Will AI Kill the Exhibition Star? Interview with Alfredo Cramerotti and Auronda Scalera

Alfredo Cramerotti and Auronda Scalera are a curatorial duo specialising in art and technology, dedicated to bridging digital and contemporary art.

We either speak over-enthusiastically about AI or in fear of its impact on creativity. My guests stand somewhat in between, advocating for a better understanding of its potential as a tool which they base upon their experiences with artists. The latter have always been irreverent regarding technologies since pigment was blown onto a hand leaving its mysterious mark on a cave wall… So what happens now, with the metaverse, AI and virtual reality? Are these new exhibition spaces? And how to they affect the existing ones? 

Our discussion took us to lots of places, amongst which the installation created by artist duo Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, THE CALL for the Serpentine, which enabled spectators to interact with an AI who had trained with choirs across the UK; we talk about artists who connect writing with sculpture, performance, and new technologies, such as Ana María Caballero, (who just sold a poem in an online auction of Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions called Natively Digital, for 0.28 Bitcoin or $11,430 at Sotheby’s), and much more. I also mention the great Jan Hopkins, an artist and writer based in Sheffield.

Cramerotti and Scalera both teach at MA IESA University Paris & Kingston University London. They co-curated the Lumen Prize x Sotheby's plus this year and the Art Dubai Digital Section 2024. As a duo, they form the International Selection Committee of the Lumen Prize and work as nominators for the Maxxi-Bvlgari Prize for Digital Art. While co-directing Multiplicity-Art in Digital, an online platform promoting women artists with a focus on diversity and inclusion, they spearhead Web to Verse, a project dedicated to fostering research on the evolution of digital art from the 1960s to the present day.

This multifaceted profile has led them to speak at prestigious events such as the UK House of Lords’ All-Party Parliamentary Group, the House of Beautiful Business, the AI House (during the World Economic Forum), the Riyadh Art Program for the KSA Visual Art Commission. They have worked with the UK Government Art