Creative R&D Issues #1-30: The Recap
This week: A special edition capturing the key themes and ideas across the first thirty issues of Creative R&D.
Once every ten issues I take a pause and add to a growing index of the themes that have emerged from “Creative R&D”.
Back after issue 20 it was clear there were seven major themes which kept showing up over and over again. That’s still the case now though the emphasis is shifting.
The pieces we’ve covered are cross-referenced issue-by-issue below. And i’ve added which themes have gone up or down the list of most prevalent (“+/-” in brackets)
If you enjoy what I’m doing here, today’s the perfect time to refer a friend and help everyone else make sense of how the bleeding edges of art and technology fit together.
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Before we jump in, I wanted to give a shout out to this Discord channel set-up by reader Robin Hunter. It’s a brilliant community of like-minded souls working at the edges of emerging tech and digital creativity.
Dive in now and you can find out about the group’s first meet up in a couple of weeks.
Theme 1 // Aesthetics for a digital world (+1)
This is really what I LOVE. Essays about different artists across a range of art forms responding to digital technology, and how digital changes the way we think about their art and artistry.
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
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 VR film, Buried in the Rock created from Lidar scans
Issue 9: Erosion Birds, the first major example of a generative AI meme
Issue 12: Aidan Walker guest posted on meme artist allhailthealgorithm
Issue 13: 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: 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 and what her work tells us about the challenges of digital preservation.
Issue 17: Digital architect Hassan Ragrab, whose surreal AI-generated visions may shape tomorrow’s real-world buildings. I also wrote about how Nick Cave’s beautiful emails are reminder of the power of the medium
Issue 19: 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 showed us new ways of seeing a world broken by technology.
Issue 21: A trip to the cinema gave me an overdose on anime Demon Slayer’s delirious digital aesthetics
Issue 23: We looked down the rabbit hole of sleep sounds and the industrialisation of ambient noise
Issue 24: A meditation on discovering some really weird stuff online - a jump into a space I called the backrooms of the internet
Issue 25: A profile of Kane Pixels, the best young film-maker on the internet you’ve never heard of.
Issue 26: My shock, horror and finally joy at the happy hardcore rave revival being led by the remarkable horsegiirL
Issue 27: A profile of one of my great heroes, Robert Wilson
Issue 27: I got very excited by some CalTech research that created an immersive experiences for fruit-flies
Issue 28: … And then nearly as excited by this immersive experiences for cats
Theme 2 // The Threat and Promise of AI (-1)
I worry AI is going to takeover the newsletter. I will fight that urge. But there is so much to talk about.
Issue 2: Deep Mind founder Mustafa Suleyman’s take on Interactive AI. I also covered three podcasts on AI
Issue 4: 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
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. And we also looked at the Rabbit.AI, the second major consumer device based around Chat GPT.
Issue 26: We covered the emergence of Udio and Suno and Generative music-making
Issue 29: A piece on Harold Cohen founder of AI art
Issue 30: Coverage of the AI film academy awards and where generative film making is at
Issue 30: The development of a high-quality training data sets for AI - and the need for this in culture and creativity.
Theme 3 // New kinds of digital-age institution (-)
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
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 was the big idea when we looked at the opening of London’s East Bank.
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.
Issue 22: We looked at a city in the Saudi desert being built on the blockchain
Issue 27: Covered SXSW coming to London and the strategic challenges it needs to answer
Theme 4 // New ways of seeing, new kinds of memory (-)
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 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
Issue 24: We covered Neuralink and the collective power of visualisation of NGX project Groupthink
Issue 25: We looked at the creative potential of a new kind of AI-powered satellite imaging that extrapolates 3D data.
Theme 5 // New devices, new interfaces (+2)
We’ve 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
Issue 21: Smart rings and the possibilities of neuro-aesthetics
Issue 23: Sleep aides and how they work (and why they don’t)
Theme 6 // The state of digital innovation (-1)
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
Issue 21: The first two major books on NFTs
Issue 22: Immersive audio on natural history TV and in the films of Weerasethukal and David Lynch
Issue 28: How music writer Simon Reynolds resets musical history with Kraftwerk as the most innovative group of all time
Theme 7 // Digital evolution of creative markets (-1)
This theme seems to be fading away a little. It looks at emergence of, and opportunity for new kinds of markets, but hasn’t shown up in the last 10 issues.
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
* not the Creative R&D offices, but the very magnificent “St Jerome in his Study” by Messina in the National Gallery.