“Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” presents digital‑physical reconstructions of key twentieth‑ and early twenty‑first‑century computational aesthetic systems in architecture and the applied arts. The exhibition traces how creation–evaluation processes have been formalized computationally, moving beyond purely data‑driven approaches and reframing computing as a medium for judging, generating, and transforming art and design. Creative Direction and Curation by Alexandros Haridis
The exhibition takes its point of departure from the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, where creation–evaluation processes were identified as one of seven key dimensions of human intelligence that future AI research should address.
Almost seventy years later, “Beyond Data‑Driven Aesthetics” examines how computational systems in architecture and the applied arts model these processes and how they relate to current developments in machine learning.
Conceived as both an exhibition and a research platform, the project translates four years of research by Alexandros Haridis into spatial, visual, and experiential formats that extend traditional scholarly communication.
Visitors encounter a series of digital‑physical reconstructions of aesthetic systems drawn from archival sources and academic literature, transformed into interactive artifacts that maintain their rigorous visual and logical languages while becoming accessible to wider audiences.
Organized chronologically in space, the exhibition is structured around five thematic areas—Aesthetic Measure, Aesthetic Guidelines, Algorithmic Aesthetics, Aesthetic Appropriation, and Aesthetic Novelty—featuring systems associated with figures such as George Birkhoff, Vera Molnar, George Stiny, and Lillian Schwartz, among others.
Together, these categories outline a trajectory from early “taste‑based” theories of aesthetic value to twentieth‑century computational formalism and contemporary AI‑driven approaches, positioning aesthetics as a central domain through which human and machine intelligence are constructed, evaluated, and expanded.
Sponsored by:
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard University Office of the Provost
MITArchitecture
