Hans Ulrich Obrist (artistic director) — Serpentine Arts Technologies research program

2023

Artists: Hans Ulrich Obrist (artistic director), