Beyond Data Driven Aesthetics

Digital Reconstruction and Public Communication of Aesthetic Systems in Architecture and the Applied Arts

Creative Direction and Curation: Alexandros Haridis
April-August 2026
MIT Keller Gallery, Cambridge, MA

At the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, “creation” – “evaluation” processes were identified as one of seven key aspects of human intelligence that future AI research must address. Nearly seven decades later, AI systems mimic creation-evaluation processes across architecture, art, design, and scientific discovery. Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics is a cross-generational and cross-disciplinary examination of academic and industry efforts in the United States that transformed computing and AI into a medium for creative expression and judgment. Through a physical multimedia exhibition, it presents original digital reconstructions and critical analyses of the 20th- and early 21st-century rise and proliferation of creation-evaluation systems. The exhibition invites visitors on a chronological journey of how mathematicians, artists, architects, and computer scientists introduced new visual and logical languages, exploring whether calculation – by hand or by programming digital computers – can both answer traditional questions of aesthetics (i.e., the nature of creating or judging) and expand the capabilities of human creators.

Sponsored by:
Harvard Provostial Fund for Arts & Humanities
Harvard Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences
MIT Department of Architecture