THE ANNUAL COMPANY OF IDEAS FORUMS
Since 2008, Company of Ideas Forums have explored the biggest issues in art. Each annual event tackles a major philosophical question about the meaning, function and value of visual art in a debate format. Speakers are drawn from all corners of intellectual and creative life. Art historians, philosophers, political and literary theorists, novelists, musicians, artists and environmentalists are asked to deliver intelligent and accessible papers that present clear positions. Students and other delegates are given formal space to engage with these big ideas, leading to interdisciplinary and inter-generational debate about matters of profound and enduring importance.
2025 Company of Ideas Forum
The Art and the Sacred
Art provides a means to experience the sacred beyond prescriptive narrative
Jeffrey Rubinoff
The history of art is inseparable from the history of religion. These two fundamental human practices have been connected for tens of thousands of years. They may even have emerged together during prehistory, when – as far as we know – objects and images were believed to possess talismanic force and used to propitiate or repel powerful spirits.
As spiritual beliefs became more organised in the ancient world, artists created effigies of their gods and deities, and converted sacred stories into pictures. For some, images were valuable pedagogical tools – Pope Gregory famously called them ‘bibles for the illiterate’ – but others, fearing the risks of idolatry, destroyed vast quantities of religious imagery in Europe and the Middle East.
As western societies secularised, connections between art and religion weakened. But from the nineteenth century onwards, the art world increasingly appropriated many of its effects. From Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky to Bill Viola and Marina Abramovic, many modern artists aspired – often explicitly – to create numinous or transcendental works provoking quasi-religious experiences.
At this year’s Forum we will explore the old and complex relationship between art and sacred, with conversations ranging throughout history and across the world. Over two stimulating days delegates will interrogate a cluster of related questions, including: How has art influenced the evolution of religion and spirituality? Can non-religious art be sacred? And how do western and non-western traditions compare?
2025 Forum Proceedings
Proceedings of past Forums
Presentation Abstracts and Delegate Bios
Abstracts and Bios – 2025 Company of Ideas on Art and the Sacred
Abstracts
Prof. April Nowell
Ice Age art: where it all began
Around 50,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic, humans began to paint images of animals, enigmatic symbols and even people on cave walls. For over a century, researchers have been interested in the meanings of these images and how they were created. Drawing on examples from Australia, Indonesian and Europe, this talk will discuss current research in Ice Age art and its implications for our understanding of what it means to be human. In particular, it will address what “art” means in a Paleolithic context and the possible relationship between art and ritual during this period.
Prof. Catherine Harding
Delighting in the Sacred: Medieval Reliquaries, Materials and Human Perception
One of the most under-studied aspects of medieval art production is the obvious delight that artists and artisans took in working their materials into powerful forms that were placed in very specific, highly charged ecclesiastical spaces. Medieval reliquaries were designed to hold many strange and wonderful materials such as blood, dust, stones, bits of textile fibers, bones, even breast milk – with the relic container then elevating these materials into something charged with the sacred. The sculpted forms of the reliquaries demonstrate a unique translation of holy meaning into forms that inspire and delight in the interplay of complex shapes placed in a particular environment. This paper will examine the union of space, form and materials in the medieval reliquary, paying homage to the sculptural vision of Jeffrey Rubinoff, as we explore the human need to create meaningful structures in response to our shared lived experience.
Dr Rebecca Marks
William Blake’s sacred art
William Blake (1757–1827) is a giant of British Romantic poetry, often anthologised alongside the likes of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley. However, Blake was not just a poet, but instead a poet-painter. Blake has long been treated as a literary figure; however, recent scholarship has instead sought to reframe Blake as an artist and engraver. Blake’s work has defied categorisation precisely because it invokes both words and images, and it does so for profoundly spiritual reasons. This talk explains how Blake’s visual work offers a radical, revolutionary, and alternative form of sacred art. Touching on his Vision of the Last Judgment and The Book of Urizen, I consider how Blake reworks Christian iconography into critiques of organised religion and moral law. More broadly, I consider how Blake’s belief in the divine power of the imagination might usefully come to bear in 2025. I argue that in a world where human creativity is under threat from automation, algorithmic thinking, and artificial intelligence, Blake’s theory of art is now more relevant than ever.
