The Art and Science of Creative AI

Annarita Papeschi is an architect, researcher, and educator. She is Lecturer (Teaching) at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and co-founder and director of FLOW Architecture. Her work explores the relationship between architecture, urban design, and emerging technologies, with a particular focus on digital participation, AI-mediated design processes, and collective forms of spatial practice. Positioned at the intersection of design theory, computational design, and urban studies, her research investigates how AI and data-driven techniques can inform new forms of collective intelligence and spatial agency. Engaging with post-digital and post-humanist perspectives, she approaches cognition as distributed, situated, and relational across human and non-human ecologies. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge volume Automation, Ethics, Built Environment: Territories of Co-Cognition.

Ardeshir Abdolrahimi is a London-based filmmaker, photographer and interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores lived experience, human connection and the emotional possibilities of moving images. He began making films in Iran in 2006 and has since worked across directing, cinematography, editing and experimental visual storytelling. He is co-founder and co-director of Aquifer Film Studio in East London and works as a Film Production Technician with the BA Media programme at University College London, supporting emerging filmmakers in developing their creative voices. His recent work includes the Trilogy of Terpsichore (2025), on which he served as co-director, cinematographer and editor. Morning received Best Music Film Editing at the 2025 Consonance Music and Dance Film Festival, while SENTIENT won Best Dance Film at Greenwich Film Festival in 2026. His participatory installation Shared Pulse extends his exploration of human presence and collective experience into interactive art. Alongside filmmaking and education, Ardeshir explores the creative and ethical implications of generative AI and hybrid filmmaking. His approach places artistic agency at the centre, questioning how technology might expand cinematic possibilities while preserving the value of lived experience, collaboration and personal discovery through making art.

Prof Atau Tanaka conducts research in embodied musical interaction. He studied electronic music with Ivan Tcherepnin at Harvard University. There he met John Cage during his Norton Lectures. Tanaka went on to carry out his doctorate with John Chowning and Max Mathews at CCRMA Stanford. Atau has carried out research at IRCAM Centre Pompidou, Apple France, and Sony Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) Paris in areas of interactive music, immersive media, network performance, and human-data interaction. His work has been presented internationally at Ars Electronica, ZKM, WOMAD festival, Sónar Barcelona, SFMOMA and Musikinstrumenten-Museum Berlin. He has been Edgar Varèse guest professor at TU Berlin, conducts research with the Bristol Interaction Group. He is professor at Goldsmiths University of London, co-director of the Centre for Sound, Technology & Culture (CSTC) and is editor of the Sonics Series on Goldsmiths Press.

Brigitta Zics is an artist-researcher and Professor of Computational Media at UCL. Her work examines how computation shapes perception, creative agency and knowledge. She develops computational systems that combine real-time data processing, sensor-based interfaces and embodied interaction to investigate human experience. Through installations, experimental interfaces and conceptual frameworks, she brings artistic enquiry into dialogue with scientific and technological methods. Her experimental world-making places the human condition at its limits, using creative testbeds to examine how emerging technologies reshape agency and experience. Her current research investigates how creative and artistic practice can challenge the assumptions and limitations of AI foundation models while contributing alternative methods to their development. Her philosophical enquiry asks how embodiment and perception shape claims about intelligence, subjectivity and experience in artificial systems. At UCL, she is Research Lead for Culture, Communication and Media at UCL East, Director of UCL Computational Media Research, and co-convenor of the UCL Network for Creative AI.

Canhui Liu is Lecturer (teaching) in Machine Learning and Research Fellow in AI Policy at the Department of Computer Science at UCL. His work focuses on AI governance, responsible AI, and AI literacy. More broadly, his work seeks to build bridges between social science and technical AI research, showing why questions of fairness, responsibility, legitimacy, and social structure are central to the future of AI.

Caroline is a Transitional Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham. Her design and research work sits at the intersection of creative design, Human-Robot Interaction, soft robotics and haptics design. Her work explores how robot might touch us humans in a way that feel safe, trusting and caring, alongside the social expectations, norms and ethics that shape robotic touch in care contexts. She is also part of the project delivery team for the Turing AI World Leading Researcher Fellowship: Somabotics: Creatively Embodying Artificial Intelligence. She holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art UK in Information Experience Design. Prior to joining the University of Nottingham, she led a Digital Future Postdoc Fellowship at KTH Royal Institute of Technology that explores design guidelines for developing digital social touch that are capable of communicating social, affective and caring content. Her design work explores applying soft robotic caring touch in contexts including healthcare, mental health, intimate care, infant play and artistic exploration. She was an awardee of the MedTech SuperConnector programme in the UK for translating soft robotic haptic technology into healthcare applications(2018-2019) and a co-investigator in the Cancer Research UK-funded project 'Improving care through soft robotic tactile intervention - towards a smarter compassionate experience in cancer treatment (SOFTLI)' (2019-2021).

