From Mimesis to Machine
Innovation series
H10:00-21:00
Innovation series
H10:00-21:00
From Mimesis to Machine: AI and the Evolution of Artistic Creation
As part of the Innovation Series, in collaboration with HEAD – Genève
The event will be held in English
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As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated into artistic practice, it challenges long-established ideas of creativity, originality, and authorship. From generative images and texts to interactive installations, AI reshapes not only how art is made, but also how it is taught and understood. This shift raises urgent questions: What does it mean to create in the age of generative machines? How is creativity redefined when the artist works in dialogue with code, datasets, and algorithms? And how can educational institutions respond critically to these transformations?
While often seen as a rupture from tradition, AI-generated art is deeply entangled with historical artistic practices. This event explores the continuity between contemporary generative systems and earlier modes of artistic production grounded in imitation, variation, and transformation – principles at the heart of the classical canon. Like Renaissance artists who learned by copying and adapting established forms, today’s AI systems generate new content by recombining existing material, reflecting rather than rejecting historical ideas of how art evolves.
At the same time, this continuity prompts fundamental questions: Can AI-driven creativity move beyond imitation and meaningfully contribute to artistic evolution? How do we ensure it fosters innovation rather than reinforcing stylistic stagnation? How can artists use AI to support intuition and critical engagement? How does AI’s training data shape the aesthetic biases it perpetuates – and how can we ensure a diversity of references and perspectives in creative education? If precedent in architecture and design reflects history and tradition, and if human creators engage critically with their sources while AI cannot, what role could AI play in shaping the future of artistic discourse?
From Mimesis to Machine brings together artists, designers, historians, and educators for a day of conversations, workshops, and performances at Istituto Svizzero. The programme investigates how machine intelligence is reshaping our relationship to images, tradition, and knowledge, and how artistic education can respond critically and creatively to these changes.
PROGRAMME:
H10:00-10:30 Welcome Coffee and Institutional Greetings
Ilyas Azouzi (Head of Science, Research, and Innovation at Istituto Svizzero)
H10:30-12:30 Datacraft
Workshop by Alexia Mathieu and Vytaus Jankauskas (HEAD – Genève)
Datacraft is a research and creation project led by the Media Design Master’s programme and the Digital Pool at HEAD – Genève, with the support of HES-SO Genève. It explores new creative approaches through the construction of personalised datasets and the training of generative models for artistic and design practices. The presentation by the Datacraft team will be followed by a short workshop with Matteo Loglio (oio studio), who will share the recipe he developed for the project, an opportunity to learn how to curate a small dataset and train a playful model.
H12:30-13:30 Break
H13:30-15:30 Teaching Creativity in the Age of Algorithms
Panel discussion and presentations:
Alexia Mathieu and Douglas Stanley (HEAD – Genève)
Christopher Salter (ZHdK)
Rossana Quarta and Gianna Angelini (AANT)
Riccardo Baccani (NABA)
Moderation:
Adrian Notz
H15:30-16:30 Coffee Break
H16:00-16:45 Playable Cinema
Workshop by Douglas Stanley and Faustine Perillaud (HEAD – Genève)
Playable Cinema is a research project exploring how artificial intelligence can ride the invisible frontier between cinema history and interactive gameplay. Using machine learning to analyze hundreds of Westerns, it constructs a generative database where fragments of film history and the streams of live gameplay bleed into one another; where the joystick becomes an editing tool for an infinite Western fever dream looping through the ghosts of cinematic history.
H16:45-18:15 Machine Visual Culture: Recombination and Canon in Art History
Panel presentations and discussion:
Leonardo Impett (Biblioteca Hertziana, Cambridge University)
Stephanie Santschi (University of Zurich)
Moderation:
Valentine Bernasconi (University of Bologna)
H18:30-19:15 Creativity: From Dada to AI
Keynote by Adrian Christopher Notz (Indipendent curator and lecturer, ETH Zurich)
H19:15-20:00 Aperitivo
H20:00 Music and AI performance by Le Slie’s
With Fabrizio di Salvo, Roberto Maqueda, with Anna Wszeborowska (University of the Arts London)
Le Slie’s represents a newly invented instrument, conceptually grounded in the technical principles of the Leslie speaker and the new collaborative composition by Fabrizio Di Salvo and Roberto Maqueda, with the aim advancing compositional interactions through the integration of AI.
SAVE THE DATE
Registrieren Sie sich für diese Veranstaltung, um eine Erinnerungsnachricht zu erhalten
Cowpoke Cabin, Playable Cinema Project, IRAD, HEAD – Genève
Soyun Park, Datacraft, 2025
Le Slie’s © Fabrizio Di Salvo