Symeon van Donkelaar
Seeing Earth and Spirit through Eastern Icons
Iconography is a liturgical art form that perceives God through the medium of beauty. This beauty is revealed in its theology, its creation, and its creative visual expression. Looking together at various examples of both portrait and festival icons from Symeon’s Conestoga Icons—such as Jesus Christ the Almighty, Mary the Guide, The Fiery Furnace, and The Nativity of Jesus Christ, each of these three elements of the beautiful will be explored within the context of its traditional iconographic roots inspired in modern Canada.
Ambreen Shehzad Hussaini
From Text to Transcendence: The “Sacred” in Rasheed Butt’s Calligraphic Art
This paper examines how sacredness is not merely represented through art but is actively constituted through intellectual and aesthetic engagement, focusing on the inquiry-based calligraphic practice of renowned Pakistani artist Rasheed Butt. Drawing on both scholarly research and personal experience as an art practitioner, I argue that sacredness emerges through the intentional interplay between belief, intellect (ʿaql), and artistic form. In Islamic traditions,ʿaql is understood not simply as a rational faculty, but as a deeper ontological capacity—one that enables the human mind to engage with the unseen (ghayb) and the metaphysical.
Rasheed Butt’s calligraphy exemplifies what I describe as a form of sacred aesthetics—a mode of artistic creation that both conceals and reveals, inviting the viewer into an experience of taḥqīq (verification and realization of knowledge). His works often obscure Qur’anic text in visually intricate compositions that require slow, contemplative engagement. This deliberate illusion fosters an intellectual and spiritual relationship with the artwork, prompting reflection not only on the text but also on the self.
Rather than approaching Islamic calligraphy solely through taxonomical or art historical frameworks, this paper emphasizes process, intention, and viewer response. It proposes that sacred art is not defined by content alone, but by the capacity of the artwork to activate deeper levels of perception, contemplation, and moral self-cultivation. In doing so, the paper reframes sacredness as a relational and experiential phenomenon—made tangible through aesthetic form and inner inquiry.
Dr David Collins
The Secular Sacred and Transcendental Style in Art
While it’s easy to associate the notion of the sacred in art with overtly religious themes, I will argue there is a sense of ‘sacredness’ that is not necessarily religious or spiritual – one based on uniqueness and non-fungibility – in which all art is sacred. I will also consider how the notion of transcendental style in film proposed by Paul Schrader, which explains how an artform like cinema that is based in the concrete and material (in the sense that, outside animation and barring digital effects, every shot has to be a photographic image of a real physical space or object) can be used to express a sense of the divine, might be applied to artforms beyond cinema and how it might be used to express a non-religious – or ‘secular’ – kind of transcendence.
Anna O’Meara
Desacralizing the Word of God: The Relationship Between Style and Concept in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord, while anti-religious and anti-authoritarian, curiously referenced French bishop and theologian, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet on many occasions, including within the film Society of the Spectacle (1972). In reading notes, Debord carefully analyzes Bossuet’s French translation of the Bible, including passages regarding speculum or “spectacle” (Corinthians 1:13). While Bossuet interpreted the Tower of Babel as a reason to support monarchism, Debord and an influence, Georges Gusdorf, interpreted Babel as a myth explaining how language is relative, diverse, and detached from the divine. Gusdorf took Bossuet’s poeticism as an example of an awareness of this detachment. Bossuet, argued Gusdorf, was a “poet-prophet” who allowed individual literary style to diversify and relativize rather than prescribing to an idealized and universal Word of God. The lack of any Word of God or Platonic ideal meant that language was material; a materiality that did not render language empirically understandable, but rather historically and personally subjective. Such materiality and subjectivity are not simply conceptual, but they can also be expressed stylistically. Debord’s poetic curation of images and words investigates multiplicity of meanings in an ephemeral adventure into language, symbols, and communication. Often, double meanings are implied discretely or suggested only in personal notes and letters. The interplay between Debord’s style and concept of language at times “desacralizes” the Word, to use Gusdorf’s term, and, at other times, invokes references to the Word of God and “magic words” as a means of emphasizing the power of film; a power that Debord saw as a tool for authoritarianism.
