London's Serpentine gallery has launched its first dedicated research and development fellowship for artists working with artificial intelligence, selecting four practitioners from more than 1,000 global applicants to spend six months investigating how AI reshapes cultural production, ownership and authorship. The Future Art Ecosystems R&D Fellowship, supported by The Glass Castle Foundation, signals a shift in institutional thinking: artists should help build the technology, not just react to it.
The four selected artists - Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Alice Bucknell, Auriea Harvey and Reina Mun - will feed their research into conversations across the technology industry, academia and policy. The Serpentine has commissioned artists around emerging technology since launching its Arts Technologies program in 2014, but this marks the first fellowship devoted entirely 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," the gallery said, adding that the artists were chosen for approaching the tech "not as a finished product, but as an unsettled terrain whose assumptions, limits and possibilities need to be redrawn."
Why R&D needs artists at the table
Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Serpentine's artistic director, has watched the relationship between art and technology evolve for more than a decade. He argues that the speed of AI development makes dedicated research time for artists urgent. "As technology speeds everything up, it's becoming permanently about output, output, output for artists - and for fashion designers, too," Obrist said. "But art, like fashion, needs time and slowness, and we need to give artists that."
The fellowship structure draws from Obrist's own experience. At 23, a residency from the Cartier Foundation gave him time to research and conduct studio visits - a period he calls crucial to his 35-year trajectory. The Serpentine aims to offer similar space for risk-taking. "Art is about experimentation, which includes experiments with technology," he said.
The gallery's arts and technologies team has grown to eight people - substantial for an institution of its size - and past exhibitions have featured artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Ian Cheng, Refik Anadol, and Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. Herndon and Dryhurst's 2024 exhibition The Call explored AI as a coordination technology for creatives, and the ideas it surfaced were later discussed by the British government and the EU. For Obrist, that trajectory illustrates the point: artists can make technical concepts legible while generating policy-relevant questions about intellectual property and ethics.
For working creatives, understanding how these systems function is no longer optional. AI for Creatives training can help professionals engage with the same questions of authorship and control that the Serpentine fellows are researching, whether they work in visual arts, design, or fashion.
Moving beyond the gallery walls
Obrist is blunt about the need to break out of institutional silos. "We should work with governments, corporations, and brands to try and put artists into those structures," he said. "Today, big organizations and governments should have artists in residence and maybe even on the board."
The Serpentine has already tested this approach through partnerships with Google Arts and Culture and, in 2022, with Fortnite - a collaboration that reached 150 million people in two weeks by placing art on the game's landing page. The gallery frames these partnerships as distribution channels, not branding exercises. Free admission and nearly a million annual visits help, but Obrist wants the institution's research to be "actually useful" for the entire sector, with findings made public so organizations without dedicated arts-and-tech teams can benefit.
"We need to move beyond the fear of pooling knowledge, beyond siloes," he said. "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."
The complexity question
Asked whether AI-generated artwork carries the same value as work made solely by human hand, Obrist refused a blanket answer. "It's an impossible question to answer in absolute terms; we can only answer it by looking at specific cases," he said. He pointed to The Call as a significant 21st-century artwork that used AI - but stressed that every output must be interrogated for what it contributes.
He also pushed back on reductive takes. "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," Obrist said. "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."
That stance aligns with the Serpentine's broader bet: that artists can surface ethical criteria and civic applications for AI that a handful of entrepreneurs building companies might miss. The fellowship is designed to create time for exactly that kind of inquiry - slow, rigorous, and unafraid of uncomfortable answers.
Why this matters for creatives
The Serpentine's fellowship signals that major cultural institutions now see artists as necessary participants in AI governance, not just end users of the tools. For working creatives, the practical takeaway is clear: literacy in how these systems work - and the ability to question who controls them - is becoming a professional asset. Whether through self-directed learning like Generative Art Training or institutional programs, the creatives who understand the data sets, training processes, and ownership structures behind AI tools will be positioned to shape the terms under which those tools are used, rather than simply adapting to whatever ships next.
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