Contact: Mary Elizabeth Luka, Mark Campbell, Helen Yung
The Activating Artistic Intelligence team, CLCF members ME Luka and Mark Campbell, and Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence founder and creative lead, Helen Yung, have spent much of 2025 building a global consortium to develop research and share findings from and information about artistic intelligence. In January 2025, they received one of the first SSHRC Destination Horizon grants at U of T, for $14,996, matched by $10,000 each from the U of T Office of the Vice-President, International and CLCF (total $34,996). The first half of this funding has gone towards a series of activities over the last several months, including the support of Research Assistant, Upasana Bhattacharjee. Prior to this year’s activities, over the last three decades, the three AAI co-leads, Mary Elizabeth Luka, Mark Campbell, and Helen Yung, have collaborated in many related activities to develop community resilience, cultural policy and practices, and in disciplinary areas as diverse as artificial intelligence, communication and media, astronomy, physics, psychology, social justice, mental health, medicine, immigration, information management, and education.
Building on decades of research and engagement in Canada and Europe, AAI is inquiring into the ways that artistic intelligence can play a key role in responding to the seemingly permanent state of polycrisis. While artificial intelligence (AI) synthesizes massive amounts of information that would otherwise be inert, latent, or overwhelming, often in discriminating ways, artistic intelligence accesses creativity to devise and invent specific transdisciplinary ways forward that may also include AI. Artistic intelligence is most effective in complex situations with multiple competing priorities that cannot be solved by replicating deductive approaches within siloed disciplines alone, including the anxiety, uncertainty, and socio-cultural ramifications of climate breakdown, mass displacement, and heightened, widespread social inequities.
AAI is activating new network partners at the systems level as well as through collectives and collaborations at local and national scales. Existing partners include Mass Culture, Work in Culture, and arts funders and policymakers in Canada. Emerging partners include Culture Action Europe (CAE) in Brussels, Salzburg Global with 40,000 Fellows in 173 countries, and ELIA, the Amsterdam-based network of art schools from 54 countries, which programmed their 2024 conference with 80 sessions devoted to artistic intelligence. AAI is convening research and creative work with culture organizations representing diverse artists in Europe, including Black History Month Florence (BHMF) and Hip-Hop Huis in Rotterdam. BHMF is a collective of artists and scholars from the African diaspora that connects Afrodescendant communities in Italy with training, partnerships, and transnational cultural and educational institutions. Similarly, Hip-Hop Huis is a community organization in The Netherlands that will converge communities to provide evidence of how arts, culture and heritage can hold brave spaces for necessary dialogue and promote intercultural learning around the world.
Between June 22-28, 2025, we three visited Amsterdam and Brussels to work with university faculty and culture sector leaders to develop what AAI could become, and to explore potential interest in a global consortium. We held a one-day working session in Amsterdam co-hosted by Annette Markham that involved faculty research partners and collaborators in media literacy and public engagement at Utrecht University (Markham & Pronzato 2023) and socially-engaged creative training and development at Minerva Art Academy in Groningen (van Boeckel 2014), both in The Netherlands, to ground European innovation in community-engaged work. We met with representatives from ELIA, an arts service association of European art schools already deeply invested in the possibilities of artistic intelligence, and subsequently reached out to some of their existing collaborators and partners. Campbell met with partner Hip-Hop Huis in Rotterdam to think about future possibilities. We three also met with Lars Ebert at Culture Action Europe, to look into what CAE is most excited about for the future as this relates to artistic intelligence. Yung and Luka met with Sandra Boer at Art Partner, an organization that has been working with arts-based methods with corporations and policymakers, and uses approaches similar to artistic intelligence for more than a decade in The Netherlands. Finally, we met with Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans at VU Brussels to explore options for partnering in future, particularly in relation to archives, creative production, and exhibition-based research.
One of the outcomes of these early discussions was the creation of the Art/In Forum, a hub headquartered at the LAI. The forum is composed of researchers, artists, thinkers, culture sector leaders and funders, and others, both individual and organizational. With each participating individual and organization contributing in-kind or cash resources that make sense for them and their levels of interest in the AAI and related initiatives, it is a collaboration based on trust and creativity. It also provides some structure for a loose network of collaborators to be convened on a periodic basis.
From the beginning of the AAI initiative, we have spent a great deal of time grounding this fairly abstract way of theorizing ways to address complex social issues by working on grant applications with partners. This has included working with the University’s Acceleration Consortium, and proposing a Horizon Europe-directed grant project with KU Leuven/LUCA, alongside Bart Geerts and his colleagues. If the latter grant is successful, we will use our funding to complete two objectives:
Objective 1: to integrate, update and thematically code previous literature reviews and environmental scans to gain deeper interdisciplinary understandings of the notion of artistic intelligence, including understandings of how these ideas could best be disseminated
Objective 2: to convene two workshops to identify and examine current and anticipated case studies from potential and existing partners that address today’s complex societal challenges (see below)
Yung, Luka, Campbell and Bhattacharjee organized an international discussion session on Activating Artistic Intelligence at this year’s UNESCO Mondiacult on September 24, 2025. It was so well-subscribed that many of our newer partners have emerged from that process.
Through all of our activities, we have been building a list of potential partners and collaborators for the AAI consortium, now numbering around 45. Our first official consortium meeting was held on December 2, 2025, incorporating a wide-ranging discussion of the meaning of artistic intelligence, what people would like to work towards as research or applied projects, and interest in developing next-level grants.
In 2026, AAI will convene a series of working meetings to prepare a Horizon Europe Cluster 2 application for “HORIZON-CL2-2026-01-HERITAGE-01: ‘Artistic intelligence’: harnessing the power of the arts to address complex challenges, enhance soft skills and boost innovation and competitiveness” as well as to explore a SSHRC PDG or Partnership Grant. Anticipated visits in 2026 include exploring futures-thinking at the Bristol Digital Futures Institute at University of Bristol and the deep legacies of cultural studies and sonic ways of knowing employed by filmmaker and professor Julian Henriques at Goldsmiths in London. More to come!