Paul Alexander
Galatea – Music-Consciousness and the Theatre of Fire
“Galatea” is a new work for string quartet, composed by Paul Alexander in April 2025 and commissioned by the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park as part of the composer’s creative residency this year. The Borealis String Quartet will give the world premiere of “Galatea” in two different versions at the Sculpture Park on July 30 and 31. This talk and audio demonstration by the composer will focus on the work’s melodic expression and on structural elements that explore spiritual realms of low, middle, and high. The presentation will also examine ambiguous or liminal aspects of consciousness and life, as well as a possible interplay between sculpture and music at the JRSP inspired by Ovid’s story of Galatea. Additionally, it will consider expressions of spiritual longing, emotional discord, resolution, and self-compassion in this and related music. The talk will also introduce the concept of the Theatre of Fire-a new mode of music performance simultaneously related the sacred and scientific in the natural world and involving both musicians and members of the audience. This idea is derived from observations of past spiritual or ritualized interconnections between humanity and nature, some of which may have been mediated through music in prehistory.
Scott Massey
Art, Science, Awe: Exploring Notions of the Secular Sacred
The history of astronomical sciences has been one of discovering a continuously diminishing pre-eminence of our place in the universe. Our old gods have grown equally insignificant. Religion as a whole is an essentially contested concept covering a range of socio-cultural practices such as morals, beliefs, prophecies, ethics and worldviews. Another word for worldview is cosmology. Every society has a cosmology, and often many in conflict at any given time. The cosmology I ascribe to, and that my artwork seeks to understand and reflect is that of science, particularly astro- and quantum- physics. But I am not a physicist, I am an artist, and so there remains also the question of awe, of the spiritual.
For a great many scientists, these domains are not absent from their work. Einstein was decidedly spiritual, though pledged allegiance to no god: “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research” he once said. Carl Sagan was also deeply spiritual, filled with awe at the discoveries of modern astronomy. He sought to “synthesize the spiritual perspectives…derived from the revelations of science.”
My own work likewise seeks to discover, assimilate and synthesize the revelations of science through the realms of art. As director James Cox asks: “Can non-religious art be sacred?” Not only do I believe it can, I believe it can bring forth the conditions by which we, the viewers, might grasp, if even for a moment, something numinous in this thing we call existence. This talk will trace these ideas through astrophysics and the resulting cosmological paradigms that inform our current understanding, while also relating this wondrous cosmology through the perspectives of art.
Speaker Biographies
Prof. April Nowell
April Nowell is a Paleolithic archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada. She received her BA from McGill University (Montreal, Canada) and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, USA). She directs an international team of researchers in the excavation of Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites in Jordan and collaborates with colleagues on the study of cave art in Australia. She and her colleagues working in Jordan published the world’s oldest identifiable blood on stone tools, demonstrating that 300,000 years ago early humans ate a range of animals from duck to rhinoceros. She is known for her publications on Paleolithic art, cognitive archaeology, the evolutionary basis for storytelling, Neanderthals, the archaeology of children and the relationship between science, pop culture, and the media. Her work has been covered by more than 200 outlets including Nature Briefings, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist, and National Public Radio. Her team’s blood residue work was named one of Time Magazine’s top 100 discoveries and her co-authored research on discerning puberty status in Ice Age teens was named one of 2024’s Top Stories in Human Evolution. She often serves as a Smithsonian Journey’s expert on their trips to visit the prehistoric painted caves of France and Spain. She is the co-editor of multiple volumes including Archaeology of Night: Life After Dark in the Ancient World and the author of the book Growing Up in the Ice Age, winner of the 2023 European Association of Archaeologists Book Prize. Watch her in episode 5 of the NOVA series Ancient Earth (2023) and in the CBC documentary Little Sapiens (2024), available on CBC Gem.
Prof. Catherine Harding
Catherine Harding is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Victoria. She researches the sacred materiality of objects in late medieval Italy, especially in Orvieto, Italy. She has published articles on late medieval Italy, and a shorter book on the Chapel of the Corporal at Orvieto Cathedral. Her other research interests include late medieval cosmographical objects and manuscripts that deal with encyclopedic world frameworks. She is also the Associate Dean Academic in the Faculty of Fine Arts.
