Edvard Munch: Connect the Lines – Museums, AI and Cultural Data

From Viewing to Participating

Museums have long collected, preserved and presented artworks, archives and historical records. Connect the Lines explores what happens when creative participation generates new forms of cultural data—and what responsibilities museums may have towards them.

In the exhibition, visitors create their own drawings on digital tablets. Artificial intelligence is used to analyse these drawings and suggest connections to works in MUNCH's archive. The technology does not explain Munch's art, replace human interpretation or generate new works in his style. Instead, it acts as a tool for exploration, helping visitors encounter the collection through their own creative gestures.

This changes the role of the visitor. Rather than simply looking at artworks, visitors use drawing as a way to navigate the archive. Each drawing becomes both a personal response and a pathway into the collection.

When Participation Becomes Data

With the visitor’s consent, drawings made in Connect the Lines may also become part of a growing body of audience-created material. This raises questions that museums are only beginning to explore.

What responsibilities do museums have when visitors contribute data? How should this material be stored, governed and shared? Who should decide how it may be used in the future? And how can museums safeguard public trust while avoiding becoming simply another source of training data for large technology companies?

These questions are increasingly important as artificial intelligence reshapes how people create, communicate, learn and access information. For museums, the challenge is not simply whether to use AI, but how to do so responsibly.

Museums as Data Stewards

Museums are trusted stewards of collections. Increasingly, they are also becoming stewards of digital collections and cultural data created through participation, interaction and engagement.

This does not mean collecting data for its own sake. Rather, it means asking a more fundamental question: if culture increasingly becomes data, what responsibilities do cultural institutions have towards that data?

Every drawing created in Connect the Lines contains traces of a creative process—choices, gestures, experimentation and interpretation. Taken together, these drawings may offer insight into how people engage with art and cultural heritage through creative participation.

The exhibition does not offer definitive answers. Instead, it creates a space in which these questions can be explored.

Sharing Knowledge, Not Just Data

The drawings created by visitors in Connect the Lines illustrate both the opportunities and the challenges that emerge when participation generates new forms of cultural data.

With consent, MUNCH is exploring whether audience drawings and drawing-process data could be shared as an open dataset for research and other non-commercial purposes. The dataset could support research, education and artistic production, and be made available to researchers, artists, educators, cultural institutions and non-profit organisations. One of the initiatives we are exploring is Mozilla Data Collective, which supports the responsible sharing of datasets for public-interest research and innovation.

Why does this matter?

Artificial intelligence depends on data, yet many of the datasets shaping today's AI systems are commercially controlled and largely inaccessible to researchers, artists, educators and the public.

The aim is not simply to make data available. It is to explore whether museums can contribute to more open, transparent and publicly beneficial approaches to sharing knowledge, supporting research and enabling creative experimentation in the age of AI.

A Museum Question, Not Just a Technology Question

Connect the Lines is not only about artificial intelligence. It is about how museums can use new technologies while remaining committed to care, trust, access and public value.

AI can help reveal connections across large collections. But the meaning of those connections remains something for visitors, researchers and museum professionals to explore together.

For MUNCH, the most important question is therefore not what AI can do on its own, but what museums choose to do with it—and on whose behalf.