Museum of the Future — 17 Digital Experiments transforms the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich into a laboratory where interactive installations explore how digitalization and artificial intelligence can make fragile, oversized or inaccessible objects newly experiencable. Seventeen experiments invite visitors to test interfaces from AI prompting to large‑scale data visualizations, including the world’s largest digital image.
The exhibition Museum of the Future — 17 Digital Experiments addresses a classic museum dilemma: how to balance conservation and mediation when many collection objects are too fragile, too valuable or too large to be shown in conventional ways. Seventeen newly developed experiments turn the galleries at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich into a future lab, investigating how digitalization and AI can deepen, expand and reframe encounters with objects. The spectrum ranges from interactive setups and VR experiences to data‑driven visualizations, all geared toward re‑tuning the relationship between preservation and access.
Highlights include a 360‑degree digital reconstruction of the monumental “Battle of Murten” panorama, rendered at around 1.6 trillion pixels as what is described as the largest digital image ever created; visitors can zoom, pan and discover previously unseen details in an immersive environment with volumetric video, 3D objects, sound and even synthetic smells. Other stations focus on virtual reconstructions of Sophie Taeuber‑Arp’s marionettes as responsive digital twins, a multisensory VR piece that lets audiences experience the world as a spider, AI‑supported interfaces such as “TRUSTAI” and “Prompt Battles”, and interactive insect models that foreground how design, motion, biology and computation converge in the museum of tomorrow.
