> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.artwalkway.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Serpentine Opens a Narrow Door Into AI’s Infrastructure - URL: https://www.artwalkway.com/serpentine-ai-fellowship-artists-infrastructure/ - Published: 2026-09-03T12:00:05.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-03T12:00:04.000Z - Description: Serpentine’s Future Art Ecosystems R&D Fellowship gives Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Alice Bucknell, Auriea Harvey and Reina Mun a place inside conversations around AI, research, policy and public life. - Author: ART News - Tags: Art & Tech, Latest Art News, Serpentine, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Alice Bucknell, Auriea Harvey, Reina Mun Serpentine is not launching this fellowship because artists need another place to use artificial intelligence. They already have those places. The harder problem is that AI is being built elsewhere, at a speed and scale most cultural institutions cannot match. Its models, interfaces, metrics and business incentives are forming inside laboratories, companies, product teams, platforms, policy rooms and investment structures before they arrive as public habits. By the time culture is asked to respond, much of the system may already be in place. That is the condition behind Serpentine’s Future Art Ecosystems R&D Fellowship. The programme names Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Alice Bucknell, Auriea Harvey and Reina Mun as its inaugural fellows, selected from an international open call that drew close to 1,000 applications. Over six months, they will research how advances in AI are reshaping cultural production, institutions and public life. The appointment of four fellows is the news. The point of entry is the story. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/67/ce6755e5-3cd4-455d-bb45-9007241988ef/content/images/2026/09/AliceBucknell_Headshot.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/67/ce6755e5-3cd4-455d-bb45-9007241988ef/content/images/2026/09/AlfredoSalazarCaro_Headshot.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/67/ce6755e5-3cd4-455d-bb45-9007241988ef/content/images/2026/09/ReinaMun_Headshot.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/67/ce6755e5-3cd4-455d-bb45-9007241988ef/content/images/2026/09/AurieaHarvey_Headshot.jpg) Portraits of the inaugural Serpentine Future Art Ecosystems R&D Fellows: Alice Bucknell, Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Reina Mun and Auriea Harvey. *Images courtesy of Serpentine.* Serpentine has framed the fellowship through research and development rather than finished artwork alone. It connects creative inquiry with industry, academia and policy, and sits within Future Art Ecosystems, the institution’s longer programme around art, advanced technologies and cultural infrastructure. Serpentine is unusually placed for that experiment because it has spent years treating art and advanced technologies not as a digital-programming department, but as a research and convening structure. Its role here is not only to exhibit technological art. It is to gather artists, technologists, funders, policy thinkers and publics around questions that no single sector can answer alone. That structure matters because the cultural field often meets technology late. A tool appears. A platform spreads. A model becomes ordinary. People begin using it to write, search, design, teach, hire, archive or make images before they fully understand the choices built into it. Artists are then invited to experiment with it, critique it, humanise it or make its effects visible. Museums host conversations after the technology has already entered work, education, images, language, search, memory and attention. The fellowship tries to move that meeting earlier. It does not place artists in control of AI. Four fellows cannot balance the power of the technology sector, capital markets, state policy or platform infrastructure. A six-month programme will not redirect the industrial development of artificial intelligence. Its significance is narrower. It creates a small, structured opening before the terms are fully settled. That opening can be seen in the projects themselves. Alice Bucknell’s research into world models turns toward AI systems that simulate environments and predict outcomes. The question is not only what such systems can calculate, but what they leave out when they decide what a world is. Alfredo Salazar-Caro’s project brings emerging technologies into relation with ancestral knowledge systems, XR, computational design and regenerative futures. The future, in this frame, is not imagined only through the newness claimed by technology, but through older forms of ecological and cultural intelligence that advanced systems often ignore. Auriea Harvey’s research follows the figure as it moves between digital craft, AI systems, files, fabrication and place. A form may be authored in one location, transmitted as data and realised differently elsewhere. The object changes, but so do authorship, craft and agency. Reina Mun turns to the promise of enhancement. AI systems increasingly arrive with claims of better productivity, creativity, wellbeing and assistance. But enhancement is not neutral. Someone has to define what improvement means, who benefits from it and how its effects are measured. Together, the projects move beyond the narrow image of AI art as prompt, output or visual effect. They treat AI as a condition shaping worlds, bodies, knowledge, authorship, care, productivity and public agency. That is why the fellowship is more interesting than a technology programme attached to a museum. It asks whether artistic research can enter the systems around AI before those systems become too settled to question. But the same structure that gives the fellowship force also gives it risk. The jury brings together artists, technology figures, economists, writers and institutional leaders. That cross-sector table gives the programme reach. It also makes the imbalance visible. Industry, philanthropy, policy and artistic research do not enter the room with equal power. Nearness is not the same as influence. This is the narrow line Serpentine has to hold. Artistic research can become a values layer placed on top of technological development: a way to make systems appear more imaginative, ethical or publicly engaged without altering their deeper incentives. Artists can be brought close enough to decorate the future, but not close enough to disturb its operating logic. The fellowship matters only if it resists that role. Its promise is not that art will govern AI. That would be too large a claim. Its promise is that artists may be able to expose where governance has already begun: inside a model, a metric, a simulation, an interface, a funding structure, a claim about enhancement, or a decision about whose knowledge belongs in the future. That is a smaller claim, but a more serious one. Serpentine’s Future Art Ecosystems work has long argued that cultural institutions need new forms of infrastructure around advanced technologies: production capability, legal understanding, research formats, policy contact, public accountability and new ways of measuring value. The fellowship gives that argument a practical test. A report can name the gap. A fellowship can show how narrow the entrance is. The future of AI will not be decided by four fellows. But Serpentine’s programme points to a problem cultural institutions can no longer avoid: whether artists can enter early enough to make technological assumptions visible while they can still be argued over. © ART Walkway. All Rights Reserved.