Symeon van Donkelaar
Symeon has been working as a liturgical artist for over 30 years. While he is best known for his work as an iconographer, when the occasion merits, he also teaches, draws, builds, writes, and walks the land. A love of simple beauty naturally tunes his hand and eye. This makes his perception of the world around him unique; from it, he has cultivated a sense of wonder and curiosity. Drawing from his Catholic faith, his family, and the land, he paints the cosmos participating in the stories, traditions and presence of Jesus Christ.
Rebecca Marks
Rebecca Marks recently completed a PhD at the University of Cambridge on William Blake’s reception of Michelangelo. Her work has been published in The British Art Journal and The Cambridge Quarterly. A monograph based on her thesis is in development. Currently, Rebecca works as an editorial consultant and lecturer, and writes a weekly arts newsletter, The Culture Dump.
Ambreen Shehzad Hussaini
Ambreen S. Hussaini is a talib-e-ilm, which in her culture means a seeker of knowledge and truth. She has a profound interest in the contemplative and meditative capacity of Arabic Qur’anic calligraphy, utilizing this art form to reflect upon and connect with something beyond her own physical being. She is a doctoral candidate within the Art History and Visual Studies Department at the University of Victoria, Canada. With a rich academic background, she completed a Master of Arts in Islamic Studies from the University of Karachi, followed by a Master of Arts in Muslim Cultures from the Aga Khan University – Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations in the UK. Additionally, she holds a diploma in Arabic Language from the Society for the Promotion of Arabic Language, Pakistan, along with qualifications in Fine Arts from the Karachi School of Arts and Diploma in Multimedia from Arena Multimedia.
Her current research delves into the contemporary artistic expressions of the Qur’an, specifically exploring how contemporary Pakistani artists interpret the Word of God through their artistic endeavors. Her doctoral work concentrates on the societal significance of the Qur’anic text in Pakistan. With a keen focus on the intersection of art, religion, and culture, her scholarly pursuits contribute to a deeper understanding of the contemporary cultural landscape of Pakistan and the multifaceted ways in which the Qur’anic text is interpreted and integrated into artistic expressions. As she enters her final year and prepares to defend her thesis, Ambreen’s diligent research promises to offer valuable insights into the intricate relationships between faith, creativity, and social dynamics.
David Collins
David Collins is the Rubinoff Early Career Research Fellow in Art as a Source of Knowledge at Churchill College, Cambridge. His work is primarily in the area of philosophical aesthetics, where he is especially interested in the concept of artistic expression and questions concerning the value and importance of art, with side interests in ethics and philosophy of mind. Coming to philosophy from a background in film and theatre as both a practitioner and teacher, he holds a PhD in philosophy from McGill University and was a postdoctoral researcher in the faculty of philosophy at the University of Oxford before his current position in Cambridge.
Anna o’Meara
Anna O’Meara is a Ph.D. Candidate and Jeffrey Rubinoff Fellow in Art as a Source of Knowledge in Art History & Visual Studies at the University of Victoria. Her dissertation, titled “Spectacle as World: Situationist Theories on the World of Images,” explores theories by the Situationist International about how image-dominated postwar culture manipulates perception of the world. In 2025, O’Meara will visit the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library through a Jackson Brothers Fellowship from Yale University.
Paul Alexander
Paul Alexander is a classical concert and intercultural music composer, orchestrator, multimedia producer, and music educator based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Originally from the UK, he composes classical concert music-including solo, chamber, and orchestral works-as well as music for multicultural dance productions and for the field of intercultural music education. His concert music has been performed by orchestras and chamber ensembles in Europe, Canada, the United States, Cuba, and Africa. Paul’s musical style centres on the assertion that in today’s world melody is avant-garde, rhythm is our passion, the audience matters, and so does the ‘story.’ Recent projects have focused on themes of social and environmental relevance, including new works for the Borealis String Quartet and violin soloist Patricia Shih. In 2025, Paul is serving as composer-in-residence at the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Garden on Hornby Island, British Columbia. Information about his music, as well as scores and parts for purchase or rental, will soon be available at https://www.alexandermusicpublishing.com/. Recordings and demos, including works in progress, can be heard at soundcloud.com/paulalexandersmusic.