Chris Rhodes is a composer, researcher and Associate Professor in Interactive Music and Creative AI at UCL Knowledge Lab. His work explores how computational systems can participate in musical creation without reducing composition and performance to fixed rules or automated outputs. This includes Guru AI, an AI-powered music-learning platform that provides personalised feedback on musical performance and technique. His practice-led research considers how AI can support exploration, learning and collaboration while preserving the unpredictability and embodied judgement central to musical practice. Rhodes works across composition, software development and interdisciplinary research, connecting technical experimentation with questions of authorship, pedagogy and computational creativity. His work approaches technology as a partner in artistic inquiry and examines how AI might extend the ways music is learned, made and experienced without standardising musical practice.

Christian Babski is a research scientist and technical developer working at the intersection of computer science, design and cultural production. With a background in computer graphics and advanced digital systems, his work includes virtual and augmented reality, motion capture, networked media and interactive visualisation. At ECAL, he contributes technical expertise to research projects that examine how digital technologies can transform exhibition formats, archives and encounters with media art. Babski has also worked on research concerned with hybrid physical-digital spaces and the infrastructures needed to present complex technological projects to public audiences. Through this work, he demonstrates how technical research can become an active part of artistic interpretation, enabling new forms of access, reconstruction and participation without treating technology as a neutral display mechanism.

Daniel Rothschild is Professor of Philosophy of Language at UCL. His research examines how meaning is produced through the interaction of language, reasoning and context, drawing on philosophy, formal semantics, pragmatics and cognitive science. He has worked extensively on conditionals, belief, communication and the structure of inference, addressing questions that are increasingly significant for the evaluation of artificial intelligence systems. These concerns provide a rigorous framework for considering whether computational systems genuinely understand language or primarily reproduce patterns of use. Within debates on creative AI, his work offers tools for distinguishing linguistic competence, reasoning and understanding, and for examining the assumptions built into claims about machine intelligence and knowledge.

Dominic Lees is a filmmaker and Associate Professor of Filmmaking at the University of Reading. His research focuses on the impact of generative AI and synthetic media on screen production, with particular attention to deepfakes, voice cloning and text-to-video systems. Drawing on substantial professional experience in film and television, he examines these technologies from the perspective of production practice as well as ethics, law and public trust. Lees has led research and industry engagement on how synthetic media changes performance, authorship, consent and the evidential status of moving images. By connecting practical experimentation with critical analysis, Lees investigates how screen media can adapt to AI without abandoning professional responsibility, labour rights or the social conventions through which audiences understand recorded reality.

Eleonora Oreggia, also known as xname, is a conceptual artist, writer, and lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her practice, situated at the intersection of art, music and (techno) philosophy, combines artistic experimentation with critical theory and technological invention. Her current research explores electromagnetic sensing systems for expressive interaction in electronic music, performance, and time-based media art. Encompassing electronic engineering and computer science, she interrogates the ontological value of electromagnetism and the epistemological and aesthetic implications of the use of invisible dynamic interfaces to interact with (intelligent) musical machines. The capability of emitting and detecting electromagnetic waves is in fact a characteristic that humans and electronic machines have in common, making the field a candidate “substance” for communication between entities of a different kind

Elly Selby is an architectural designer, lecturer and doctoral researcher at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her research examines how computational systems are transforming concepts of authorship within architectural practice. Through teaching and research, she explores how AI-assisted production changes not only the appearance of designed objects but also the professional and conceptual structures through which architecture is made. Her background spans architectural education and design practice, supporting an approach that moves between theoretical analysis and the practical consequences of computational methods. Selby’s research contributes to wider debates about agency, attribution and creative labour, asking how architects might critically engage with automated and generative systems without obscuring the human, material and infrastructural relations that enable them.

