Artographer
A researcher figure A participant figure

Artographer

A Curatorial Interface for Art Space Exploration

To appear in the Generative AI as Creative Probe session, at the ACM Creativity & Cognition Conference (C&C 2026) in London.

Yuwen Lu Yuwen Lu
University of Notre Dame
ylu23@nd.edu
Brett Halperin Brett Halperin
University of Washington
bhalp@uw.edu
read the paper!
check it out!
what is it?

Relating new art & media to previously established works is crucial in creating and engaging with art & culture... but mainstream AI interfaces & media platforms tend to obscure and extract from culture, instead of supporting meaningful engagement with it.

Can we imagine new ways of designing with data to support media ecosystems where history & culture can thrive?

artographer interface Artographer is an interface for exploring a curated dataset of around 16,000 historical artworks as a zoomable, similarity- clustered map, constructed from multiple embedding models’ representations of each artwork’s visual and semantic features.

to characterize art exploration within a curatorial media interface...
p1 was an artist p2 was an artist-scholar p3 was a participant p4 was a participant p5 was a scholar p6 was a novice p7 was a novice p8 was an artist p9 was an artist-scholar p10 was a novice p11 was a novice p12 was an artist-scholar p13 was an artist-scholar p14 was a scholar p15 was an artist p16 was an artist-scholar p17 was an artist p18 was a novice p19 was an artist-scholar p20 was a scholar
We traced how 20 participants, including 9 art history scholars, used Artographer to explore, discover and collect across art space.
...investigating...
  1. How can computational curation shape the ways we encounter media?
  2. How might users explore and engage with an alternative media presentation—in this case, a zoomable, similarity-clustered visual-spatial map?
  3. How can we apply this understanding to design curatorial media systems—ways of presenting media that facilitate more meaningful engagement?
want to learn more? :3

read our paper, or come see the talk at C&C 2026 in the Generative AI as Probe session on Tuesday, July 14, 4:30–6:00 PM, in the Platform Theatre.