Serpentine Announces First Participants in AI

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. This week, London’s Serpentine Galleries announced the launch of a six-month fellowship program, commencing in September, that will award four artists working with artificial intelligence grants of £10,000. The inaugural cohort of the fellowship includes Reina Mun, Alice Bucknell, Alfredo Salazar-Caro and Auriea Harvey. Serpentine has long demonstrated support for artist-cum-technologists. In 2019, the gallery founded Future Art Ecosystems, a program which frequently organizes “research-led initiatives” and facilitates AI experiments. The participants in the new fellowship were selected from an international call to artists that drew nearly 1,000 applicants. As a part of the program, the selected fellows will travel to London to conduct original research, working alongside mentors to examine how advances in AI are reshaping cultural production and arts institutions. Among the fellowship’s interdisciplinary jurors are artists Refik Anadol, Cao Fei, and Holly Herndon; Google DeepMind COO Lila Ibrahim, the chief A.I. readiness officer of Google’s DeepMind; and Evan Spiegel, the Co-Founder and CEO of Snap Inc. (formerly Snapchat). The new London arts charity Glass Castle, chaired by Quadrature Capital co-founder Suneil Setiya, has committed to a three-year partnership with Serpentine in order to support the fellowship. “This Fellowship builds the connective tissue between art and emerging technology, so they develop together rather than in sequence,” Bettina Korek, CEO of Serpentine Galleries, said in a statement. Salazar-Caro, an artist and the Creative Director of DiMoDA (The Digital Museum of Digital Art), will be spending his fellowship researching how emerging technologies and ancestral knowledge systems might potentially converge. Bucknell will develop Medium Sized World, a research project investigating how future-predicting AI systems function. Harvey, an artist and sculptor, will explore what happens to a figure when it is rendered using different materials and under different contexts. Mun, a doctoral researcher at Harvard, will investigate AI’s promises to meaningfully enhance human cultural production.