London’s Serpentine Galleries has spent years positioning its R&D platform, Future Art Ecosystems, as a bridge between contemporary art and emerging technology. Its newest initiative puts real money behind that mission: the Future Art Ecosystems R&D Fellowship has named its first cohort of four artists, each given £10,000 and six months to research how artificial intelligence is reshaping culture — not to make a single commissioned artwork, but to actually investigate the question.
Four different bets on what “AI’s effect on culture” means
- Alice Bucknell (Los Angeles) is developing Medium Sized World, researching AI systems built to simulate environments and predict outcomes — pointed squarely at the same world-model territory currently being explored by video-generation labs, but from an artist’s research angle rather than a product one.
- Reina Mun, a doctoral researcher at Harvard, is examining how “AI enhancement” itself gets defined and evaluated — an unusually meta starting point, questioning the criteria used to judge AI systems rather than building with them directly.
- Alfredo Salazar-Caro (Mexico) is exploring post-digital architectures through artistic experimentation and what the fellowship’s materials describe as regenerative worldbuilding.
- Auriea Harvey, an Italian sculptor, is investigating craft and authorship in algorithmic production — the question of what “making” something means once part of the process runs through a model.
Research funding, not commission funding
The structure is deliberate: rather than paying artists to produce a finished exhibition piece, the fellowship funds six months of open-ended research beginning September 2026, connecting each fellow with industry, academic, and policy contacts along the way. Serpentine CEO Bettina Korek framed the reasoning behind that structure directly: “This Fellowship builds the connective tissue between art and emerging technology, so they develop together rather than in sequence” — treating research time itself as the deliverable, on the theory that technology and art shaping each other requires slower, less outcome-driven space than a typical commission allows.
A judging panel that spans both worlds
The fellows were selected by a panel that pairs working artists with technology and policy figures: media artist Refik Anadol and artist Cao Fei sit alongside Lila Ibrahim, Chief Operating Officer of Google DeepMind, and Mariana Mazzucato, an economics professor at University College London. That mix — two artists already deep in AI-driven practice, one of the industry’s own senior executives, and an economist known for work on public-value-driven innovation policy — signals an institution trying to keep the research grounded in more than just artistic interpretation of the technology.
Related Reading
- Four artists explore AI’s effect on culture as part of Serpentine’s new art and technology award — The Art Newspaper
- Serpentine Announces First Participants in AI-Centric Art Tech Fellowship — Artforum
- Future Art Ecosystems R&D Fellowship: Art x Convergence — Serpentine Galleries
- Serpentine Taps Four Artists For New Tech-Focused Fellowship — Artnet News