Something happens to poetry and symbolism in an exhibition of contemporary art when curators and studio visits are outsourced to intelligent machines, when the artist is completely cut off from constructing the curatorial frame around the works in his exhibition, and the curator is replaced by an intelligent machine.

Something happens when machines begin not only to recognize the actual content of images but conduct their “second-order” reading of their significance and implications that stretch outside of their physical boundaries as geometric entities. At some point they are able to relate images not only based on their physical composition, but based on how they overlap in terms of their metaphoric content. As far as an artist’s trajectory is concerned, once multiple images of artworks by an artist are closely studied and interrelated, once this data is overlapped with the artist’s available Curriculum Vitae, his past and upcoming exhibitions and his other public appearances, an intelligent machine might be able to get as close as possible to an “understanding” of his artistic oeuvre in order to possibly organize an exhibition of his work.

Algorithms of Child Play is a flash retrospective of Dejan Kaludjerović’s works at Bildraum 7 Gallery in Vienna as if conceived and organized exclusively by algorithms, that is by making modifications to existing digital tools for interpreting and organizing existing text and images about the artist online. By mapping out the speculative steps in which available technologies might be able to understand artwork and artistic intentionalities, the exhibition presents a body of works from Kaludjerović’s trajectory and uses this occasion to explicate the ontology and functions of algorithms in the context of artistic production, display and circulation.

Consisting of existing works by Kaludjerović, the exhibition is a collaborative attempt by the artist and Berlin-based critic, curator and writer Mohammad Salemy and a team of researchers from The New Centre for Research & Practice led by Nathalie Agostini to construct a solo exhibition completely from the position of a non-human external observer with only digital access to works and their contexts. A video produced exclusively for the exhibition walks the viewers through the exhibition and the logic and process of its making.

Algorithms of Child Play is also a comparison between the primitive method through which algorithms understand images today and children’s own way of appreciating and understanding art. The exhibition will examine the possibility of arriving at an algorithmically organized and aesthetically and socially relevant exhibition given the methodology of the artist, particularly regarding his focus on the world of children and the role that play, and self representational narratives, have in the transition from childhood to adulthood.