My Dear Ada
The exhibition My Dear Ada: Artificial and Artistic Intelligence at Prague’s MeetFactory Gallery explores the relationship between artificial and artistic intelligence and the possibilities of creating and interpreting images and texts in the age of AI. It connects historical visions of computing technologies with contemporary art and experiments with artificial intelligence. The exhibition runs from 23 October 2026 to 10 January 2027.
- MeetFactory Gallery
- Opening: 22 October, free entry
- Exhibition dates: 23 October 2026 – 10 January 2027
- more info at Meet Factory
Artists:
- Jana Bernartová, Milan Guštar, Haruka Kajiura and Zdeňka Němcová Zedníčková, Ada Lovelace, Paleofuture Lab, Zdeněk Sýkora, Magdalena Wutkowska
Curators:
- Jana Bernartová, Monika Mitášová, Virtuální futuroložka A°D°A
- Architecture: Zzyzx OAS1S (Ondřej Fiedler, Matouš Kučera)
- Animation: Sofie Fenyková, Jaroslava Straková
- Photo retouching: Studio Flusser, Václav Novák
- Text translation and proofreading: Brian D. Vodak, Lucie Kolouchová
- Production: Nikol Hoangová
- PR: Zuzana Kolouchová, Filip Pleskač
- Graphic design: Jakub Kučera
About the Exhibition
The exhibition My Dear Ada: Artificial and Artistic Intelligence explores and tests the possibilities of creating and interpreting images and texts in the era of developing artificial intelligence. It presents a selection of scientific and artistic works that foreshadowed the emergence and innovative uses of universal computers (Ada Lovelace, Zdeněk Sýkora) and places them in the context of visual art created before the advent of AI or during the training of expert AI systems (Milan Guštar, Magdalena Wutkowska, Jana Bernartová). The works created for the exhibition through interactions with AI proto-agents (Virtuální futuroložka A°D°A) are thus the result of a network of human and non-human actors (Paleofuture Lab, Zdeňka Němcová Zedníčková & Haruka Kajiura) spanning the fields of visual art, architecture, computing, and technology.
The initial framework for the exhibition is the personal correspondence of Ada Lovelace, the author of the first computer algorithm, which – after the eventual creation of computers – was debugged as a computer program. The curators were driven by a desire to discover not just texts but also previously unexplored images in Ada's archived correspondence. The exhibition features facsimiles of her solutions to the geometry problems she studied as well as a fragment of one of her last letters to her mother, in which Ada mentions, in a single sentence, her intention to devote herself in the future to poetical philosophy, poetical science. The artworks on display and the exhibition as a whole – as well as the publication My Dear Ada…, which describes the work with the experimental educational software Virtuální futuroložka A°D°A, including textual commentary by AI proto-agents about the published texts – offer a possible response to her visionary projects.
The AI proto-agents thus take part in and learn from the exhibition and publication as paradialogical participants. However, the exhibition places the emphasis on the viewers and readers as actors and on their possible perspectives on artificial and artistic images and texts. The time and space that we experience here are measured against the seemingly infinite time and space of past and present computing technologies. If the tradition of interpreting non-human images and texts is expanded to include those generated by artificial intelligence, what new ways of perceiving and strategies for interpreting will we discover in art and culture?