Fei Jun is an artist, designer and Professor of Art and Technology at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. His practice investigates the relationship between physical environments and digitally mediated experience through interactive installations, virtual spaces, visual systems and participatory projects. He has developed work across art, design and public culture, often creating hybrid situations in which audiences move between material and computational forms of presence. Alongside academic activity, he has undertaken large-scale creative direction and design projects that demonstrate how media technologies can operate across galleries, public events and broadcast contexts. His work approaches technology as a cultural language and examines how interfaces, networks and virtual representation reorganise perception, participation and social relations.

Fiona Zisch is an architect, researcher and Associate Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her work explores the relationship between architecture, cognition, movement and embodied experience. She has led teaching and programme development in design for performance and interaction, supporting experimental practices that combine architecture with responsive systems, immersive media and movement-based inquiry. Her interdisciplinary work brings designers into dialogue with researchers in neuroscience and human-computer interaction, creating methods for studying experience that remain grounded in spatial practice. As a co-convenor of the UCL Network for Creative AI, she contributes to discussions about embodied intelligence and the role of situated perception in the development of computational and creative systems.

Francisco Durán del Fierro is a Senior Research Fellow at UCL Knowledge Lab whose work examines the social, epistemic and ethical dimensions of digital transformation. His research addresses data practices, digital infrastructures and the institutional conditions through which emerging technologies become embedded in public and professional life. At UCL, he contributes to interdisciplinary research on knowledge, inclusive futures and the social consequences of computation. His perspective is relevant to creative AI because it situates technological innovation within wider structures of governance and meaning. His work examines AI as a sociotechnical development shaped by the communities, values and institutional arrangements that determine what these systems are designed to know and do.

George Proud is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gendo, an AI visualisation platform developed for architecture and design workflows. His background spans design, computer-generated imagery, visual effects and immersive technology, giving him direct experience of the time-intensive production processes that shape professional visualisation. The company’s work addresses a central challenge in generative production: how to make rapid image generation useful within professional processes that depend on precision, iteration and accountability. He is interested in how AI can remove repetitive technical barriers without replacing the judgement of designers. Through Gendo, he contributes an industry perspective on the integration of generative systems into established production environments and on the new skills, expectations and forms of collaboration that follow.

Georgina Voss is an artist, writer and researcher whose work examines large-scale technological systems and the social worlds built around them. Moving between installation, performance, critical writing and teaching, she investigates infrastructures that are often difficult to perceive directly, including industrial production, logistics, standards and complex organisational networks. Her book Systems Ultra explores how technological systems become culturally powerful through the interaction of design, labour, fantasy and institutional authority. Voss holds a research background in science and technology studies and has worked across academic and artistic contexts, including UCL and Central Saint Martins. In relation to AI, her work draws attention to the physical, organisational and imaginative conditions that support apparently immaterial computation. She asks how societies learn to trust complex systems and whose interests are embedded in their design.

Jasper Stevens is a designer and technologist working on intelligent systems, novel interaction and new computing platforms. He is a Member of Technical Staff at London-based startup Cypress Labs, designing and building agentic systems that help independent business owners understand their businesses and decide what to do next. As founding designer, his work explores the seam of human-agent collaboration, and what it means to work alongside a system that learns. He co-founded Liquid City, an award-winning XR and AI studio imagining and building new realities through film, prototypes and products for platforms including Niantic Spatial, Snap Specs, and Apple Vision Pro. Before that, at Meta Reality Labs he designed spatial input and operating systems, helping bring hand tracking to Quest and shaping the interface of the Orion AR glasses.

Dr Jeremy Silver is an entrepreneur, author and adviser whose work spans digital media, music and the creative industries. He is Chair of UCL’s Creative Intelligence Centre and an Honorary Professor in UCL’s Department of Computer Science. He served as CEO of Digital Catapult from 2016 to 2024 and as Interim Chief Executive of the British Library from 2025 to 2026. His career includes senior positions at EMI and Virgin Records, roles as CEO of Sibelius Software and Executive Chairman of Semetric, and advising the founders of Shazam. He is the author of Digital Medieval and Towards a Digital Renaissance, which explore the relationships between technology, creativity, entrepreneurship and investment.

Jessica In is an architect, coder and educator based at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her work explores the meeting point between architecture, robotics, performance and interactive systems. She develops design methods in which computation is not simply used to represent a finished proposal but becomes part of an evolving spatial process involving bodies, machines and environments. She has played a leading role in education focused on design for performance and interaction, supporting students who work across architecture, media and computation. In’s research asks how emerging technologies change the agency of designers and participants, and how technical systems can remain open to improvisation. Her work brings architectural thinking into direct contact with embodied and performative forms of intelligence.

