We Should Be Prompting a Museum, She Said

we should be promping a museum, she said was born from the need to explore how generative models—LLMs, text-to-image, and text-to-video—think, produce, and mediate exhibition spaces for digital art. Historically, digital arts—especially computational ones—have faced serious challenges integrating into the exhibition environments of museums and galleries, partly due to infrastructure issues (computational art requires infrastructures museums don’t typically have: stable power, video sync, networks, sensors) and partly due to limited knowledge of the diverse ways a digital artwork can be exhibited in space. In this time, we should be promping a museum, she said with Rocio Mio seeks to envision an enabling environment for digital arts: generative spaces, transforming sculptures, holographic displays—the dream of prompting art live.

As a space, it has always sought artists who interpret it; in this case, Rocío Mio proposes to re-thread the chaotic pixels of model-generated art of the prompt museum with analog synthesizers, reprinting, pixel by pixel, the input videos and composing an analog–digital flow in which each video rematerializes in phosphor (CRT), noise, and voltage control.

By remediation we mean—following Bolter and Grusin—the reconfiguration of one medium by another. For us, to remediate is not to translate files, but to reconfigure energies: text → model → video → luma → CV → phosphor → camera → dataset, and back again. In that loop, the digital ceases to be mere representation and the analog ceases to be nostalgia; each modulates the other. The we should be promping a museum, she said operates as a back-and-forth circuit: model-generated material is imprinted onto electric bodies (CRTs, synthesizers), devirtualized into brightness, grain, and voltage variation, and returns to the synthetic with a different material sensitivity.

We do not begin from the “white cube” but from a curatorial pipeline: prompt → signal → situation. Since video art and the first synthesizers of the 1970s, the museum ⇄ signal tension has persisted; here we propose a post-infrastructure that speaks in protocols, not just in walls. The gaze intervenes in the work: in these videos and GIFs, the eye modulates meaning and closes the circuit between prompt and phosphor, making mediation visible. We do not exhibit results; we expose processes. we should be promping a museum, she said is an open infrastructure to speculate, understand, and fabricate contemporary modes of exhibiting computational art.

Canek Zapata & Rocio Mio