Alice Bucknell, Reina Mun, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, and Auriea Harvey are the inaugural fellows of Serpentine's Future Art Ecosystems R&D Fellowship, each spending six months researching how AI systems that pursue goals and model environments are reshaping culture and governance, under the theme Art x Convergence.
Serpentine selected the four fellows from close to 1,000 applications to the inaugural edition of its Future Art Ecosystems R&D Fellowship. Delivered in a low-residency hybrid format, the programme combines online sessions, tailored mentorship through specialist seminars and workshops, and in-person intensives in London.
“This Fellowship builds the connective tissue between art and emerging technology, so they develop together rather than in sequence,” says Bettina Korek, CEO of Serpentine.
The honorary jury brought together artists, technology leaders and thinkers working across innovation, economics and institutional change. It included Refik Anadol, Cao Fei, Holly Herndon, Lila Ibrahim, Chief AI Readiness Officer at Google DeepMind, Mariana Mazzucato, Venkatesh Rao, Suneil Setiya and Evan Spiegel, alongside Hans Ulrich Obrist, Bettina Korek and Serpentine's Future Art Ecosystems team.
Alice Bucknell's project, Medium Sized World, investigates world models, AI systems that simulate environments and predict future outcomes. Through trusted tester access to commercially available systems, the project examines the assumptions, omissions and value systems embedded within them. Combining technical research with science and technology studies and philosophies of AI, Bucknell explores alternative approaches to world simulation that are collaborative, multiscalar and open-ended. The research will inform a new multiplayer video game currently in development.
Reina Mun, a doctoral researcher at Harvard working on multimodal closed-loop control for ambient intelligence systems, is examining one of AI's central promises: enhancement. As generative and agentic AI systems increasingly shape everyday life, her project asks what enhancement means, who defines it and how its effects can be meaningfully evaluated. Focusing on wellbeing, creativity and productivity, the research pays particular attention to the gap between perceived benefits and measurable outcomes.
Alfredo Salazar-Caro is exploring how emerging technologies and ancestral knowledge systems might converge to create post-digital architectures that rethink dwelling, ecological stewardship and regenerative futures. Through computational design, XR and robotic earth construction, he investigates how Indigenous knowledge and vernacular building traditions can inform hybrid physical and virtual environments.
Auriea Harvey, whose three-decade practice spans net.art, video games and physical fabrication, is exploring what happens to the figure when it exists in a permanent state of becoming: authored through digital craft and AI systems, transmitted across borders as a file, and realised differently according to the conditions of each place it reaches. By tracing how forms shift across materials, technologies and contexts, the project examines questions of craft, authorship and artistic agency in an era of increasingly distributed and algorithmic production.
