Serpentine’s Hans Ulrich Obrist: Creatives Must Help Shape AI - Vogue

As generative AI has become better at producing convincing — if not hyper-polished — images, video and other creative work in the past year, the debate around its role in culture is moving beyond whether artists should use it. More pressing questions are emerging around authorship, ownership and creative control — and whether artists can help shape the technology itself, rather than simply respond to it.

London’s Serpentine gallery is now inviting artists to interrogate these questions. This month, the institution launched its inaugural Future Art Ecosystems R&D (research and development) Fellowship, a six-month research program supported by The Glass Castle Foundation, bringing artists and technologists together to investigate how AI is reshaping cultural production, institutions and public life. Selected from more than 1,000 global applicants, the four selected artists — Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Alice Bucknell, Auriea Harvey and Reina Mun — will spend the next six months investigating AI, ownership and authorship, with their research feeding into conversations across the technology industry, academia and policy.

The Serpentine has been commissioning artists and developing research around emerging technology since it launched its Arts Technologies program in 2014, but this is the first fellowship the gallery has launched dedicated to R&D in the area.

“The fellowship is founded on the belief that artists are not simply observers of technological change, but essential contributors to it, creating opportunities for practitioners to shape wider conversations about how emerging technologies are governed,” the Serpentine Gallery said, adding that the artists were selected for their approach to the tech “not as a finished product, but as an unsettled terrain whose assumptions, limits and possibilities need to be redrawn.”

Few people have watched the relationship between art and technology evolve from as close a vantage point as Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Serpentine’s artistic director, art curator, critic and historian. Vogue Business sat down with Obrist to discuss what AI means for image-making, its implications for creativity, and what role creatives should play in shaping how AI develops.

Vogue: The Serpentine Gallery has been exploring AI and emerging technology for more than a decade. How has that work evolved, and what does this new R&D fellowship add?

The Serpentine Gallery has been looking into AI for around 12 years, which is why we started the [Art Technologies] project. We’ve had several exhibitions, including those by Pierre Huyghe, Ian Cheng, Refik Anadol, and Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, who explored AI as a coordination technology for creatives in their 2024 exhibition The Call. We’ve also built up a dedicated arts and technologies team of eight people over the years — a lot for the size of the organization. I think that demonstrates our commitment to exploring art and tech, which is a huge priority for us.

But we’ve always felt it’s extremely important that there’s an R&D dimension to our explorations of technology. R&D within the art practice involves both backend applications of tech and explorations of its role at the frontend, via exhibitions and artwork, as our R&D work with artists often leads to an exhibition or commission.

So we’re now taking it further with these residencies — they’re meant to allow for risk-taking, because art is about experimentation, which includes experiments with technology.

Vogue: Why now?

As technology speeds everything up, it’s becoming permanently about output, output, output for artists — and for fashion designers, too. But art, like fashion, needs time and slowness, and we need to give artists that. It’s just as important for fashion, in fact for all creative fields, that we give creatives the opportunity to slow down and not to have to do four to eight shows a year.

When I was 23, I got a residency from the Cartier Foundation in Paris, which allowed me to leave Switzerland for the first time (I had no money) and just be there, research, and take time for lots of studio visits. It was a really crucial moment in my life — my entire trajectory wouldn’t have been possible over the last 35 years without that residency.

I think as an art institution, it’s our job to make people think about how these technologies will affect us over a longer duration, while also allowing people to work on longer projects. That’s what binds all our projects together — moving past short-termism, which is a danger with AI.

The entire fellowship is founded on the belief we have that artists are not simply observers of technological change, but contributors to it. And if we believe that, then we must create opportunities for artists to think and be part of that dialogue.

Vogue: What role do you think institutions like Serpentine should play in enabling artists to research and experiment with technologies like AI?

We want to do something useful for the entire sector, for artists, and for the world. We say to ourselves every day: this shouldn’t be R&D for R&D’s sake; how can it be actually useful? We’re very aware that many organizations don’t have an arts and tech team as we do, so we want our learnings to extend to other institutions by making them public.

We also strongly believe in partnerships with organizations in other sectors. Without the supporting philanthropic arts organization Glass Castle, this fellowship wouldn’t be possible, but we’ve also had very early partnerships with Google Arts and Culture, and even a partnership with Fortnite in 2022. That was particularly exciting because we reached 150 million people in two weeks as we were on the Fortnite landing page — tech partners can be an important way to reach huge audiences and bring more art into the world.

Likewise, we should work with governments, corporations, and brands to try and put artists into those structures. Today, big organizations and governments should have artists in residence and maybe even on the board. We don’t want to just show art and tech in the museum. We believe artists should be involved in the tech conversations that are happening beyond the gallery.

I’ve always felt that it’s unbelievably important that we bring fields together. We need to move beyond the fear of pooling knowledge, beyond siloes. Art, tech, government, and corporations should all speak to each other. I profoundly believe museums can play a role in this because we bring people together.

Vogue: What about art’s role in understanding technology?

Many people are worried about AI, but many are also curious. I think a lot of people today don’t actually understand what AI is. For many, it’s a strange, mysterious thing. They don’t know about large language models (LLMs) or how a data set works. But when we commissioned Holly Herndon’s exhibition, visitors could actually understand how a data set works. It made the invisible kind of visible. At the same time, her project explored AI as a potential coordination technology for building ethically sourced vocal datasets for sharing creative works, and those ideas were then discussed by the British government and the EU. Artists’ IP is absolutely something we should be concerned about and encourage discussion of.

I think that shows artists can make really important contributions because they can think about this technology in ethical terms, and also interrogate how it can actually be useful for society, not just a handful of entrepreneurs building AI companies. Artists can play a central role in asking how AI can be useful in a civic way. We need to listen to artists and have artists at the big tables where decisions are made. That’s our mission, as an institution.

And then as galleries, we must also make sure our projects and exhibitions reach as many people as possible. We have free admission, and almost a million visits a year at the Serpentine. And we must constantly think of how we can bring this project to the attention of not only people in the art world, but everyone in society.

Vogue: A lot of the creative industries are dismissive of AI and AI outputs right now. Do you personally think an artwork created with AI is as valuable and interesting as an artwork created solely by human hand?

It’s an impossible question to answer in absolute terms; we can only answer it by looking at specific cases. Yes, I believe The Call by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst is a very important 21st-century artwork that used AI, for the reasons I’ve outlined. But it’s a case-by-case basis. AI isn’t the be-all and end-all; you have to interrogate every output for what it’s contributing. You also have to follow ethical criteria and think of societal usefulness when experimenting with AI.

I think this technology is very complex, and it’s important to acknowledge that, and not just to say AI in art is good or bad. I think we as creatives and we as a society need to address AI in its full complexity, with its dangers, with its downsides, with its risks, and with its possibilities.