AARAU.- Can a machine be creative? And when artificial intelligence helps produce an image, a text or even an artistic decision, who can claim authorship?

Those questions sit at the heart of Artificial Creativity, a new exhibition opening at the Aargauer Kunsthaus on September 26, 2026. Bringing together 14 artists and artist collaborations, the exhibition examines how artificial intelligence is entering the creative process — not simply as a new tool, but as a technology that is changing ideas about authorship, responsibility and even what society considers creative in the first place.

On view through January 10, 2027, the exhibition comes at a moment when generative AI has moved remarkably quickly from a technological curiosity into everyday life. Since the public launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, artificial intelligence has become increasingly visible in education, work, business, health and culture. For artists, the transformation has opened both possibilities and uncomfortable questions.

The Aargauer Kunsthaus places that uncertainty at the center of the show.

Rather than asking whether AI will replace artists, Artificial Creativity looks at the more complicated relationship developing between people and machines. Across installations, interactive works, generated images, voices and language-based projects, participating artists explore what happens when human intentions encounter datasets, algorithms, prompts and systems whose results cannot always be completely controlled.

The museum positions AI within a longer history of technological changes in art. Photography, digital imaging and other new media were initially greeted with anxiety about what they might mean for traditional artistic practice. Instead of eliminating creativity, however, they created new ways for artists to work.

Artificial intelligence may represent another such turning point — although one with particularly difficult implications.





The exhibition is organized around three broad questions: How does AI become part of the artistic process? How does AI-generated content alter the way people perceive reality? And what happens when artificial intelligence moves beyond the screen and becomes something experienced spatially, physically and socially?

The artists offer very different answers.

For some, AI functions primarily as a tool. For others, it becomes something closer to a collaborator or an unpredictable participant in the making of a work. Still others examine the technical systems themselves, drawing attention to the datasets, rules, prompts and training environments that determine what artificial intelligence can produce.

These largely invisible structures become part of the exhibition's subject.

That shift also complicates familiar ideas about authorship. An AI-generated image, for example, may involve an artist's prompt, software developed by one company, datasets assembled from enormous quantities of existing material and computational processes that produce results the artist cannot entirely anticipate.

Creativity, the exhibition argues, does not simply move from the human being to the machine. Instead, it emerges from an increasingly complex interaction between people, data and technical systems — as well as cultural assumptions about what deserves to be called creative.

The show also turns its attention to one of generative AI's most unsettling characteristics: its ability to create convincing material that may have little or no factual basis.

Artificially generated images, texts and voices can appear credible even when their origins are impossible for viewers to verify. AI systems can also produce so-called hallucinations, filling gaps in information with persuasive but incorrect results.

Rather than treating these moments only as technological failures, several works in Artificial Creativity consider how such errors can themselves become artistically productive.

At the same time, the exhibition draws a clear distinction between the apparent agency of artificial intelligence and human responsibility. AI systems may generate surprising results, but they do not possess intention, understanding or accountability. Responsibility, the museum argues, remains with the people and institutions that design, use, present and evaluate them.

The participating artists are Alfatih, Niculin Barandun, Botto, Terence Broad, Onome Ekeh, Emanuel Gollob, Tobias Gutmann, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Hochschuh & Donovan, Esther Hunziker, Simone C. Niquille, Theresa Reiwer, Monica Studer / Christoph van den Berg and Robi Voigt.





The exhibition is curated by Dr. Katharina Ammann, with Florian Brand as assistant curator, and has been developed in cooperation with HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel.

Visitors will also be encouraged to test some of the questions raised by the exhibition for themselves.

A dedicated learning space includes two chatbots designed to help visitors consider their own position on artificial intelligence somewhere between technological utopia and dystopia. Questions range from whether AI might help address problems such as the climate crisis to whether its rapid expansion introduces new dangers.

Elsewhere, in a test laboratory in the museum's Freiraum on the ground floor, visitors will be able to experiment with AI image-generation tools and experience firsthand the unpredictable results that can emerge when humans give instructions to generative systems.

A program of talks, workshops and panel discussions will extend the conversation beyond the galleries, inviting schools and the wider public to consider the ethical, legal and aesthetic consequences of using artificial intelligence in creative production.

The exhibition will also be accompanied by a publication examining artificial and human creativity from several perspectives. Computer scientist Eva Cetinić of the University of Zurich contributes a discussion of the development of generative AI and the importance of latent space in machine-generated image production, while philosopher Julia Langkau of the University of Geneva considers the relationship between human and artificial creativity.

The publication also includes questions about AI posed by artist Beni Bischof, alongside responses from artists participating in the exhibition about their own experiences working with the technology.

Taken together, the exhibition and accompanying program avoid offering a simple verdict on whether artificial intelligence is good or bad for art. Instead, Artificial Creativity treats the technology as something artists are already living and working with — a new creative environment filled simultaneously with possibilities, contradictions and responsibilities.

Artificial Creativity will be on view at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau from September 26, 2026 through January 10, 2027.