The End of the Real

open letter

Common realities in common museums: A Proposal for Museums in the Age of AI

As museums, we often describe ourselves as trusted institutions. We are entrusted by the public to collect, preserve, interpret, and communicate knowledge. Through exhibitions, educational programmes, public communications, and curatorial narratives, museums participate in the production of social reality. We help shape understandings of history, culture, science, and truth. At a moment when museums are being called upon to strengthen democratic resilience, foster critical engagement, and respond responsibly to technological transformation, we believe it is necessary to extend this commitment to transparency beyond exhibitions and public programming. We must also examine the invisible infrastructures that shape the museum experience itself.

Alongside galleries, collections, and educational programmes, museums increasingly rely on systems of surveillance, security, and data processing. Cameras, sensors, access-control systems, and AI-assisted monitoring technologies are now common features of museum operations. These systems contribute to safety and security, but they also influence how visitors experience museum spaces and how institutions understand, classify, and respond to behaviour. If museums wish to remain trusted institutions in the digital age, we must be transparent about these systems and their implications. We help shape understandings of history, culture, science, and truth. At a moment when museums are being called upon to strengthen democratic resilience, foster critical engagement, and respond responsibly to technological transformation, we believe it is necessary to extend this commitment to transparency beyond exhibitions and public programming. We must also examine the invisible infrastructures that shape the museum experience itself.

We propose that museums acknowledge surveillance infrastructures as part of their public responsibility and adopt a clear commitment to explain how they operate.

1. Clear Notice of Recording

Visitors should be informed, in accessible and visible language, that they are being recorded from the moment they enter the museum.

This recording serves security and operational purposes. However, it also means that images and footage of visitors may be captured and stored within museum systems. Such information should not be hidden within lengthy privacy policies or legal notices but communicated openly and clearly at points of entry and throughout the museum.

2. Trust Requires Transparency: A Proposal for Museums in the Age of AI

Museums should explain that cameras are only one part of a broader network of human and technological actors designed to protect collections, staff, and visitors. They should also acknowledge that their surveillance technologies are not unique to cultural institutions. The same cameras, sensors, analytics platforms, and AI systems are widely used in shopping centres, transportation networks, workplaces, public spaces, borders, and refugee camps. Although museums deploy these technologies for different purposes and under different governance frameworks, they remain part of a broader technological ecosystem that shapes how people are observed, classified, and managed. Recognising this connection situates museum surveillance within wider debates about digital rights, privacy, and automated monitoring.

Where artificial intelligence supports monitoring or analysis, museums should provide clear, accessible explanations of its role in institutional decision-making. Transparency should go beyond simply disclosing AI use and help visitors understand how these systems function. For example, museums could explain that AI:

does not identify visitors as individuals
detects patterns, anomalies, or situations requiring attention
compares observed behaviour with historical data and operational definitions of normal activity
does not judge visitors as "good" or "bad," but nevertheless makes automated assessments that
influence how situations are interpreted and managed

These explanations should be written for non-specialists and acknowledge that AI actively shapes institutional responses and visitor experiences. Doing so can foster greater public understanding of both museum surveillance and the broader social implications of automated observation and classification.

3. Trust Requires Transparency: A Proposal for Museums in the Age of AI

Museums should clearly communicate:

what data is collected
why it is collected
how long it is stored
who has access to it
under what circumstances it may be shared

4. Trust Requires Transparency: A Proposal for Museums in the Age of AI

Museums should recognise that transparency is not merely a technical matter but a democratic responsibility.

In accordance with the principles of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), visitors should be informed of:

their rights regarding personal data
how to request access to recorded footage containing their image
contact details for the institution's responsible department or Data Protection Officer

This information should be easy to find, easy to understand, and available in accessible formats.

From Trust to trusted accountability

Museums have the opportunity to become allies in the defence of both human rights and digital rights. As institutions committed to public knowledge and democratic values, museums can model what responsible technological governance looks like.

Trust cannot depend solely on what museums exhibit. It must also extend to the infrastructures through which museums operate.

By making surveillance systems visible, explainable, and accountable, museums can demonstrate that technological transformation is not only about efficiency or security, but also about maintaining public trust, respecting individual rights, and ensuring that digital systems serve the public interest.

By doing this project we accept there is no end of the real because we do not believe the real ever ends.

By doing this project we accept reality is not a stable ground that disappears beneath our feet. It is continuously produced through infrastructures, institutions, technologies, narratives, and practices. What changes is our ability to follow its production.

By doing this project we accept today, power rarely operates through silence or erasure. Instead, it overwhelms. Information proliferates, signals collapse into noise, and the conditions under which reality is made become increasingly opaque. In this environment of platform enshittification, algorithmic mediation, and permanent cognitive overload, confusion often turns into inaction. We sense that something is wrong, yet struggle to locate where intervention is possible.

By doing this project we invite you, reader, to care about reality, which means caring about its production. We must learn to trace the pipelines through which realities are assembled, like Alice following the White Rabbit: their actors, their pacts, their infrastructures, and their human and non-human alliances. Not to recover a lost truth, but to understand how truths are made, contested, stabilized, and transformed.

The challenge is not to defend the real from its end, but to make the mechanics of reality production visible again.

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