Scott Massey
Scott Massey is an artist based in Vancouver. He graduated from the photography program at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Massey’s work typically explores the confluence of art and science whereby he accentuates and amplifies natural phenomena, often heightened through artificial means or via slight manipulations. Light as a medium figures heavily in his work, which derives out of research into areas of quantum physics, cosmology, astronomy, and other scientific disciplines. Upcoming and recent solo exhibitions include Light Adjustments, Dazibao, Montreal, 2015; The Day Breaks Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto, 2015; Let’s Reach c Together, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver, 2013; Topologies and Limits, CSA Space, Vancouver, 2011; and Swan Song, Luminato Box, Toronto, 2009. His work has also been included in group shows in Canada and abroad at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark, 2013; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2012; the Columbus College of Art & Design, Ohio, 2007; and CONTACT Photography Festival, Toronto, 2007.
2024 Company of Ideas Forum
On Art and Artificial Intelligence
Watch the 2024 Forum on YouTube →
I think of art, as its most significant, as a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it
—Marshall McLuhan, Mamoulian Collection: Vol. 172, no. 1032 (Apr. 1936)
Art and technology have been intertwined for hundreds of years. From the printing press and the camera obscura to photography and cinema, artists have always sought new ways to create and disseminate their images. The digital revolution has only intensified this process. Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of new platforms for making, showing and selling art, including robotics and 3D printing, virtual and augmented realities. Of all these rapidly evolving technologies, none has wider implications than Artificial Intelligence.
In the last few years AI has gone from being a fringe fantasy to an inescapable reality. Its impact on visual art has proved particularly significant. A growing number of artists are now using AI systems to generate and manipulate increasingly sophisticated images, some of which have met with great critical and commercial success. But the rise of AI also raises profound questions about the nature and future of art itself.
Art-making has long been considered an inherently human act, grounded in an individual’s identity and morality. Jeffrey Rubinoff, whose ideas are the genesis of all of our events, famously defined art as a ‘map of the human soul’ and ‘an act of will in accord with a mature conscience’. How do such assumptions fare in the AI age?
At this year’s Forum, we will explore the complex and already controversial relationship between visual art and AI. Over two days, delegates will interrogate a cluster of related questions: are new algorithmic platforms genuinely transforming the basis of creativity? Will they undermine or empower artists? And how might they change the history and future of art?
Presentation Abstracts and Delegate Bios
Abstracts and Bios – 2024 Company of Ideas on Art and AI
Abstracts
Anthony Cross
Tool, Collaborator, or Participant: On AI Art and Artistic Agency
The past few years have seen an explosion in AI-generated art. AI image generation tools such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are now capable of generating sophisticated and compelling images from simple text prompts. In this paper, I take it as a given that these image generation tools can be used for artmaking; I focus specifically on how artists might make use of them to create art. Most existing discourse surrounding AI art falls under what I call the production model: artists rely on AI image generators either as tools or as collaborators in the production of an artistically significant output. It is this output—an image, say—which is the artwork, and which is the focus of our appreciation. I introduce an alternative way of thinking of AI art, which I refer to as the exploration model. According to this model, artists instead relate to AI as a participant: artists create a space for interaction with the AI algorithm by way of their prompts, thereby allowing them to explore the way that the algorithm “sees” and “represents.” AI art practiced in this fashion bears a striking resemblance to contemporary conceptual and participatory art: the artwork is not so much the output—the resulting images—as it is the artist’s structuring an interaction with the AI algorithm. I argue in conclusion that which model of AI art we adopt will have significant implications for our understanding and appreciation of AI art, with implications for the appreciation of style in AI art; concerns about novelty and originality; and the assignment of artistic credit and copyright.
