HERA Collective - sb&co

HERAtlas

Interactive Installations / Research / Partner: Heracollective

Key Takeaways

Designing for absence, not just presence
We’re translating a data problem, gaps that are invisible by definition, into a physical, interactive installation, applying our expertise in making complex data relatable to content that has no fixed form to begin with.

Bringing research into public space
A travelling pop-up kiosk turns a scientific atlas into a hands-on public experience, letting museums and studios explore their own collections’ gaps directly, rather than reading about them in a report.

AI to battle bias, not amplify it
Left unchecked, AI tends to generalise, and generalisation quietly reinforces the biases already baked into historical data. HERAtlas does the opposite: applying AI and statistical modelling with care, and with the right domain understanding, to expose bias rather than repeat it.

Visualizing absence

Only 13% of works on display in major Dutch museums are made by women, and the gap runs deeper than any single collection reveals. Curators, game designers and educators face a shared blind spot: no one can currently see where and when gender balance has existed, why representation rises or falls, or which collections hold untapped work still waiting to be found. HERAtlas asks what it would take to make that invisibility visible, and to turn it into something the creative sector can actually act on.

Developed in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam, HERAtlas combines AI-driven data enrichment with statistical methods borrowed from ecology, originally built to estimate species no one has observed, and applies them to art no one collected. The result is a federated, interactive atlas that doesn’t just map the women’s art that survives, but estimates, with real uncertainty ranges, how much never made it into any archive at all.

These findings are then brought to the people who can change them. A travelling pop-up kiosk carries the atlas out of the research lab and into museums and design studios across the country, turning bias scores and structural insights into a tool curators and creatives can use to find overlooked work, and to start telling the stories that were never given the chance to be told.

Was has happend so far:

Present day

Project kick-off
HERAtlas begins as a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam and our studio, bringing together AI, statistics, history and design around a single question: how do you measure, and visualize, what’s missing from the art historical record.
Co-creation workshops & first prototype

Together with the HERAtlas expert panel and invited practitioners, we translate the needs of curators, educators and designers into a first clickable prototype of the atlas.

Okt ’26
Nov ’26 - Feb ’27

Building & enriching the atlas

A baseline collection of roughly a million artworks is harmonised and integrated into the atlas, alongside a data-donation pipeline that lets museums and archives, large and small, contribute and preview their own holdings. A first public version goes live, combining interactive maps and timelines that let anyone explore where and when women’s art has been visible, or invisible, across history. From there, the atlas grows: statistical models estimating the volume of lost or uncollected women-made art turn missing history into bias scores with real, visualised uncertainty, while a structural layer links representation gaps to historical factors like suffrage, education access and inheritance law, revealing not just where women’s art is missing, but why.
Pop-up kiosk & public showcase

The atlas moves out of the research context and into public space: a travelling pop-up kiosk debuts in collaboration with a partner museum, letting visitors explore the atlas hands-on for the first time.

May ’27
TBD

Project completion

HERAtlas concludes with a full open-source toolkit and policy brief, handing curators, producers and educators the means to keep closing the gaps the atlas revealed, long after the project ends.