AAE stemmed from Jānis Aufmanis and Lia Carreira’s earlier discussions on Curating and Architecture, reaching back to 2019. The exchanges later paved the way for a discussion on the relationship between experimental practices in museum-related spaces, especially in exhibitions, and Artificial Intelligence slowly became a focal point.
Lia Carreira
Lia Carreira is a Brazilian-born researcher, media artist and curator based in Lisbon, Portugal. She is currently a postgraduate researcher (PhD in Art) at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (UK), where she is finishing her investigation on the motto of the ‘Exhibition Space as a Laboratory’ (2019-2023). Lia has a first Master in Media Studies (Media Technologies and Aesthetics) from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (ECO/UFRJ) where she developed a thesis on digital art and image appropriation. She has a second Master in Media Arts Cultures from the Danube University (Austria), the Aalborg University (Denmark) and the City University of Hong Kong, in which she developed the thesis ‘Experimental Curating in Times of the Perpetual Beta’ in partnership with the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM) in Germany. She has worked at the ZKM as a researcher on the topic of online exhibitions and on Artificial Intelligence in the Arts, and is currently a curator at the recently developed digital museum Palácio das Belas Artes Lisboa (in partnership with the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien in Austria).
Jānis Aufmanis
Jānis is an architect working in conventional architecture field, as well as looking for possibilities in territories where architecture overlaps with art, politics and philosophy. He is currently doing a Masters in Architecture in KU Leuven, Brussels. Jānis has worked in architecture and design offices in Riga and Rotterdam, and has been involved in exhibition curating and making in Riga, Latvia, as well as co-founded an NGO which aims to revitalize Riga’s central area. In his initiatives and passions, Jānis has tried to shake the slow and steady growth of the population of Riga, and his goals are to constantly inject little vaccines of discomfort, to keep people around conscious and thinking. He has been an organizer of a design thought workshop to preserve a modernist building, threatened to be demolished by Ministry of Culture; a co-organizer, moderator and game developer for the urban planning workshop Radi Rīgu to bring together estate developers, municipality workers, and civil infrastructure keepers to empathize and together develop a better understanding of contemporary public space standards. He has been a part of an invited competition team to envision the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art together with Outofbox architects and wHY architects (US), and has worked on personal and group exhibitions that tackle urban issues.
Janis finds inspiration and motivation in working in multidisciplinary environments and believes that encountering knowledge outside of our own professional fields is vital for new and more in depth understanding about our own fields – meaning it helps to position the knowledge we already have with knowledge of others, giving a more critical assessment of who we are and what we do, and where are we heading to.