Kate Armstrong
Provocations
Kate Armstrong will present speculative insights about Generative AI and reflect on possible futures arising from these technologies with regard to art, design, and creative practice. For example, what happens to art in a world where cultural experiences are individual to each person? What kind of aesthetic evolution happens when AI-altered images flood the internet to the extent that they become a new layer of training data for next generation AIs? How might communities, cultural organizations, or artists work together to build different kinds of datasets toward self-empowerment? Themes such as individualized or decentered forms, next-generation iteration, model collapse, alternative datasets, and radical multimodality will be explored in order to chart the paradigm shifts that confront us as we navigate AI-enabled artistic production.
Dominic Lopes
Real Art and Art in Reality+
Smart thinking about new technologies in art should take care not to stray too far from the details of their workings. Speculative philosophy of photography made seriously wrong predictions. The most promising work on AI and art attends to what AI actually is and how we actually use it. However, some anxieties about AI art stem from speculation. Taken in their own terms, the anxieties are misplaced. I argue that there is no significant difference between art in our world and art in the kind of simulated worlds described by David Chalmers. The reasons why this is the case also imply that there is no significant difference between art in our world and what would be bits of sim-art injected into our world. Since there are differences, the bigger lesson is one about what is significant.
Aidan Meller
Ai-Da Robot: the future of art?
This talk will explore the journey of Ai-Da, the world’s first ultra-realistic artist robot. Created in 2019, Ai-Da is a sophisticated robot, integrating AI algorithms and deep learning to create works of art, challenging our perceptions of creativity and the role of technology in the arts. As we embrace the start of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, what is creativity if AI can impinge on this aspect of human culture? The presentation will trace Ai-Da’s international trajectory, highlighting her events and exhibitions, including her engagement with initiatives like the United Nations ‘AI for Good’ Global Summit, and her addresses at the House of Lords and the Oxford Union. Additionally, we will examine her art work at the V&A, Tate, Design Museum and during the Venice Biennale. This talk aims to shed light on how Ai-Da’s art stimulates crucial discussions on the evolving intersection of technology and creativity, offering insights into the future of artistic expression in the age of artificial intelligence.
Lucy Seal
Ai-Da, AI and the Avant-Garde
Ai-Da, the artist robot, has both performative and philosophical connections to Dada and the Avant-Garde movements. Internationally recognised, Ai-Da has sparked controversy by claiming the role of an artist, a position traditionally reserved for humans. On these contested grounds, Ai-Da serves as both artist and artwork, challenging societal categories in a manner reminiscent of the Dada controversies of the early twentieth century. Just as Duchamp questioned the nature of ‘art,’ Ai-Da questions the nature of ‘the artist.’ This talk will highlight some of Ai-Da’s different AI capabilities, including Neural Networks, Evolutionary Algorithms, and Language Models. It will explore how Ai-Da’s ability to break traditional boundaries through her AI capabilities mirrors our evolving society, where AI is becoming increasingly dominant. Ai-Da, as a humanoid robot, exemplifies how AI is transforming not only the digital realm but also redefining the biological human experience.
Michael Tippett
Maximum Perception
Michael Tippett will present his latest film, *Maximum Perception*, which showcases the potential of new AI-powered tools that generate audio, images, and video for filmmaking. The film centers on an inventor of augmented reality technology and delves into the philosophical, ethical, and technical questions this new technology introduces. Described as a prototype rather than a completed work, *Maximum Perception* demonstrates what is possible with today’s AI technology. The presentation will include a screening of part of the film, followed by an open discussion on the technology’s impact on film and video, and its potential to disrupt modern filmmaking practices and the business of film in general.
Speaker Biographies
Prof. Anthony Cross, Texas State University
Anthony Cross is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University. His research focuses on the normative significance of relationships with artworks and cultural objects. He also has research interests at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of technology: recent work has explored the impact of the internet and emerging technologies on our artistic practices—including work on the nature and value of Internet memes; the significance of NFTs; and the use of AI in artistic production.
