ARTLAS: Mapping Art-Technology Institutions via Conceptual Axes, Text Embeddings, and Unsupervised Clustering
arXiv:2603.28816v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The global landscape of art-technology institutions, including festivals, biennials, research labs, conferences, and hybrid organizations, has grown increasingly diverse, yet systematic frameworks for analyzing their multidimensional characteristics remain scarce. This paper proposes ARTLAS, a computational methodology combining an eight-axis conceptual framework (Curatorial Philosophy, Territorial Relation, Knowledge Production Mode, Institutional Genealogy, Temporal Orientation, Ecosystem Function, Audience Relation, and Disciplinary Positioning) with a text-embedding and clustering pipeline to map 78 cultural-technology institutions into a unified analytical space. Each institution is characterized through qualitative descriptions along the eight axes, encoded via E5-large-v2 sentence embeddings and quantized through a word-level codebook into TF-IDF feature vectors. Dimensionality reduction using UMAP, followed by agglomerative clustering (Average linkage, k=10), yields a composite score of 0.825, a silhouette coefficient of 0.803, and a Calinski-Harabasz index of 11,196. Non-negative matrix factorization extracts ten latent topics, and a neighbor-cluster entropy measure identifies boundary institutions bridging multiple thematic communities. An interactive web-based visualization tool built with React enables stakeholders to explore institutional similarities, thematic profiles, and cross-disciplinary connections. The results reveal coherent groupings such as an art-science hub cluster anchored by ZKM and ArtScience Museum, an innovation and industry cluster including Ars Electronica, transmediale, and Sonar, an ACM academic community cluster comprising TEI, DIS, and NIME, and an electronic music and media cluster including CTM Festival, MUTEK, and Sonic Acts. This work contributes a replicable, data-driven approach to institutional ecology in the cultural-technology sector.
