July the 17th, 2026 – Meet BEYOND THE GAME, a new AI exhibition explores belonging, collective emotion, commercialisation, inequality and the future of sport.
Football may last ninety minutes, but its meaning extends far beyond the pitch. It is a global ritual, a carrier of memory and identity, a major industry and one of the few cultural phenomena capable of producing collective emotion on a planetary scale.
These ideas form the foundation of BEYOND THE GAME, a new exhibition developed within the AI Art Singularity project. Multiple artists submitted works, from which a selection committee consisting of Aco Momclovic, Lav Stipić and Siniša Koprivnjak chose twelve final pieces.
The project is supported by N1 and AI Central Point, while cooperation with Go2Digital will bring the exhibition to digital screens in public spaces. This allows the works to reach people outside conventional galleries and become part of everyday urban life. Go2Digital operates Croatia’s leading network of digital advertising displays, comprising over 500 screens across 52 cities and reaching nearly 3 million impressions daily.
beyond football in and of itself
The selected works use football as a lens through which to examine wider social questions.
Some present the stadium as a contemporary cathedral and football fandom as a form of secular ritual. Others explore the emotional power of crowds, the role of jerseys and symbols in preserving personal and collective memory, or the way sport connects children and communities across generations.
Several works take a more critical position. They address the transformation of athletes into commercial products, the influence of brands and institutions, unequal access to sporting opportunities, corruption and the tension between football as a public culture and football as a global business.
The exhibition also looks towards the future. Images of humans competing against robots raise a deceptively simple question: even if machines eventually become faster, stronger and more precise, would technically perfect football still contain what makes sport emotionally meaningful?
Human error, courage, improvisation and uncertainty may prove more important than optimal performance.
a tool for expression
The project continues a central idea introduced through the original AI Art Singularity – Zagreb Exhibition: generative AI can lower technical barriers and enable more people to transform ideas into visual form.
This democratisation should not, however, be confused with the claim that every generated image automatically becomes art. AI can produce novelty at enormous scale, but meaning and value are still interpreted and assigned by people. Creativity is therefore not merely produced; it is also judged.
The decisive human contribution may increasingly lie in defining the question, choosing the perspective, refining the output and taking responsibility for the message.
the curator in an age of abundance
This also changes the importance of curation.
When images were difficult and expensive to produce, creative value was closely connected to production. In an environment where thousands of technically convincing images can be generated quickly, scarcity shifts elsewhere. The central problem is no longer how to create more content, but how to identify what deserves attention.
The curator becomes the person who filters, connects and transforms individual works into a coherent narrative. In that sense, selection itself can become a form of authorship: the curator’s medium is choosing.
Copyright already partly recognizes this principle by protecting the human selection, coordination and arrangement of materials, even where individual AI-generated elements may not receive the same protection.
For BEYOND THE GAME, the twelve selected works gain additional meaning through their relationship to one another. Together, they create a wider story about ritual, belonging, childhood, commercialization, technology and power.
bringing art into the public space
The cooperation with Go2Digital adds another layer to the project. Digital screens usually operate within the commercial economy of attention. By placing art on them, even temporarily, their function changes: from selling answers to presenting questions.
The goal is not merely to demonstrate what AI can generate. It is to give people new means of expression and a public platform through which they can celebrate positive developments, criticize harmful ones and imagine alternative futures.
Ultimately, BEYOND THE GAME asks not whether machines can create impressive images. They already can.
The more important question is who chooses the subject, who defines the meaning, who takes responsibility for the message, and what parts of creativity we want to preserve as distinctly human, not because machines are incapable of them, but because we believe they should remain ours.
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