Joasia Krysa is a curator, scholar and Professor of Exhibition Research at Liverpool John Moores University, where she directs the Institute of Art and Technology. She has held leadership and curatorial roles across universities, biennials and contemporary art organisations, developing exhibitions and research programmes that connect artistic practice with critical approaches to technology. Krysa has contributed to major international projects, including documenta and the Liverpool Biennial, and has worked extensively on the relationship between curatorial agency and computational systems. In the context of AI, she is interested in how automated classification, recommendation and decision-making reshape the conditions of display and interpretation. Her work asks how cultural institutions can critically engage with technological systems while developing more accountable and experimental forms of curatorial practice.

Kieren Reed is an artist and Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. His practice often works through sculpture, installation, architectural intervention and socially engaged projects, examining how spaces and institutions shape participation. Reed has developed work in collaboration with communities and public organisations, creating structures that operate as artworks, meeting places and platforms for collective activity. In relation to creative AI, Reed brings a fine-art perspective grounded in material practice and public engagement. He is interested in how technological systems enter artistic institutions and how artists can respond critically to their social consequences while constructing alternative spaces for experimentation, learning and exchange.

Leah Lovett is an artist and Senior Research Fellow at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. Her work combines performance, moving image, drawing, mapping and collaborative research to explore how places are represented and collectively imagined. She often works with communities and interdisciplinary teams, developing participatory methods that connect local knowledge with digital and spatial technologies. At UCL, she contributes to research on connected environments and digital co-creation, bringing artistic methods into projects concerned with cities and public life. Her approach to creative AI is grounded in situated practice: she considers how computational tools can support shared inquiry while remaining accountable to the people, histories and material conditions represented.

Lourdes de Agapito Vicente is Professor of 3D Vision at UCL Computer Science and a co-founder of Synthesia. She leads research on computer vision methods that recover the three-dimensional structure, appearance and movement of dynamic scenes from images and video. De Agapito has combined academic leadership with the translation of research into widely used technologies for synthetic media. This position gives her a distinctive perspective on the relationship between fundamental research, commercial development and the social consequences of generative systems. Within creative AI, her work raises questions about representation, realism and control: how visual models are built, what information they preserve or discard, and how new forms of image production can remain technically robust, transparent and responsibly governed.

Luca Zappala is a filmmaker, visual-effects practitioner and Lecturer in Film Production at UCL. His professional background spans production and post-production, with specialist experience in visual effects supervision, colour grading and the integration of digitally generated material into live-action workflows. At UCL, Zappala teaches students how technical decisions influence cinematic meaning, production planning and the relationship between creative intention and execution. His expertise is particularly relevant as generative AI begins to enter visual research, previsualisation, image creation and post-production. Zappala’s work emphasises that emerging technologies must be understood as parts of an iterative production ecology, requiring informed judgement from directors, cinematographers, editors and visual-effects teams instead of functioning as autonomous creative solutions.

Lydia Farina is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. Her research works across philosophy of mind, metaphysics and the philosophy of artificial intelligence, with particular attention to emotion, agency and the conceptual assumptions built into computational systems. Farina also contributes to interdisciplinary research on responsible AI in artistic and archival contexts, exploring how automated systems affect interpretation, ownership and cultural value. In creative AI, she is interested in what it means to attribute intention, imagination or understanding to systems that generate convincing cultural material. By connecting foundational philosophical inquiry with applied research, Farina investigates how concepts of mind and responsibility shape the design, use and evaluation of AI within creative and institutional practice.

Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás is a curator, art historian and lecturer whose work examines media art, computational culture and the institutional conditions of exhibition-making. She has developed exhibitions and research programmes for museums, festivals and cultural organisations internationally, with recurring interests in surveillance, planetary computation, virtual environments and the politics of technological infrastructure. At UCL, she contributes to Computational Media Research through teaching and scholarship in media practice and curation. Her work on AI asks how cultural institutions can respond to automated systems without treating them as neutral tools. She is particularly concerned with curatorial responsibility, the material conditions of computation and the possibility of building shared cultural infrastructures that support critical access, collective knowledge and the digital commons.

Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver is Associate Professor of Digital Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. She is a researcher and curator whose work focuses on data, networked images, digital art and the politics of curatorial practice. Her research develops critical approaches to data that question extractive models of collection, classification and value. Drawing on feminist, posthuman and practice-based perspectives, she examines how digital infrastructures reorganise relations between humans, technologies and environments. In relation to creative AI, she asks how datasets and computational processes shape cultural visibility and how alternative data practices might support more reciprocal futures. Her scholarship connects critical theory with experimental exhibition-making and collaborative artistic research.

Marc Barto is Senior Producer, Digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where he develops public programmes exploring the intersections of art, design and technology. His work creates opportunities for audiences to engage critically and creatively with emerging technologies through participation, making and dialogue. Marc leads festivals, workshops, artist commissions and community events that connect artists, designers, technologists and audiences. He curates Digital Design Weekend, the V&A’s annual festival celebrating digital cultures, and created PORTALS, a youth programme exploring immersive storytelling and emerging technologies. His recent work spans artificial intelligence, creative coding and immersive experiences, with a particular interest in how museums can support collective learning and reflection on technologies and their impact on culture and society.

Mattia Paganelli works at the intersection of philosophy, non-linear sciences, emergence, and contemporary art. Drawing on computational complexity, statistical mechanics and algorithmic information theory, his research focuses on the aesthetic and epistemological dimensions of emergent properties, recasting the sensual and poetic materiality of contemporary art as the possibilities generated by complex systems. He teaches as a Lecturer in the MA/MFA Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London; has taught as an Associate Tutor in Critical & Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art and as a Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. He was Research Associate in Data Loam at DieAngewandte, Vienna and Royal College of Art, London.

Min Han is an artist, educator and curator at the School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art. His work supports the development of interdisciplinary practices that connect contemporary art with emerging technologies, scientific research and new forms of public presentation. He has held academic leadership responsibilities within the School and has directed or curated major programmes concerned with intermedia art, including exhibitions and forums bringing together artificial intelligence, mixed reality, generative art, performance and ecological practice. His work also contributes to postgraduate supervision and the development of research on AI-enabled artistic production, spatial computing and human-machine collaboration. Through teaching, curating and institutional leadership, Han helps create platforms where artists, designers and researchers can test how technological change is reshaping artistic language and education.

Neill Campbell is Professor of Visual Computing and Machine Learning, with research spanning computer vision, graphics and data-driven modelling. His work examines how the shape, appearance and movement of objects and environments can be reconstructed from images and video. Campbell has worked across academic research and industry collaboration, including projects concerned with human appearance, dynamic scenes and creative visual production. His work is relevant to generative AI because it addresses the representational foundations on which many image-making systems depend. By combining mathematical research with applications in design and media, Campbell contributes to a clearer understanding of how visual models encode form, where their limitations arise and how they can be developed as reliable creative tools.

Parashkev Nachev is Professor of Neurology at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and an honorary consultant neurologist. He leads research that uses computational methods to understand complex neurological disorders through high-dimensional clinical data. His work combines medicine, neuroscience, machine learning and causal inference, seeking models that can support more precise diagnosis and treatment while remaining grounded in the variability of individual patients. This interdisciplinary position allows him to question the assumptions that accompany claims about intelligence and prediction in both clinical and creative AI. Nachev’s contribution to debates on artificial intelligence therefore connects technical capability with epistemology: what a system can infer, how its conclusions are validated and where responsibility lies when computational outputs influence consequential decisions.

Patricia Reed is a theorist, artist and designer based in Berlin. She is Head of Critical Inquiry Lab (MA) at Design Academy Eindhoven (NL), and is currently a research fellow at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures. Recent writings have appeared in Informatics of Domination, Pierre Huyghe: Liminal, Ceremony: Burial of an Undead World, Navigation beyond Vision, and e-flux Journal. A compilation of selected essays entitled Cosmovisiones de otro mundo was released by Holobionte Ediciones (in Spanish) in 2025, and Figuring Planetary Space was recently published by the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam.

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Patrick Keller is an architect, designer and Associate Professor in Media and Interaction Design at ECAL. His research explores the spatial, cultural and technical consequences of networked computation, including cloud infrastructure, interactive environments and hybrid exhibition formats. Trained in architecture and computer graphics, Keller works across design, research and artistic collaboration. At ECAL, he has led research into the reconstruction and reinterpretation of media artworks, examining how historical technological practices can be activated through contemporary tools. In the context of AI, this perspective foregrounds the environments and infrastructures through which computational systems operate. He asks how design can make these systems perceptible and how cultural projects can use advanced technology without concealing the material, historical and institutional relations on which it depends.

