What is an art catalogue today? A mere documentary record, an institutional formality, one more node in the hyper-complex ecosystem of the exhibition... or a work with its own entity capable of devouring the exhibition that originated it and of projecting itself, emancipated, into the latent spaces of contemporary culture?

This seminar proposes to think of the exhibition catalogue not as an isolated object, but as a semantic and semantised artefact that actively participates in the network of interactions - between institutions, curatorship, artistic creation, graphic design and audiences - that configures the exhibition field as a complex cultural system. Through a choral round table, we will bring together the agents involved in its life cycle, to unravel how these devices are produced, circulated and re-signified in the current web of cultural practices.

Axes of the conversation

• Conceptualisation and negotiation spacesThe catalogue as a place where curatorial discourses, institutional narratives and editorial decisions converge, generating that shared «cultural state» described by the sociology of cultural fields.

• Production, materiality and sustainabilityThe materiality of publishing, workflows, the ecological footprint and the challenges of an institutional framework in tension between print and digital.

• Legacy and emancipationThe survival of the catalogue in the face of the free PDF, its circulation as open and linked data (LOD) and its consecration as an object of independent collecting, beyond the exhibition that originated it.

• Catalogue as a node in a knowledge networkunderstood as a primary source for the automated extraction of metadata, linguistic corpora and knowledge graphs.

Case study: cataloguing futures

The seminar will culminate with the official presentation of the exhibition catalogue. From them (humans) to us (AIs), a speculative project situated on the border between traditional cataloguing, literary creation and the projection of futures. The publication invites us to rethink what it means to catalogue when the agents of enunciation are no longer only human, but also artificial intelligences that inhabit latent spaces - those emerging semantic territories where generative models compress, relate and reorganise visual and textual knowledge - displacing the boundaries of the author, the work and the document.

At a time when AI is transforming the way in which we produce, describe and preserve exhibition heritage, this meeting proposes to think of the catalogue as a living ecosystemA network of actants, discourses, data and materialities whose emancipation heralds new formats, new editorial ontologies and a new role for design in the age of artificial intelligences.