What can A.I. bring to the table in museum mediation?

In the context of the exhibition
"AMERICAN DREAMS - A new life in the USA"
at Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg
we developed two interactive media installations,
that explore a new, captivating storytelling approach:

TRAUMREISEN & TRAUMFABRIK
Bringing historical figures eye to eye with visitors
and staging their personal stories in a fascinating, cinematic dreamscape.

Visitors were asked about their own migration history. Three questions about migration triggers, the journey and arriving in the new environment could be answered via a touch interface. Using an LLM (Large Language Model), these answers were translated into “stage directions.” The emotional core of the answers was translated into visual metaphors. This meant that complex and simple answers could be treated equally.

In the next step, the “directions” were sent as prompts (keyword-like instructions) to an A.I. passed on to image creation in order to create dreamy, backdrop-like image worlds. Finally, a short film was edited that staged the quotes in this visual scenography.

To give the aesthetic a common thread, the prompts were manually combined with tailored instructions. In this way, the installation was given a distinctive design signature and at the same time individual, emotional images were created.

A.I.  generated prompt for image generation:
war-torn landscape installation, Afghan mountains, broken school desk, dim flickering candles

These dream trips are a collection of in-depth stories - from the perspective of the protagonists of the exhibition.

The personal history of these people and experiences, for example the crossing on a steam sailer, serve as starting points for contextual information. In order to bring these stories to life and engage visitors on an emotional level, fictional portraits of the protagonists were created with the help of “artificial intelligence”.