Curaturae: Combining Art and Text in Curious Ways
By: Heather Kretschmer
You may have noticed the images in the article I wrote for this issue, “Taking the AI Plunge,” and wondered why I chose centuries-old artwork for an article about cutting-edge technology. Well, I drafted my article using this delightful app: https://curaturae.com/. The app connects language with art from the Smithsonian Open Access. So, as I typed in my sentences, art pieces appeared, a few of which are included in my article. I liked the parallels between beautiful art created by humans and beautiful writing from students.
Drafting my article using this app was an enjoyable writing experience. As I was writing, I would scroll through the images. And if I really liked a particular piece of art, I would click on the image to find information about the piece, like the artist, the year it was created, etc. This was distracting but fun. And what was really neat was that the process of generating went both ways. Eastman Johnson’s The Girl I Left Behind Me popped up at some point, which not only helped me visualize how I feel about AI but also inspired my introduction.
The curatureae app is free and requires no registration. But if you’re interested in giving this app a go, be sure to save your text in another document as you’re working, because once you close the app, your text disappears. Interestingly, if you paste in or type in the same text again, different pieces might appear.
I also appreciate that the text inputted doesn’t have to be in English. Other languages it’ll connect to artwork are Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Here’s an example from the app:
The old pond by Matsuo Bashō
古池や
蛙飛び込む
水の音
Old pond…
a frog jumps in
water’s sound
However, the artwork featured in the curaturae app comes from the Smithsonian, an American institution. Although the Smithsonian has cultural centers with the goal of building “bridges of mutual respect and understanding of the diversity of American and world cultures” (link), the Smithsonian curators still have to decide what is valuable art, and they might see the world through a Western, American lens. In this Think Tank’s much more video, Peter-Paul Verbeek remarks that
in order to design AI from an intercultural perspective, we also need a space where that can happen, where people can have this intercultural dialogue about ethics. And to agree somehow about how to deal with artificial intelligence. From the perspective of diversity, and not from a unifying perspective.
It is possible that people from different cultures curate art at the Smithsonian, but I think the curaturae app could be improved if it were to include open access images of artwork from museums from other parts of the world.
Finally, I’m curious how teachers might use the curaturae app with language learners. I haven’t tried it out with mine yet, but I could imagine students collaboratively writing stories, poems, or other short texts, and then pausing to see what artwork appears. Perhaps the art would then influence the direction their writing takes. Students could certainly talk about the art that appears and possibly compare it to art from their own cultures. For sure, the surprising and often strange connections the app makes between language and art would give students food for thought. And intriguingly, the different languages supported by the app open up the possibility of a multilingual writing project.
Heather Kretschmer is always curious about different ways to help students find joy in writing and speaking in foreign languages.