AI in the Archive

The role of artificial intelligence in the management, generation and processing of data is of fundamental importance in a modern digital information society and economy. The issues of knowledge generation and management through artificial intelligence have been present in society since ChatGPT and Midjourney at the latest. Archives as places of the foundations of social processes offer the ideal access to investigate sustainable knowledge generation and data practice for the future. At the same time, they are repositories of complex knowledge systems and material-medial entanglements, in which objects and data that are in danger of eroding require innovative methodological approaches to long-term time sequences. This is particularly true for archives of the built environment. As one of the most comprehensive and important archives for architectural and engineering works in Germany, the saai is a potential space with largely untapped treasures and exciting questions. With estates of regional architects of international importance, the saai can become a material, toolkit and field of experimentation with radiant power in the genesis of knowledge in architecture and engineering technology.

The project is supported by the KIT President's Strategy Fund with a postdoctoral position and material resources for two years.