Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Collaborative Experimentation: Lessons from the AI&Arts Interest Group
The AI & Arts Interest Group is a cross-disciplinary initiative at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national research institute for data science and artificial intelligence. The group brings together a community of over 500 practitioners worldwide, spanning academia, cultural heritage institutions, the creative industries, and policymaking.
Although collaborations between art and technological innovation have a rich history, today we are witnessing the emergence of new artistic practices where AI is not only a tool but also a subject of exploration. Increasingly, artists are using AI to support, extend, or simulate creative processes. Some engage with data and algorithms as raw material, shaping aesthetic and conceptual outcomes by curating datasets or tweaking machine learning parameters. Others use these technologies to probe new relationships between humans and machines. At the same time, researchers in this space are not only advancing state-of-the-art techniques to analyse the vast data being produced, but also grappling with deeper ethical questions around data collection, use, and its impact. These issues are too complex to be addressed by any one discipline alone, reinforcing the urgent need for multi- and transdisciplinary collaboration.
In this panel discussion, the group’s organisers will explore pressing questions at the intersection of AI, art, and society, share concrete examples of research and practice in this hybrid space of shared inquiry, collaboration and critical engagement, and highlight the skill sets needed to address today’s societal challenges – from climate crisis and online polarisation to the erosion of trust in institutions and scientific expertise. By sharing insights from the AI & Arts community of research and practice, including how its distributed, decentralised governance model has grown and evolved over the years to address the rapid changes in the field, this panel aims to foster critical dialogue with the audience and to re-imagine new modalities of thinking, creating, living and convening, together.