Paul GLADSTON is the inaugural UNSW Judith Neilson Chair Professor of Contemporary Art. He was previously Chair Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham UK and Head of the School of International Communications at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. His book length publications include Contemporary Chinese Art: A Critical History (Reaktion 2014), which received ‘Best Publication’ at the Awards of Art, China (2015), and Contemporary Chinese Art, Aesthetic Modernity and Zhang Peili: Towards a Critical Contemporaneity (Bloomsbury 2019). Among publications co-edited by Gladston is Rethinking Displays of Chinese Contemporary Art: Diversity and Tradition (Palgrave Macmillan 2024). He has curated or co-curated several exhibitions internationally, including most recently ‘In-/Visible Spectrums: Contemporary Video Art from the Sinosphere’ staged at the SOAS Gallery, University of London (2026).

Penelope Haralambidou is a Professor of Architecture and Spatial Culture, Co-Director of the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch programme, and Co-Chair of the Cultural and Creative Industries Committee at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her practice reevaluates architectural design through time-based media in research and pedagogy. She is the author of the monograph Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire (London: Routledge, 2013) and her current research project, ‘City of Ladies’ is a design-led investigation of Christine de Pizan’s proto-feminist text, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405).

Petra Molnar is a London-based AI Animation Director and founder of AI CineLab, creating award-recognised generative films, animation and commercial work. Her projects include AI promotional work displayed on Nasdaq's seven-storey Times Square screen, and she was a runner-up at the 2025 MetaMorph AI Film Awards. Featured by Reuters as part of a new generation building careers in AI filmmaking, Petra is also co-founder of the Creative AI Network and has delivered AI filmmaking workshops at Royal Holloway, University of London. With an unusual background spanning biology, dentistry and UX/UI design before moving into filmmaking, Petra brings both a technical and creative perspective to generative storytelling and the rapidly evolving craft of AI animation.

Phoenix Perry is an artist, game designer, educator and Reader in Games and Creative Technologies at the UAL Creative Computing Institute. Her work examines embodied play, creative computing, machine learning and inclusive approaches to technology. She develops interactive experiences that explore how bodies, social relationships and computational systems become entangled through games and physical interfaces. In the context of AI, Perry is interested in systems that remain open to improvisation and accessible experimentation without reinforcing narrow technical cultures. Her teaching and public work connect critical reflection with practical making, showing how games and machine learning can become tools for investigating social values, embodied intelligence and alternative forms of human-computer relationship.

Dr Roberto Bottazzi is an architect, researcher, and educator based in London. He is an Associate Professor and Director of the MArch Urban Design at The Bartlett, UCL. He is the author of Digital Architecture beyond Computers: Fragments of a Cultural History of Computational Design (Bloomsbury, 2018), and the upcoming The Architecture of Void: The Work of Leonardo Mosso and Laura Castagno (Birkhäuser, 2027).

Sean Hanna is Professor of Design Computing at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research investigates the use of computational methods to understand and generate complex forms in architecture and the built environment. Working across design computation, machine learning and spatial analysis, he examines how algorithms can support creative reasoning and how designers interact with systems that produce unfamiliar solutions. Within creative AI, he brings a long-term perspective on the relationship between automated processes and human expertise. Hanna’s work resists both technological determinism and simple tool-based accounts, focusing instead on how computational systems can become partners in exploration while remaining subject to critical evaluation, professional responsibility and the material constraints of construction.

Shu Cao, also known in exhibition contexts as Cao Shu, is an artist and educator based at the School of Intermedia Art, China Academy of Art. His practice includes three-dimensional moving image, sound installation, interactive games and site-responsive digital work. He often uses archives, found narratives and computational processes to examine how history and social experience are reconstructed through media. His approach to creative AI grows from a wider engagement with simulation, virtual environments and the cultural politics of digital representation. He is interested in how computational tools can reorganise memory and perception, and how artists can use those tools to reveal unstable or contested relationships between technological images and historical knowledge.

