New Experience of Art Through Scenography: A Futuristic Approach via AI

Toward the End of the “White Cube”: The Obsolete Museography of the 20th Century

Throughout my research on exhibition scenography applied to museums, conducted about a decade ago, I had already sensed the end of an era: that of a modernist system turned anachronistic. Museography inherited from the 1930s, ideological, technicist, and imbued with colonial elitism, was founded on the dogma of a white cube aspiring to be rational and universal.

Revisited in the 1960s and 1970s, this aesthetic sought to align itself with the democratization of culture. It undeniably introduced methodological advances: scientific classification, spatial rationalization, optimization of safety and lighting. The modern museum, heir to Les Lumières and now a model in itself, imposed its codes: immaculate walls, artworks hung at eye level, hierarchies by school or chronology, systematic isolation of works.

This apparent neutrality, supposedly a guarantee of clarity, was built on an illusion: that of a “neutral” context where the spectator must contemplate the masterpiece within the aseptic silence of a sanctuary. Yet this museography of emptiness was born from an authoritarian modernist imagination, marked by the purism of the International Style and the exclusion of non-Western arts.

Banished to the dim halls of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, these “exotic” objects—African masks, pre-Columbian and Oceanic sculptures—were stripped of their ritual potency to become aesthetic curiosities. And yet, it was within this ambiguous framework that Picasso and the Surrealists discovered these other forms, igniting a revolution of the gaze (see the book from author Micaela Neveu, Le Code précolombien, Messagers des dieux, Éditions de Paris, 2025).

Decontextualization and Lost Sacredness: The Shadow of the Colonial Museum

The Romantic 19th century, with its overloaded rooms and emphatic décor, had already introduced a kind of visual hygienism where the sacred object was transformed into a mere “work of art.” Across Europe, collections taken from the colonies were torn from their ritual contexts and reconfigured as objects of contemplation. Their magical and initiatory functions were erased in favor of an aesthetic reading, universalizing, but fundamentally mutilating.

The contemporary white cube, direct heir to this ideology, has prolonged this disembodiment of meaning. In galleries and international art fairs such as Art Basel Paris 2025, scenography continues to separate, hierarchize, and commodify. The white cube becomes an instrument of social distinction: “premium” galleries occupy the gilded floor while artists from the Global South are relegated to peripheral walkways. Under the guise of neutrality, scenography perpetuates a narrative of power and value.

Artificial Intelligence as a Generative Curator

The emergence of generative AI opens a radical breach in this paradigm. Where the scenographer conceives space through narrative, emotion, or aesthetic intent, artificial intelligence can now imagine dynamic, sensitive, and adaptive displays. Each visitor could experience a personalized exhibition, reconfigured according to emotional affinities, behavioral data, or the rhythm of movement.

The AI curator now has access to an interconnected set of tools that allow scenography to be conceived as a living, evolving, and multimodal ecosystem. These technologies go far beyond technical sophistication: they contribute to redefining the museum as both a cognitive and emotional interface between the artwork, the space, and the visitor. We can identify several families of tools according to their specific function within the scenographic process:

● Visualization and spatial design tools: Midjourney, RunwayML, and Kaiber make it possible to generate scenographic models, imagine new forms of hanging, explore lighting or chromatic atmospheres, and simulate exhibition spaces that do not yet exist. These visual intelligences act as genuine creative partners for the scenographer during the conceptual phase of a project.

●  Immersion and spatial experience tools: Spatial.io, Unity 3D, and Unreal Engine 5 enable the creation of interactive, immersive environments in which visitors move through a sensitive spatial narrative. The museum becomes a dynamic territory shaped by data, light, and movement.

●  Emotional analysis tools: Affectiva and EmotiveAI capture and interpret visitors’ physiological and behavioral responses. The exhibition adapts in real time to these emotional signals, transforming scenography into a responsive, living surface that reacts to human presence.

●  Sound and sensory creation tools: SoundGPT and MubertAI generate sound environments that respond to audience density, movement rhythm, or the emotional tone of the artworks. Sound becomes a living material that modulates the aesthetic atmosphere continuously.

This emerging taxonomy of scenographic technologies reveals that AI is not simply a tool for visual projection but a sensitive infrastructure, a new kind of creative intelligence that links perception, spatiality, and emotion. It redefines the museum as a living organism, responsive and porous, traversed by flows of data and affect.

Toward an Organic and Relational Scenography

In this emerging model, the human curator does not disappear: they become the conductor of a sensitive system, a kind of “algorithmic demiurge”. Scenography no longer merely presents objects, it breathes, interacts, reacts. The museum space transforms into an organic entity composed of data, emotions, and shared narratives.

This poetics of data, where the visitor’s emotional flows become the raw material of creation, signals a decisive break with modernist museography. The spectator is no longer a passive observer but a co-author of the narrative, a co-creator of the aesthetic experience. Void, light, movement, and algorithm unite to generate a dramaturgy where emotion supplants hierarchy.

AI as Catalyst for a Scenographic Renaissance

Artificial intelligence does not replace the exhibition curator; it amplifies their thought. It makes it possible to move beyond the logic of the frame, the display case, and the white cube, to invent a living art space, a site of organic mediation between body, data, and memory. This future “expology” liberates itself from historical narrative to give shape to an emotional ecology of art and context, where scenography becomes language, interface, and experience. The challenge is no longer to show art but to live it, to co-write it, to transform it into a shared and evolving experience.

Micaela Neveu