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Kathimerini English Edition Feature on Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics
May 15, 2026
At MIT, a Greek architect questions who decides what is beautiful in the age of AI
In a new exhibition, Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics at MIT’s Keller Gallery, Alexandros Haridis probes how computers have tried to solve one of humanity’s oldest problems
Featured in Kathimerini, English Edition (The New York Times International Edition), print and online, May 15. Written by Theodora Tsevas.
Official Website and Documentation:
https://aestheticsbeyonddata.com/
Excerpt
Research papers, it goes without saying, are not meant as objects to walk through. But after Alexandros Haridis spent four years writing them, rather than just submit them to a journal and move on, he started wondering what they would look like as a room.
Haridis is an architect by training, a computational researcher by practice, and a faculty member at Harvard University. That combination, design thinking fused with a precise understanding of how systems work, shapes everything about the exhibition now on view at the MIT Department of Architecture’s Keller Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“What you’re trying to do,” he said, “is take a research paper that’s very dense, sometimes with mathematical formulas, algorithmic ideas, and instead of describing it in words, transform it into a story that includes interaction, physical material, and digital visualization.”
The exhibition, “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics,” is organized around five installations, each drawn from archival sources and academic literature, and structured around a question Haridis has spent years working on: not whether AI can create, but whether it can evaluate. Whether it can look at two things and know, in any meaningful sense, which one is better.
That question has a specific origin point. In 1956, at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project, a group of scientists gathered to define what artificial intelligence should pursue. They identified seven dimensions of human intelligence that future AI research would need to address, one of which was creativity and originality. Some of the people in that room went on to win Turing Awards. The field they named has since made extraordinary progress on most of their list. Creativity and judgment have proven harder.