Kate Armstrong, Emily Carr University of Art & Design
Kate Armstrong is a writer, artist, and curator who has dedicated two decades to exploring the nexus of art and technology. Renowned as a pioneer in generative literature, her work spans generative text and image systems, speculative fiction, blockchain text-poetry, video, dynamic graphic novels, and location-aware fiction, among other conceptually driven hybrid forms. She has exhibited her work internationally at the Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, Lithuania), Psy-Geo-Conflux (New York), Akbank Sanat (Istanbul, Turkey), and was included in Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art 1905–2016 at the Whitney Museum. Armstrong’s artworks are held in collections including Rhizome, the Rose Goldsen Archive at Cornell University, and the Library of the Printed Web. She was part of Poeme Objkt Subjkt curated by the Verseverse for L’Avant Gallerie Vossen in Paris, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Lumen Prize in Crypto Art. As a curator, she has produced exhibitions, events, and publications in contemporary art and technology internationally. Armstrong chairs the Acquisitions Committee at the Vancouver Art Gallery and is the Director of Living Labs at Emily Carr University of Art & Design, where she leads the research initiative AI Futures for Art and Design.
Prof. Dominic McIver Lopes, University of British Columbia
Dominic Lopes is University Killam Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. A member of the UBC aesthetics group, he has worked on pictorial representation; the aesthetic and epistemic value of pictures, including scientific images; theories of art and its value; the ontology of art; computer art and new art forms; aesthetic value; and the history of aesthetics in Europe and Asia.
Lopes’s most recent books are an edition of Bernard Bolzano’s Essays on Beauty and the Arts, published by Hackett, The Geography of Taste with Samantha Matherne, Mohan Matthen, and Bence Nanay, now available open access from Oxford University Press, and Aesthetic Injustice, which will be published by Oxford University Press in October. His next project is a book entitled Pluralism and Its Discontents: Episodes in the History of Aesthetics.
Lopes is past chair of the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association, past president of the Canadian Philosophical Association and the American Society for Aesthetics, associate editor of Ergo, and a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics, Cognitive Semiotics, and Imaginations.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has been a Canada Council Killam Research Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the National Humanities Center, Distinguished Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, and Leverhulme Visiting Research Professor at the University of Warwick. He has won two teaching awards, a Philosophical Quarterly essay prize, a Canadian Philosophy Association essay prize, the American Society for Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize, the Killam Research Prize, and the APA’s Quinn Prize, given for “service to philosophy and philosophers”.
Aidan Meller
Aidan Meller is the Director of the Ai-Da Robot Studios, and has over 27 years’ experience in the art world. It was while reading and seeing how technology is disrupting large sections of society that he realized the need to discuss these shifts. Meller eventually narrowed down on AI and robotics and devised Ai-Da as an entity that would be able to comment on emerging social and technological trends. Ai-Da has since traveled the world and exhibited in several major museums, such as the V&A, Tate, Barbican, Design Museum, and during the Venice Biennale. Meller says: “I believe the greatest artists in history grappled with their period of time, and both celebrated and questioned society’s shifts. Ai-Da Robot is the artist today to discuss the current developments in technology and the unfolding legacies.”
Lucy Seal
Lucy Seal is the Researcher for the Ai-Da Robot project. Graduating from the University of Oxford, her interests have focused on Dada and the Avant Garde. She has traveled internationally with Ai-Da, including trips to the United Nations’ ‘AI for Good’ initiative, Ai-Da’s pavilion during the Venice Biennale, and the pyramids in Egypt. She has spoken about Ai-Da’s poetry on BBC Radio Three and written about Ai-Da’s art for The Art Newspaper.
Michael Tippett
Michael Tippett is an Emmy-nominated technology professional with nearly two decades of experience in the industry. He has founded multiple technology companies in New York and Vancouver, including NowPublic, the largest citizen journalism network in the world. He also led GrowLab, a technology incubator, and Hootsuite Labs, driving innovation and nurturing startups. A graduate in Philosophy from Queen’s University and an alumnus of The Vancouver Film School, Michael combines analytical thinking with creative storytelling. His current work focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence with film and video.
Student Delegates
Student sessions will take place on both afternoons of the Forum.
Participating students are required to prepare a 10-15 minute presentation. Each set of presentations will be followed by questions and discussion.
Students can choose to talk about any topic, but are required to directly address one or more of the following questions:
- How does AI change of challenge the notion of artistic creation?
- What are the creative and/or socially transformative possibilities of AI?
- How might AI transform our experience and understanding of the history of art and culture?
Student speakers are encouraged, where possible, to make reference to what they have seen, read or heard at the JRSP.