The internet of today bears little resemblance to its original promise of making all of human history and culture accessible to anyone, democratising information and strengthening human bonds across class and distance. Today’s internet is bordered and colonised, our attention largely controlled by invisible algorithms and corporations. Though everything may technically be on the internet, without a targeted pathway to less mainstream content, it may as well not exist. At the same time, physical galleries and museums are intimidating and accessible only to a limited part of the population.

The book you hold in your hand belongs to the Free Museum, a collection of twenty curatorial proposals by Tara Kelton’s students that attempt to bring art, culture and knowledge to new and overlooked communities in both public and online spaces. Each book documents an experimental prototype of a new model for content dissemination that challenges traditional forms of curation, archives and the ‘museum’.

These experiments attempt to retranscribe existing physical and virtual structures of information, reconsidering how we can provide deeper access to knowledge in a chat-gpt age, where objective truth is under question, propaganda reigns supreme, and people’s attention is increasingly limited to tiny gleaming windows and Youtube echo chambers.