Presentation of the catalogue From Them (humans) to Us (AIs)
Malaga, 4 May 2026. The Cultural Container of the University of Malaga today hosted the presentation of the exhibition catalogue. From Them (humans) to Us (AIs), a speculative curatorial project loosely inspired by the novel Membrane, by Jorge Carrión, which reflected on the current and possible relations between humans and artificial intelligence systems. The event, held as part of the seminar Speculative catalogues. Curatorship, design and experimentation as a cultural ecosystem., The event, which was attended by the Vice-Chancellor for Culture of the UMA and the director of the Telefónica-UMA Chair.
A catalogue that reads like a recombinant novel
The publication, co-produced by the Vice-Rectorate for Culture and the Telefónica-UMA Chair, is a unique publishing artefact: it takes the format of a traveller's diary that integrates several autonomous booklets: the catalogue itself enunciated by the voice of artificial intelligences, a volume of essayistic texts and the novel La Grieta, that narratively expands the fictional universe of the project. The booklets are recombinant nodes that can be rearranged, read in any order, extracted or expanded: the narrative is not fixed in the object, but is activated in each reading. If Membrane is a novel with the structure of a catalogue, this publication inverts the operation and presents itself as a catalogue with the will of a novel, which does not document the exhibition, but rather rewrites it, prolonging its questions in a narrative territory that the physical exhibition could not explore.
Part of a transmedia narrative
The catalogue is part of the transmedia ecosystem generated around the project, together with Carrión's novel itself, the exhibition held at the Espacio Cero of the Vice-Rectorate for Culture and the device Radicular, a mixed and immersive reality experience developed in collaboration with XRC Experiencias Inmersiva, which bifurcates and spatially expands the universe of the exhibition, reimagining the fictional museum of the 21st century that is the protagonist. Membrane. Each piece in this constellation - book, exhibition, catalogue, immersive device - reactivates the same questions from a different place, generating new versions of the same project.
With this co-production, the Telefónica-UMA Chair reaffirms its sustained commitment to cultural experimentation, editorial innovation and artistic research at the crossroads between humanities, technology and artificial intelligence. The Chair promotes spaces of hybrid creation in which critical reflection, speculative prototyping and experimental curatorial practices become tools for imagining possible futures and rethinking the traditional formats of cultural mediation - the exhibition, the catalogue, the archive - as living and open ecosystems. The Vice-rectorate for Culture, for its part, extends with this publication its remarkable collection of author catalogues, characterised by combining formal and conceptual experimentation.
The initiative is also part of the R&D project of the National Plan Complexhibit, led by the research group iArtHis_Lab of the Department of History of Art of the University of Malaga, whose focus is on the complex cultural ecosystems -among them the catalographic artefact itself - and their emerging dynamics, and continues the sustained line of work of iArtHis_Lab around the catalogue as a critical device.