Shuoyang Zheng (Jasper) (he/him) is a researcher and ML engineer at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London, funded by the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in AI and Music. His work explores AI systems through their convergence with media and arts, primarily focusing on the development of neural audio synthesis tools and on the understanding of how these technological advances interact with artistic practices. Shuoyang has been an Associate Lecturer at UAL Creative Computing Institute, teaching units across creative computing, data science and AI, and machine intelligence. During the 2020 lockdown, he wrote songs and produced tracks under the name "Alaska Winter". As an interdisciplinary artist-researcher, his works have been exhibited in venues such as Sónar+D Festival, IRCAM Forum, and various academic conferences.

Szilvia Ruszev is a film editor, media artist, researcher and Lecturer in Fiction Film Production at UCL. Her professional practice spans feature films, documentary, television and immersive media, giving her extensive experience of how meaning is constructed through editing, rhythm and the organisation of audiovisual material. Ruszev has led research on responsible generative AI in creative practice, investigating how shared imagination, authorship and cultural difference are affected by machine-generated images. As a co-convenor of the UCL Network for Creative AI, she contributes to interdisciplinary dialogue between filmmakers, artists, researchers and technologists. She asks how AI can be incorporated into creative workflows without obscuring labour, reducing aesthetic decisions to prediction or reproducing biases embedded in existing image cultures.

Tamas Czuper is a sound artist, designer and production specialist working with recording, composition and audiovisual media. At UCL, he supports sound production within Computational Media Research and contributes practical expertise to student and research projects. His practice brings attention to the decisions that sit behind apparently automated audio workflows, including recording quality, spatial organisation, editing and the relationship between sound and moving image. In the context of creative AI, he examines how machine-assisted tools can support experimentation while preserving the specificity of human performance and auditory judgement. His teaching and demonstration work emphasise practical listening, responsible workflow design and the integration of emerging tools into broader processes of composition, production and collaborative media-making.

Tanya Aplin is Professor of Intellectual Property Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London. Her research focuses on copyright, confidential information, trade secrets and the application of intellectual property law to software and emerging technologies. Aplin’s expertise is central to debates about generative AI, particularly the use of protected works in training datasets, the legal status of machine-generated outputs and the rights of creators whose practices are affected by automated systems. Her work combines detailed legal analysis with attention to technological practice. Within creative AI, Aplin asks whether existing frameworks can protect creative agency and cultural labour, and where new forms of regulation or institutional responsibility may be required.

Terence Broad is an artist, researcher and Senior Lecturer in Data Science and AI for Creative Industries at the UAL Creative Computing Institute. He has worked with generative artificial intelligence for more than a decade, developing artistic projects that investigate how neural networks learn, transform and reproduce cultural material. His practice is known for treating AI as an artistic medium whose constraints and failures can be exposed through experimentation. He works across computational creativity, explainable AI and critical approaches to generative systems, often questioning the assumptions embedded in dominant models and datasets. Broad’s work asks how artists can move beyond the passive use of commercial tools and instead intervene in the construction, training and interpretation of AI systems.

Thomas Parker has over a decade of experience in the field of architectural design, with a specialist focus in 3D Scanning, metrology, and computer vision systems. His design-led research intersects these fields, both within an academic context and in his external design practice. His current interests lie in the operational, epistemic, and often paradoxical, measure of images in space sensing and computer vision technologies in an ever changing world of artifical images. Thomas was a lead designer at the creative practice ScanLAB Projects, where he worked on just over 100 projects, ranging between design, film, exhibtions, and performances, all with a focus on this emerging technology. Major projects include BBC Rome's Invisible Cities, Collapse in Collaboration with New Movement Collective, and the 'Oya Tour' with Ibeyi. Since leaving ScanLAB Projects, he has continued to work in the commericial field of 3D scanning, and engaged in major reserach projects both within UCL and externally, including leading the digital metrology of 'Uncovering Casa Sperimentale' and 'Kew House' in REF 2021.

Tobias Nolte is an architect, researcher and Professor of Media Architectural Representation at Leibniz Universität Hannover. He is also a co-founder of Certain Measures, a design practice working across architecture, computation and strategic research. His professional background includes leadership in advanced computational design, and his projects have been presented through major cultural and architectural institutions. Nolte examines how artificial intelligence, data and media systems reshape architectural representation and decision-making. His work often moves between speculative research and practical design, using computation to identify patterns, generate alternatives and question established assumptions about space. His work contributes to critical debate on architectural agency, automation and the cultural consequences of computational representation.

