Exploring Creative Intelligence with London’s Southbank Centre

Ashwani Kumar — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:22:49 +0000

Exploring Creative Intelligence with London’s Southbank Centre

A new weekend explores how artists, digital innovation and AI are reshaping the world we live in.

This weekend, the Southbank Centre in London becomes a playground for creative technologies during the inaugural Creative Intelligence weekend, curated by PACT, Planetary Art Culture Technology.

Emerging computational tools are fundamentally reshaping how art is made and experienced. For a public art institution and Europe’s largest art centre celebrating its 75th anniversary, this shift poses important questions about how to work with artists to innovate with technology whilst celebrating human creative agency.

It is this inquiry that has informed the collaboration between Southbank Centre and Google Arts & Culture to date, from celebrating Hayward Gallery at 50 and digitising Art by Post to hosting four interactive experiments from the Arts & Culture Lab in the public foyers this weekend.

A Public Playground for the Imagination

In the Royal Festival Hall’s Clore Ballroom and Exploration Bazaar, visitors can experience Google Arts & Culture interactive experiments that harness AI

Dreaming with Flamingos by Yinka Ilori: Weaves West African folklore with Google DeepMind’s advanced AI music generation tool, Lyria, in an interactive riddle quest to restore a park’s lost wisdom

Unlock Yinka Ilori’s musical playground

Splash Canvas by David Li: Gemini and fluid dynamics power squishy sea creatures who act as your paintbrushes and real-time art critics

Paint on a squishy, fluid canvas guided by AI sea creatures

Learn Everything: Uses Gemini to turn photos of everyday objects into visual metaphors for understanding complex topics.

Turn everyday objects into instant science lessons

Say What You See: A puzzle game that sharpens prompt literacy by reverse-engineering AI imagery.

Learn the art of prompting

Visionary voices across the weekend

The wider weekend brings together leading artists whose practices explore art and code — including several Google Arts & Culture has collaborated with over many years:

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: The artist presents her algorithmic garden workPollinator Pathmaker on the Riverside Terrace. The work uses an algorithmic tool to design living gardens for pollinating insects rather than human taste, transforming art into a platform for non-human agency. Google Arts & Culture was an early supporter of the work.
Xin Liu: Ahead of her upcoming residency with Berlin’s LAS Art Foundation and Google Arts & Culture, artist Xin Liu explores art, science, and ecology through a performance lecture.
Lex Fefegha: Google Arts & Culture Lab Artist in Residence, Lex brings Future Inventions to Southbank Centre with Peckham Digital for workshops exploring creative tech through an Afrocentric lens.

Experience the weekend from Friday 11 September to Sunday 13 September 2026 at the Southbank Centre, or explore the experiments online via Google Arts & Culture.

Creative Intelligence was a major inaugural three-day art and technology festival presented by London’s Southbank Centre. Held from Friday 11 September to Sunday 13 September 2026, the site-wide takeover explored the intersection of human imagination, AI, and digital innovation. Produced as part of the arts centre’s 75th-anniversary celebrations and channeling the forward-looking ethos of the 1951 Festival of Britain, it was curated in partnership with PACT (Planetary Art Culture Technology) and supported by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). [1, 2]

The 11-acre riverside campus was transformed into an interactive playground showcasing how contemporary creators use emerging computational tools: [1, 3]

The Exploration Bazaar: Hosted in the Royal Festival Hall, this free public showcase gave visitors direct access to emerging creative technologists, live demonstrations, and public debates. This included interactive AI experiments in the Clore Ballroom hosted in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture, such as Yinka Ilori’s Dreaming with Flamingos, which merged West African folklore with Google DeepMind’s Lyria music generation model. [4, 5]
Immersive Environments: Featured installations included Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley’s post-apocalyptic interactive game THE DELUSION: I Can’t Move Without You, Andrew Thomas Huang’s dreamlike The Deer of Nine Colours, and a live-coded electronic music event by AlgoRhythms known as Algorave. [5]
Academic & Scientific Tech: Universities brought data to life, such as Norwich University of the Arts showcasing video game engine simulations depicting the future impacts of rising sea levels. [6]

The festival kicked off on Friday 11 September with an industry-focused summit exploring everything from quantum computing to venture capital for art. Key segments included: [7, 8]

The Image After AI: A critical conversation on non-human vision featuring prominent digital artists and thinkers like Sougwen Chung, K Allado-McDowell, and Alex Estorick.
Ecosystems & Planetary Art: Panels featuring Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Anab Jain centered on art where nature, pollinators, and rivers act as the primary protagonists.
Deep Listening Sessions: Audiences attended specialized audio sessions with pioneering composer Holly Herndon, who demonstrated her decade-long practice of treating the training of AI models as a meticulous act of creative authorship.
Authorship & Ethics: Renowned screenwriter Jack Thorne joined Baroness Beeban Kidron to discuss the legal and creative definitions of authorship under the shadow of rapid AI deployment. [7, 9, 10]

Would you like to know more about the individual artists involved, details on the Google Arts & Culture AI experiments, or upcoming programming scheduled for the rest of the Southbank Centre’s 75th season?