Launched in 2020, Future Art Ecosystems (FAE) is an annual strategic briefing that provides concepts, references, language and arguments that can be integrated into operational agendas for 21st century cultural infrastructure: the systems that support the production, distribution and financialisation of art and advanced technologies as a whole, and respond to a broader societal agenda. FAE was conceptualised in collaboration with Rival Strategy. 

The inaugural issue – Future Art Ecosystems 1: Art x Advanced Technologies (FAE1) — addresses the implications of artistic engagements with advanced technologies in terms of the infrastructural redesign that they enable within and in parallel to existing art ecosystems. Future Art Ecosystems 2: Art x Metaverse (FAE2) considers how the perception, experience and production of art are transforming with the advent of the metaverse, — an always-online, persistent, spatial ‘second’ world and an emerging internet megastructure. Future Art Ecosystems 3: Art x Building Hybrid Worlds (FAE3) will be released in September 2022, bringing into focus the gaps and opportunities for devising mission-driven investment metrics to drive the development of new hybrid organisational systems that straddle art, web3 technologies and delivery of public value.

The Arts Technologies programme at Serpentine proposes critical and interdisciplinary perspectives on advanced technologies through artistic interventions, challenging and reshaping the role that technologies can play in culture and society.

The foundation of the Arts Technologies programme is located in an evolving R&D Platform that nurtures innovation for future art ecologies by securing a crucial institutional space for pragmatic interventions and necessary risk-taking at the intersection of art, science and technology. This is achieved through dedicated research labs (Blockchain Lab, Creative AI Lab, Legal Lab, Synthetic Ecologies Lab), orientation and knowledge-sharing with the wider sector through Future Art Ecosystems, and co-facilitation of a national Creative R&D Working Group. Tune in to Arts Technologies on Twitch.