What happens when your metahuman decides to overshare about their existential crisis? Or when one of your AI workers decides to unionise mid-interview? What about a disgruntled virtual character that decides it’s done talking to your visitors?
In MOD.'s 2025 exhibition, FOREVER, we explore speculative “death tech” through Eterna.Life, a fictional company that invites visitors to a near-future careers opportunity. Here, AI-driven characters interview visitors for roles like consciousness uploading specialist or cryogenics technician. These interactions challenge visitors to consider the ethical and personal implications of speculative technologies and living beyond death.
Designing Eterna.Life was an experimental and iterative process. It’s one thing to develop AI characters in theory, but quite another to place them in a dynamic, live gallery space where visitors interact unpredictably. The lack of control was thrilling and confronting, forcing us to embrace failure and adapt as we tested, ensuring the visitor journey remained inclusive, accessible, and thought-provoking.
This talk will cover the risks and rewards of relinquishing control to AI in cultural spaces. MOD. and design studio Junior Major will share how we prototyped and refined this experience, blending humour and ethical complexity into an immersive exhibit. A demo of the AI interviews will showcase how this project redefines cultural engagement with emerging technologies.
This isn’t another talk about AI’s theoretical merits or potential fears - this is about putting AI to work in the real world, live, in an exhibition context, and with all the unpredictability and humour that entails.
Claudia von der Borch is Exhibitions Lead at MOD., a future-focused museum in Adelaide. She drives the development of engaging and innovative exhibitions through impactful design. Exhibitions worked on closely by Claudia have received national and international recognition. Prior to this role, Claudia consulted on heritage and online engagement projects, and engaged in marketing, programming and collection-based roles in the GLAM sector. Claudia is currently Vice-President of the AMaGA SA branch and has recently completed her fellowship as a George Alexander Fellow with the International Specialised Skills Institute investigating immersive exhibition design techniques.
Tom Siddall, Junior Major. Tom has a long history of working with museums, architects, and artists around the world. He has created award-winning experiences in Dubai, Singapore, the US, Europe, and Australia for clients such as Atlassian, Museums Victoria, Museum of Sydney, Australian National Maritime Museum, Dallas Love Field Airport, Conrad Shawcross, Google Creative Lab, and ACMI - projects such as an interactive sporting gallery, a reactive digital flip-dot sculpture, an immersive installation about migratory birds, and an intergalactic online experience. Tom thrives on the challenge of transforming seemingly impossible ideas into reality.