The Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon turns ten this year, and the exhibition it has chosen to anchor the back half of its anniversary programme is not a celebration of what AI can make. “Energies of AI”, curated by Antonio Somaini, opens October 2, 2026 and runs through March 8, 2027.
The framing is a pun that turns out to be a thesis. Energies means two things here, and the show insists on holding both.
What goes in
The first energy is the literal one: electricity, water, critical minerals, computation, human labour, capital. This is the material substrate that the interface is designed to make invisible — the data centre, the cooling system, the mine, the annotation contract, the venture round.
It is also, not coincidentally, the territory that several of the named artists have spent years mapping. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler produced Anatomy of an AI System, the enormous fold-out diagram tracing a single Amazon Echo back through lithium extraction, container shipping, and click-work — a piece that did more than any essay to make the supply chain legible. Trevor Paglen has photographed the physical infrastructure of surveillance and machine vision for two decades, including the undersea cables and the training sets themselves.
What comes out
The second energy is what AI releases into the world: data analysis and data generation, prediction, surveillance, attention capture, mind control. Effects rather than inputs, and cultural rather than geological.
Hito Steyerl is the obvious presence here — her work on circulation, resolution, and the politics of the image has effectively defined how a generation of artists talks about machine vision. Grégory Chatonsky has been making work with generative systems since long before the current wave, under the banner of what he calls imaginary artificial intelligence. Fabien Giraud, often with Raphaël Siboni, works in long-form cycles about computation and deep time.
MAAT says many of the works are very recent and several will be shown for the first time, alongside Portuguese and other international artists, and that much of the material is turned toward where AI is heading rather than where it has been.
Why the double frame matters
There is a version of the AI-and-art exhibition that has become a genre: a room of generated images, a wall text about prompts, a gesture at “questions the technology raises.” It is not a good genre.
What Somaini appears to be doing instead is refusing to treat AI as an image-making technique at all. Putting extraction and effects in the same room makes a specific claim — that the energy consumed and the energy discharged are the same phenomenon viewed from either end, and that you cannot honestly discuss the output without the input. That is a curatorial argument, not a theme, and it is the kind of thing that distinguishes a show worth flying to from a show worth reading about.
The venue helps. MAAT sits on the Tagus in a converted power station — the Central Tejo, which burned coal to light Lisbon for half a century. An exhibition about the energy costs of computation, staged inside a decommissioned generating plant, did not need to labour the point.
Practical
Energies of AI, MAAT, Lisbon. October 2, 2026 – March 8, 2027. It runs alongside Life is the Game and Pedro Cabrita Reis’s com o coração livre de cuidados, both open from September 16 through February 22, 2027, so a single visit covers three of the anniversary programme’s major shows.