Future Art Ecosystems 5: Art x Creative R&D

The fifth Future Art Ecosystems briefing, published by Serpentine in June 2025, argues that creative research and development, where artistic experiment meets advanced technology, is a field of innovation in its own right and needs forms of support suited to it.

Its authors are Kay Watson, Victoria Ivanova, Tommie Introna and Nicholas Houde, and it draws on interviews and roundtables with more than sixty people. Among them are the artists Ian Cheng, Natsai Audrey Chieza, Anicka Yi, Lauren Lee McCarthy and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, organisations including 221a, Trust and Watershed, and policy bodies such as the AHRC, DCMS and the British Council. McCarthy, Cheng and Chieza each have a section of their own.

Chapters on the artist and on infrastructure lead to four proposals directed at UK policy, among them a broader official definition of R&D that takes in creative work, and ways of measuring the creative ecosystem as a whole. The briefing was timed to feed into the UK government's Industrial Strategy and its plan for the creative sector, both then in preparation. The closing words come from Hans Ulrich Obrist with Bettina Korek, and the design is by Roxy Zeiher.

Serpentine Galleries, 2025. 9 x 13.5 cm.