The mission statement makes Creative Intelligence<\/em> a natural platform for the kinds of artists and technologists supported by the London-based incubator Restless Egg: the \u201ccultural first movers\u201d in question. And yes, that includes the team behind the \u201cworld\u2019s first competitive robot dog fighting league\u201d… but also others, like the artist-led team behind the creative platform Fuser, or the architect and editor Jack Self, whose latest project aims to reengineer the attention economy to define what\u2019s actually contemporary and culturally relevant.<\/p>\n Speaking of cultural relevance, the broader Creative Intelligence<\/em> programme\u2014curated with PACT\u2014also featured talks and installations by creative pioneers including Holly Herndon, Sougwen Chung, K Allado-McDowell, and Kate Crawford. Hands-on exhibits, courtesy of Peckham Digital, included an anti-surveillance make-up demonstration by Lauren Bowker (founder of The Unseen and creator of lip balm grown in space) and PCs running Quantum Backrooms<\/em>, a game using quantum computing tech by the quantum technology company Moth.<\/p>\n Needless to say, attendees learned a lot, with a few Dazed Clubbers also present after grabbing discounted tickets via Dazed Club. The three-day festival offered profound insights into how creators are navigating a rapidly shifting technological and economic landscape.<\/p>\n The romanticised image of the starving artist has done immeasurable damage to creative people\u2019s bank accounts. Does it really have to be this way? Not according to many of the speakers at Creative Intelligence<\/em>, who have found a way to balance making a living with maintaining their own creative vision. In fact, this is central to Restless Egg\u2019s vision for art, which applies a Silicon Valley-style model to making and selling culture. As co-founder William Morgan describes it, this can even unlock new methods of getting your art seen and making a real impact, viewing commercialisation as a force multiplier for creativity.<\/p>\n You didn\u2019t have to agree with this model, though, to glean something from Restless Egg\u2019s conversation with the Mozilla Foundation and Diana Ayton-Shenker, CEO of Leonardo\/ISAST, at Creative Intelligence<\/em>. With old creative economies crumbling all around us, it was inspiring enough to hear from anyone trying to build something better and facilitate creative collaboration, experimentation, and inquiry at a transformative moment for creatives and humanity at large.<\/p>\n An interesting counterpoint to the fast-paced, large-scale models presented in the morning session was an afternoon discussion on creative worldbuilding between directors Jenn Nkiru and Jordan Hemingway (collaborators of Beyonc\u00e9 and FKA twigs, respectively), hosted by the artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. This emphasized the importance of slow community-building and a mindful approach to working with brands\u2014which often involves trading personal values for cash and exposure\u2014building directly on the personal experiences of each creator.<\/p>\n On a more traditional note, the three-day takeover also saw the launch of the Creative Intelligence Award, featuring \u00a350,000 in project development grants for artists working at the crossroads of art and tech. Supported by CoSTAR National Lab, the Southbank Centre, and UKRI, the artist-first grant opens for applications this October.<\/p>\n AI is at the centre of almost every creative conversation today, and for good reason. Speakers at Creative Intelligence<\/em> warned of the technology\u2019s very real potential to upend the creative industries and flood our lives with meaningless derivative content. Others, however, stressed the need for artists to get involved with emerging tech like AI as soon as possible, instead of just burying their heads in the sand. Why? Because, as William Morgan noted, it is still the people who work with AI that set its course today\u2014it hasn\u2019t totally run away from us yet. He added that if you change the people, who are the input, you can bet that the output will change.<\/p>\n Having collaborated with AI in their own work for many years, K Allado-McDowell was similarly optimistic about changing the output of AI tools, saying in a conversation with Sougwen Chung and Jazia Hammoudi that most uninspired algorithmic output stems from people working with the core, default settings of the system. And who is best placed to bend the rules and push these systems past their default settings? Artists, of course.<\/p>\n Building on this idea, Moth Quantum founder Harry Kumar made a case for the early adoption of a technology that is still in its embryonic phase: quantum computing. In conversation with Morgan and Lauren Bowker, he doubled down on the value of bringing people in early, at a time when the technology is still maturing\u2014both as a way to help shape the direction of the new technology and to communicate to the public what is going on behind closed doors.<\/p>\n Back in 1968, the Southbank Centre hosted a first-of-its-kind performance of computer music. At Creative Intelligence<\/em>, almost 60 years later, Holly Herndon showed just how far things have come in the decades in between, with a deep listening session that took fans through a variety of major projects with her partner and fellow artist Mat Dryhurst. From the groundbreaking album Frontier<\/em> to working with local choirs to train bespoke AI voice models, Herndon sat comfortably, playing music and talking the audience through her artistic process. Attendees even got to hear some unreleased tracks, which proved just as compelling on the level of creative experimentation.<\/p>\n This share-as-you-go approach aligns with the idea of protocol art, a term popularized by Herndon and Dryhurst, where creativity has just as much to do with curating data, designing frameworks, and shaping new tech as it does with playing an instrument or painting a picture. As Herndon herself put it, each step is an art-making moment.<\/p>\n If Creative Intelligence<\/em> proved one thing, it is that these art-making moments are everywhere once you know what to look for. From video games to make-up that resists state surveillance, to inventions from the cross-disciplinary research company Termite, to music by the London Community Laptop Orchestra, creativity is very much alive and well\u2014it just looks a little bit different than it used to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A robot dog is refusing to leave the stage at London\u2019s Southbank Centre. It strains against its leash as its owner, dressed in all black with a cyborgian, voice-changing mask, tries to drag it backstage. This is easier said than done, because the robot dog is bred for fighting. What we\u2019re describing here is not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1118,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[645,1711,1028,1710,12,17,223,1173,14,95,8,1709,13],"class_list":["post-1119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oriental-textiles-and-fashion","tag-centre","tag-collide","tag-creative","tag-dogs","tag-fashion","tag-festival","tag-inside","tag-intelligence","tag-oriental-style","tag-robot","tag-silk","tag-southbank","tag-textiles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/orientalplaces.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/images-prod.dazeddigital.com\/1200\/392-0-2415-1610\/azure\/dazed-prod\/1450\/5\/1455199.jpg\")
<\/figure>\nYOU ARE ALLOWED TO MAKE MONEY AS AN ARTIST<\/h2>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/images-prod.dazeddigital.com\/786\/azure\/dazed-prod\/1450\/5\/1455203.jpg\")
<\/figure>\nTECHNOLOGY DOESN\u2019T HAVE TO BE THE END OF THE WORLD<\/h2>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/images-prod.dazeddigital.com\/786\/azure\/dazed-prod\/1450\/5\/1455198.jpg\")
<\/figure>\nPOLISH AND PERFECTION ARE OVERRATED<\/h2>\n