Photos courtesy of ELIA Biennial

Our colleagues Helen Yung and Mark V. Campbell of the Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence gave plenary keynotes at the ELIA Biennial Conference in November 2024 in Milan, Italy. They also organised a session on “The Future of Funding” with invited speakers from SKKG and Wider Sense to address innovations in philanthropy.

ELIA is a global European network representing higher arts education, fostering professional exchange, advocacy, and collaboration among its 285 members across 54 countries. The ELIA Biennial 2024 Arts Plural, hosted by NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti), celebrated artistic intelligence and explored how artists, educators, and designers can act as agents of change. It examined the role of arts education and necessary structures for fostering pluralism and addressing global challenges.

Helen Yung’s opening keynote, The Artist Elsewhere In Society,presented the Lab’s definition of artistic intelligence and pointed to the Imagination Audit, previously developed in residence at UTSC, as a key component of the Lab’s methods.

We frame our ‘solutions work’ as art, as part of an extended continuum of artistic practice, or a circular economy of artistic intelligence. Current realities [for educational institutions] are such that one cannot exist without the other. It is not either Art is intrinsically valuable, or Art is merely valued for its extrinsic benefits. It’s not either/or….

It’s ‘yes, and ______.’

The Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence specializes in projects that propose and unpack ways of doing things differently in the world, led by artists and artistic methods. These transdisciplinary projects include collaborations with astronomy, immigration, mental health, medicine, information sciences, and more. Experiments can fail — if all your experiments succeed, then it wasn’t an experiment nor are you innovating. But the breathtaking possibilities of bringing artists ‘elsewhere’ in society are that connections and insights often emerge that can be at once exploratory and actionable, at different scales.

In the closing keynote, entitled “Listen Deeply, Respond Curatorially: Reflections on the Wise Application of Artistic Intelligence,” Mark V. Campbell responded to the conference as a whole, calling for a poetics of (disobedient) relationality, building on both Glissant’s and McKittrick’s anticolonial methodologies. His talk ended with a survey of artistic intelligences significant to his artistic and curatorial practices:

• What does the graffiti artist know about scale, visibility, and proportion?
• How does the photographer know the sun’s shadow and its geometric possibilities at dawn or dusk?
• What does the capoerista know about proximity, distance, balance and obscuring?
• What does the DJ know about tempo, repetition, expectation, and memory?

The conference marked the five-year anniversary for the Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence, founded in 2019 by artist, researcher, and consultant Helen Yung, along with artists Sharada Eswar, Tom Kuo, and curator Mark V. Campbell, who is also a CLCF cluster member.

You can follow Mark V. Campbell’s work with CLCF here.