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As we start preparing the showcase of the Nxt AI Residency, Powered by Prosus, we are taking a closer look at the mentorship programme our selected artists are learning from. This programme provides instructions from over ten mentors with a diverse set of skills, ranging from the technical aspects of data science in AI to the societal implications of its use, to the production of artistic works that use AI as a tool.

Throughout this residency, artists are encouraged to question and explore the (future) impact of intent-driven AI on us as individuals and our society. Rather than venturing into dystopian perspectives, this residency encourages artists to consider alternative narratives:

Artists explore the structure and exploits of emergent technologies, like “AI”, to address social functions as distinct from market and innovation drives. That helps broaden the conversation for greater participation in the impact, role, and meaning of incorporating these systems into the body politic.

– Charlotte Kent, PhD

Charlotte Kent, PhD, Associate Professor of Visual Culture and Head of Visual and Critical Studies at Montclair State University, led a workshop on ‘Intimacy & Ethics in AI’ and gave us some insight into her reasons for participating in this mentorship. As stated by Kent, the role of the artist is to imagine and present ways of envisioning new technologies that differ from the corporate uses for which they are usually developed. Enabling these different imaginaries can help better understand the possible uses of emerging technologies that often get subsumed under umbrella terms like “AI,” especially since these often carry intense scepticism from the general public.

Throughout the residency’s mentorship programme, the artists first gained technical skills, learned about new tools and the possibilities of AI and data-driven research, and later participated in workshops exploring the societal impacts of AI. Starting the AI-focused programme with issues of copyright and ownership, followed by an exploration of intimacy & ethics, and finishing with exercises of visualisation and remixing, the mentorship programme aims to tackle a wide range of important issues of contention surrounding the world of AI in art. 

Abdo Hassan – creative technologist, AI ethicist, digital anthropologist, and poet – was another mentor in the programme and gave a workshop about the role of AI in art. In a conversation we had with Hassan on the importance of exploring intent-driven AI through art, he told us:

The rapid emergence of Agentic AI systems is blurring the lines between form and function. In the process, these systems pose key ethical questions not only around authenticity and attribution, but about power, knowledge and discourse. The role of the artist here is to hold space for new collective imaginations that centre liberation rather than optimisation.

– Abdo Hassan

Hassan’s goal in the mentorship was to reframe the moral issues surrounding AI as stemming from a “crisis of imagination.” Hassan encourages us as a society to step away from technologically-deterministic narratives and instead take control of the narratives surrounding AI by envisioning new ways of engaging with it, such as slow, ambient, poetic, or eco-conscious AI. Through these different modalities of engaging with tech, different futures are possible, and AI can serve as a tool of emancipation rather than as the evil that it is often understood as in certain social spheres. 

On September 13 and 14, Nxt Museum will host a showcase of the artworks created by the residency programme artists. More information can be found through the button below. 

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