Creative R&D Issues #1-20: The Recap

This week: A special edition capturing the key themes and ideas in the first twenty issues of Creative R&D.

Once every ten issues I’m stopping for breath to see what themes are emerging from the different stories we’re covering in “Creative R&D”.

We’ve got through a lot of territory, and there are seven major themes which are showing up over and over again.

They’re cross-referenced issue-by-issue below so if something is of interest to you, you can trace all of the projects and ideas I’ve talked about..

The Seven Samurai. Seven themes of Creative R&D.

If you’ve not upgraded to a paid subscription yet, today’s the perfect time so you can how this weekly dive into the sharp edge of art and technology fits together.

Right, let’s dive in.

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Theme 1 // The Threat and Promise of AI

Over twenty issues, there’s no question artificial intelligence has been the most persistent topic. I’m still agnostic - one week amazed, another week disappointed, another week scared, another week bemused. I don’t want to reach an opinion - the implications are too significant not to just stay observant and keep thinking. But I do want to keep documenting. Here’s what we’ve covered.

• Issue 2: I covered Deep Mind founder Mustafa Suleyman’s take on Interactive AI. I also covered three podcasts on AI

• Issue 4: I grappled with the ambiguity of synthetic AI in issue 4, when I wrote about the emergence of synthetic social networks.

• Issue 9: I covered NERFS and Gaussian Splatters, new forms of visualisation that use AI.

• Issue 11: We featured the first of a new generation of AI-powered device, the Humane.AI Pin and spitballed some of the creative use cases for it

• Issue 12: In this guest post

  Aidan Walker
  talked about AI-powered memes and a new wave of misinformation - a story that exploded with Taylor Swift just a few months later

• Issue 13: We featured analyst Benedict Evan’s take on tech in 2024 - very simply: there’s AI and there’s everything else.

• Issue 14: Charisma.AI’s Chat-GPT based dream simulator was a jump off into a history of dreams in gaming

• Issue 17: We looked at AI-powered dreamy new architecture and the rapid rise of training for architects in AI skills.

• Issue 19: The copyright challenge around AI, and the path out was an essay topic here. And we also looked at the Rabbit.AI, the second major consumer device based around Chat GPT.

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Theme 2 // New kinds of digital-age institution

This is the topic closest to my heart. We are seeing a wave of new types of institution emerge as as a response to the collision of creativity and technology - and become digital-age competitors to museums, galleries and other sites of culture.

• Issue 1: We started by talking about Innovation Labs National Gallery X, the lab for the future of culture I ran, and the lab at the British Museum I never got to build

• Issue 2: We talked about distributed media labs - a model brought brilliantly to market by Digital Catapult; plus a first glimpse of the rise of the Immersive Institution

• Issue 3: The institutionalising of the principles of Creative R&D - places where learning and acting at the interface of research, art and technology - was the big idea when we looked at the opening of London’s East Bank. I want to write more about this..

• Issue 5: We brokered the idea of the distributed institution as a digital-age competitor to museums and galleries and looked at Arkive

• Issue 8: I looked at the Lumen Prize and how it is pointing the way towards a new singularity in the digital art market. And I ❤️❤️❤️’d talking about Michelangelo’s very own art lab, hidden underground in Florence - which got this newsletter its first media coverage

• Issue 10: We looked at Berlin’s LAS-Art Foundation and how, unanchored from a permanent venue, they are unlocking new subjects and objects for art, with their shows about AIs and installations made for bees

• Issue 18: This has really been the big initial outgrowth of this newsletter, my cover feature for the February Art Newspaper on the Immersive Institution. Here I broke down the backstory to this piece.

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Your must-do in Web 3 // WAC Weekly

This month I’m totally delighted to have WAC Weekly as newsletter partners.

WAC Weekly is THE best place to keep up with what’s going on as Web 3 meets the Art ecosystem. A weekly call every Wednesday at 6 CET, it has an amazing revolving cast of speakers and projects.

It’s run by old friend and major maven, Diane Drubay. Register now - this season has a couple more months to run.

And look out for some exclusive content I’m making for Diane and WAC Labs over the coming weeks.

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Theme 3 // Artists in a digital age

Essays about how different artists across a range of art forms respond to digital technology, and how digital changes the way we think about artists.

• Issue 2: We looked at the reshaping of the history of immersive art at the Haus Der Kunst in Munich, putting female artists at the centre of a forgotten artistic line

• Issue 6: We took a big look at one of my favourite design groups, Space Popular who blur the boundary between the real and the digital

• Issue 7: We dove into a new production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in Digital Valkyries

• Issue 9: We looked at a brilliant VR film, Buried in the Rock created from Lidar scans

• Issue 12:

  Aidan Walker
  guest posted on meme artist allhailthealgorithm

• Issue 13: We looked at why protest-artists Pussy Riot are a reminder of the utopian promise of social media

• Issue 14: An interview with visual artist Wolfe Von Lenkiewicz on AI

• Issue 15: We touched briefly on Ursula Le Guin, who asked whether technology defines the world, or whether we can bend it to our needs

• Issue 16: Digital artist Aureia Harvey has a new show in New York. We looked at what her work tells us about the challenges of digital preservation.

• Issue 17: We looked at digital architect Hassan Ragrab, whose surreal AI-generated visions may shape tomorrow’s real-world buildings. I also wrote about how digital media makes Nick Cave’s beautiful emails a reminder of the power of the medium

• Issue 19: A dive into film-maker Michael Mann, and how he saw the world differently as he transitioned from shooting on film to shooting on digital

• Issue 20: The brilliant Edward Burtynsky show at the Saatchi Gallery in London shows us new ways of seeing a world broken by technology.

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Theme 4 // New ways of seeing, new kinds of memory

Across many domains, we’re seeing new ways of visualising, imaging and seeing. Through digital technology, the visual becomes data, and what we turn that data into is increasingly new forms of creativity.

• Issue 3: We looked at motion capture and the real-time ability to turn complex data into live simulations in baseball - and then the NFL followed immediately behind. We also looked at an amazing digitisation and recreation of an Aztec city,

• Issue 4: We featured the Venice Architecture Biennale’s digital twin (which was, frankly, a bit weird)

• Issue 5: We deep-dived into museums non-identical digital twins.

• Issue 6: A look into recent immersive museum experiences

• Issue 7: We asked where this hyperreality opera has gone?

• Issue 9: We looked at NERFs and Gaussian Splatters and how they are accelerating new forms of 3D visualisation

• Issue 10: How meme of the year the Erosion Birds shows a new path for digital creativity

• Issue 14: We looked at two projects around digital preservation - of cities ravaged by war, and a country likely to be destroyed by climate change and the critical role of digitalisation

• Issue 18: New developments in thermal imaging cameras took me on a trip through Predator, Robocop and Silence of the Lambs, and how cheaper camera-tech opens up new ways of seeing

• Issue 20: we talked about how digital twins will likely be part of the Superbowl in the next 3-5 years

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Theme 5 // The state of digital innovation

New kinds of digital creativity are creating new ways of innovating, and new outcomes to that innovation. They’re also creating new theories of how innovative, and in what ways innovation happens.

• Issue 3: I looked at the idea of slow innovation

• Issue 4: Riffed off a piece from

  Matt Klein
  on new forms of art penetrating spaces for advertising. I also looked at how game design has been on a 40 year quest to innovate the infinite

• Issue 7: We looked ahead at what the licensing of the Matrix films for the brilliant Free Your Mind! project at Factory International might tell us about the future of IP. And we looked at a crazy Web 3 Monopoly game

• Issue 8: I defended the state of 21st Century Culture.

• Issue 9: We looked at how generative AI is now unlocking a new kind of digital infinity.

• Issue 10: Overviewed key reads on digital fashion and digital identity

• Issue 16: We looked at the idea of the tyranny of the algorithm, and how it’s producing a global “sameness” in aesthetics - my take, this is a transitional phase we can iterate our way out of

• Issue 18: Looked at bleeding edge “shit post modernism” innovation in music

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Theme 6 // Digital evolution of creative markets

The emergence of, and opportunity for new kinds of markets has been a growing theme.

• Issue 4: We talked about advertising and the chance to build cultural business models between advertising

• Issue 5: Museums’ blockchain adoption was a topic

• Issue 8: We looked at the way the digital art market is moving towards a singularity that will give it strength and value.

• Issue 10: We looked at Darabase, a platform for augmented property rights and we looked at research and insight on the digital fashion market.

• Issue 11: Featured an overview of a brilliant report on the UK arts ecosystem - a great act of re-imagining how we describe the value of culture

• Issue 12: Featured an exclusive webinar with Nimi looking at the rise of blockchain-based digital collectibles in museum loyalty and philanthropy

• Issue 18: My piece on the rise of the Immersive Institution is all about the emergence of a new market we only barely understand - but need to, fast

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Theme 7 // New devices, new interfaces

Over the last couple of months we’ve seen, and looked at, a wave of new devices and physical technologies taking us in new directions. More of this to come.

• Issue 11: The first consumer device based on next-gen AI, the Humane.AI Pin was the start for a look at what new kinds of creativity this could unlock

• Issue 15: We looked at spatial computing as Apple launched the Vision Pro -and at Meta’s competing vision for the wearables of the future

• Issue 16: A look at a wave of transparent LED screens

• Issue 17: Disney’s, frankly pretty weird, HOLO floor.

• Issue 18: New developments in thermal imaging cameras.

• Issue 19: The Rabbit.AI, the second consumer AI device and the questions it raises about a post-app world

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Boy, that’s a lot.

But it’s not quite everything.

There’s other bits and pieces that haven’t really bloomed into themes yet.

I’ve written a couple of times about the dullness of real-world digital infrastructure - the data centres appearing everywhere. Take the chance for beauty guys!

And there have been some weird diversions into the odder edges of gaming. Just wait til I get to talking about anime next week.

But most of all, there’s been lots of references to post-punk and poetry. To keep that going, here’s one of the best post-punk songs, Memories by Public Image Limited. Amazing song.

Thanks for reading.

See you next week.

❤️🙏❤️🙏