How Kunsthalle Praha Is Using AI to Help Students See Art Differently

AI is often seen as the enemy of creativity — a machine poised to replace the artist, the writer, the dreamer. But what if it isn’t replacing creativity at all? What if it’s becoming its newest catalyst?

That’s the question being explored inside an unlikely setting: a former 1930s transformer station in the centre of Prague. Reimagined as Kunsthalle Praha, the space hums with the same energy it once distributed across the city — only now, it’s fuelling experiments at the intersection of art, technology, and learning.

For the museum’s Learning and Public Programmes team, led by Martina Freitag and Barbora Škaloudová, AI is a creative material — something to stretch, bend, and test. And their workshop series, Warm-up with AI, invites students to do exactly that.

A Warm-Up for the Imagination

“Think of it like stretching before exercise,” says Freitag. “You don’t start by running a marathon. You start by testing your limits.”

The workshops begin with simple, playful interactions with AI. Students use image and text generation tools to create short pieces inspired by the museum’s exhibitions. But beneath the fun lies a deeper aim: to shift perception from fear to familiarity.

“When photography first appeared,” Freitag explains, “many artists were afraid of it. But once they learned to use it, entirely new art movements emerged. AI feels the same right now.”

In other words, Kunsthalle Praha is teaching young people not just how to use AI — but how to think with it.

Libraries Without Labels, Stories Without Limits

The idea first took shape during the 2023 exhibition READ by artists Elmgreen and Dragset. Known for their conceptual installations, the duo transformed a gallery into a library — except the books were turned backwards, their titles hidden.

Visitors were puzzled. What were they supposed to read when there was nothing to read?

Freitag turned that confusion into a prompt. Literally.

Using ChatGPT, participants wrote their own literary interpretations of the exhibition. They selected an artwork, chose a genre, and asked the AI to generate a story around it. The results were as diverse as the imaginations behind them — detective tales, romantic monologues, surreal fables. Each was a small act of co-creation between human and machine, the algorithm acting less as author and more as accomplice.

The exercise transformed passive observation into active interpretation. Visitors didn’t just look at art; they conversed with it — and, in doing so, rediscovered their own creative agency.

When the Photographer Disappears

The next exhibition couldn’t have been more different. Gone were the conceptual installations; in their place came the crisp, disciplined photography of Lucia Moholy, a lesser-known figure of the Bauhaus.

Her story is both extraordinary and unjust. Moholy’s negatives were taken by Walter Gropius when he fled Nazi Germany, leaving her without access to the very work that defined her career. For decades, her images circulated without credit, her role in the modernist movement almost erased.

Freitag and Škaloudová saw a parallel between those lost negatives and the blind spots of history — and they wondered: could AI help students reimagine what’s missing?

This time, they turned to a tool called Runway, which can generate moving images from still photographs. Students selected one of Moholy’s images and used AI to create a short video imagining what might have happened just before or after the shot.

It wasn’t about accuracy, but empathy — about seeing beyond the frame.

“AI often made the portraits too perfect,” Škaloudová recalls. “It erased the individuality, smoothing away the human details. So we guided students to think differently — to use AI to suggest a moment, not rewrite it.”

The most powerful outcomes, she says, were the subtle ones: a shadow shifting, a gesture continuing, a line of architecture breathing to life.

Two Hours to See Differently

Each Warm-up with AI session lasts two hours. The first half-hour introduces artists working with technology, the middle hour is hands-on creation, and the final 30 minutes is reflection — not critique in the traditional sense, but a shared conversation about process and perception.

Participants work in groups, like small film crews. One student might compose the shot, another write the prompt, a third oversee the editing. The process demands clarity of thought — how do you describe an idea precisely enough for a machine to understand?

That discipline, the educators say, is what students carry away most strongly. They learn to translate vision into language, to think about what a camera means to do, not just what it shows.

“Writing a good AI prompt,” Škaloudová notes, “isn’t so different from directing a film. You have to know what story you’re trying to tell.”

The Art of Staying Close to the Source

As Kunsthalle Praha’s exhibitions change, the workshops evolve alongside them. When exploring Chiharu Shiota’s installations of thread and shadow, students focused on movement within space — on how a single camera angle could suggest a story without disrupting the fragile stillness of the work.

At another exhibition, Bergman and Hartung and We’ll Never Be Parted, participants worked with abstract paintings, using AI to explore the gestures and textures that imply motion. The challenge, Freitag says, was maintaining the original artist’s spirit.

“The AI sometimes made things too literal,” she explains. “A swirling brushstroke became a spinning vortex. We had to remind students that abstraction isn’t meant to explain — it’s meant to evoke.”

In other words, AI wasn’t a shortcut to meaning; it was a mirror for interpretation.

Learning as Collaboration

What emerges from these sessions isn’t just digital output, but a new way of thinking about learning itself. Freitag and Škaloudová act less like teachers and more like moderators, guiding conversations rather than dictating lessons.

“There is not one all-knowing guide,” says Freitag. “Learning is a two-way street.”

The approach has turned Kunsthalle Praha into a kind of laboratory — one where art and technology continually test each other’s limits. And in that process, both educators and students rediscover a crucial truth: innovation is rarely about the tools. It’s about the questions you ask with them.

The Spark That Keeps Transforming

For a building once devoted to generating electricity, Kunsthalle Praha has found a fitting legacy. Its workshops now generate something far more human: curiosity.

Each experiment with AI, each prompt and pixel, carries the same charge — a reminder that creativity isn’t being replaced. It’s being redefined.

Because when students stop fearing the machine and start playing with it, something remarkable happens.
They begin to see art — and the future — through new eyes.

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Martina Freitag and Barbora Škaloudová from Kunsthalle Praha spoke at the Creative Museums Summit 2025.