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 in Rome. 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.

Rather than treating AI as a mere tool or opaque system, this initiative positions it as a site of tension and potential: between automation and invention, reproduction and transformation, bias and critical intervention. In doing so, it opens space to reflect on how we teach creativity, how we define artistic lineage, and how we imagine the future of art and design in the age of intelligent machines.

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)

H12:30-13:30 Break

H13:30-15:30 Teaching Creativity in the Age of Algorithms
Panel discussion and presentations by 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)

H16:45-18:15 Machine Visual Culture: Recombination and Canon in Art History
Panel presentations and discussion by Leonardo Impett (Biblioteca Hertziana, Cambridge University), Stephanie Santschi (University of Zurich)

Moderation: Valentina Bernasconi (University of Bologna)

H18:30-19:15 Creativity: From Dada to AI
Keynote by Adrian Christopher Notz (ETH Zurich)

H19:15-20:00 Aperitivo

H20:00 Music and AI performance by Le Slie’s
With Fabrizio di Salvo, Roberto Maqueda, and Anna Wszeborowska