Gray Area was delighted to have hosted Alasdair Milne from King’s College London and Serpentine’s Creative AI Lab during his research trip to San Francisco in Summer 2023. During this time, Alasdair expanded his doctoral thesis project, conducted studio and exhibition visits, and initiated discussions with artists, curators and creative technologists. Gray Area is excited to deepen this exchange through a Creative AI Field Mapping project. The trip was funded by the London Arts & Humanities Partnership (LAHP).
Creative AI Field Mapping with Serpentine & Kings College London
Alasdair Milne
Alasdair’s work focuses on the collaborative systems that artists build around new technologies. As part of Serpentine’s Creative AI Lab he studies how machine learning is increasingly integrated into artistic workflows, becoming part of broader and more complex systems of tooling. He researches curatorial methods for how best to support such emerging practices, records histories of their construction (such as with 0rphan Drift & Etic Lab’s ISCRI, and dmstfctn’s God Mode) and develops practice-informed theories in parallel.
Alasdair has focused on developing collaborative spaces and methods for in-depth conceptual exploration, a research process which feeds forward into the technical development of artistic projects. As established support structures in AI art practice increasingly focus on the technical, this curatorial method for ‘conceptual R&D’ aids artists to bridge the complexities of machine learning as it is deployed in specific cultural contexts.
More broadly, Alasdair’s focus on transdisciplinary collaboration makes Gray Area a vital case study towards an understanding of institutional infrastructures for ambitious artistic projects that draw together expertise not just between the artistic and the technical, but also from diverse disciplines.
If you are an artist working with machine learning in the Bay Area, feel free to reach out to Alasdair directly at [email protected].
Future Art Ecosystems
Vol. 4 Art x Public AI
Gray Area is proud to be a partner in the Future Art Ecosystems project, researching how art x advanced technology (AxAT) practices can lead to meaningful infrastructural transformations in culture and beyond.
In this new briefing, FAE4 highlights how organisations and artists, as agents, producers, sense-makers, truth-finders and curators, can negotiate the different components of how AI systems land in society.
Future Art Ecosystems (FAE) is a project that was launched in 2020 by Serpentine Arts Technologies.