What will the museum of the future look like? The Museum of the Future exhibition dares to look ahead and transforms the exhibition space into an interactive laboratory for digital innovations. With 17 newly developed experiments, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich shows how digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the way museums present objects and make them tangible.
Many museum treasures are not freely accessible for conservation reasons or are too fragile for transportation. The exhibition shows how digital technologies create new, surprising approaches and thus enable the museum experience of tomorrow. Visitors can actively interact with AI-supported installations, for example in “TRUSTAI”, where their own self invites them to engage in dialog as a digital counterpart, or in “Prompt Battles”, in which creative collaboration with image-generating AIs is playfully tested.
One highlight is the digital panorama of the Battle of Murten, a 360-degree representation of a monumental oil painting with an incredible 1.6 trillion pixels. The wealth of detail in this, the world’s largest digital image, is an invitation to discover and marvel.
Other stations are dedicated to the virtual reconstruction of cultural assets, such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s marionettes, which come to life as digital twins in the room and can be controlled by visitors’ movements. Never-before-realized architectural projects and tiny creatures can also be experienced in a new way using digital technology.
In the final exhibition area, the focus is on dialogue: visitors enter into surprising conversations with Fred Schneckenburger’s digitized stick puppets, supported by a language model.
The exhibition is the result of a multi-year research project funded by the DIZH innovation program with the project partners Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, the Laboratory for Experimental Museology, eM+ of EPFL Lausanne, the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), the Natural History Museum Zurich, the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. The installations will be evaluated by the Citizen Science Competence Center of the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich in order to derive findings for the museology of tomorrow.
29. August 2025 – 2. February 2026
Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Ausstellungsstrasse 60
Vernissage: 28. August 2025, 19 Uhr