Tom Holberton is a chartered architect, researcher and Associate Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His work investigates how artificial intelligence and deep learning can become part of architectural design without eliminating ambiguity, interpretation and creative risk. He develops experimental methods that use latent spaces and generative models to explore forms that cannot be reached through straightforward optimisation. Holberton combines academic research with architectural practice and teaching, bringing computational experimentation into dialogue with the constraints of buildings, clients and professional responsibility. His research also examines the visual cultures through which AI systems learn architectural form. His work asks how machine learning might expand architectural imagination while keeping designers actively responsible for selection, interpretation and consequence.

Tommie Introna is a producer and researcher working at the intersection of art, advanced technology and cultural infrastructure. As R&D Platform Producer for Arts Technologies at Serpentine, he contributes to programmes that support artists and institutions engaging with emerging computational systems. Introna has contributed to the Future Art Ecosystems programme, which examines how art-and-technology practices are shaped by investment, labour, governance and infrastructure. Within debates on AI, Introna focuses on the systems that determine which creative practices can be developed, maintained and shared. He asks how cultural organisations can build technological capacity without becoming dependent on commercial platforms, and how research and development can serve artists, publics and long-term cultural value beyond novelty alone.

Valentina Soana is an architect, researcher and lecturer working across The Bartlett School of Architecture and mechanical engineering at UCL. Her research focuses on adaptive structures, robotics and material systems that can change shape in response to environmental or human interaction. Soana’s work combines architectural design, computation, fabrication and engineering, allowing questions of embodiment to be tested through physical prototypes. In the context of creative AI, her research challenges the tendency to locate intelligence only in software or language models. Soana’s work opens new possibilities for spatial practice while also asking how responsive environments can remain legible, safe and meaningful to the people who encounter them.

Dr Viktor Bedö is an interdisciplinary researcher, designer, and educator working as a Tutor (Research) at the School of Communication and Design of the Royal College of Arts and the director of Studio Neumann. Over the past fifteen years, Viktor’s career has traversed the domains of academic research in design and humanities, design strategy consultancy, urban play, and creative practice. Today, this trajectory supports a strategic, critical, and collaborative approach to design research and mission-driven innovation. At the foundation of his work is a commitment to convivial, life-affirming, and more-than-human urban infrastructures.

Professor Wang is Head of the Department of Curatorial Research at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) Art Museum. His work focuses on modern art history, contemporary art theory and criticism. In 2012, he was appointed a special adjunct curator at Michigan State University’s Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, with responsibility for exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art. He was the first Chinese curator to hold such a position at an American art museum. In 2013, he was appointed curator of the Chinese Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and deputy principal editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art in the United Kingdom. He is also editor-in-chief of the Chinese Contemporary Art Series, published by Springer.

Wenzel Mehnert is a scientist and futures researcher at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology. His work examines the imaginaries that develop around emerging technologies and the ways those narratives influence research, investment and public decision-making. He uses methods from foresight, speculative fiction and technology assessment to study fields including artificial intelligence, biotechnology and networked systems. His research brings scientists, artists, policymakers and publics into dialogue through scenarios and experimental formats. In relation to creative AI, he examines how stories about automation, intelligence and innovation establish expectations before technologies are widely understood. He connects critical analysis with practical methods for collective reflection and anticipatory governance.

Winnie Soon is an artist, researcher and Associate Professor of Art and Technology at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, where they direct the BA Art and Technology. Their practice works across computational art, software studies and critical approaches to code. Soon examines how technical systems are shaped by language, identity, labour and politics, often using artistic methods to make the operations of software perceptible. Through writing, teaching and experimental projects, Soon investigates how computation structures visibility and participation within digital culture. In relation to AI, their work asks how datasets, interfaces and automated systems reproduce social categories and whose experiences are excluded by dominant technical standards. This creates possibilities for intervention, refusal and alternative forms of computational practice.

Yulia Gryaditskaya is a Senior Research Scientist at Adobe Research in London. Her work spans computer graphics, computer vision and machine learning, with a focus on creative tools that give users meaningful control over generated visual content. She has researched sketch-based modelling, three-dimensional representation and methods that translate intuitive human input into structured digital form. Before joining Adobe, she held academic research and teaching roles in the United Kingdom, contributing to work on graphics, immersive technologies and visual computing. Within creative AI, she contributes to the development of systems that extend professional practice while keeping iteration, authorship and user intention central to the design of generative tools.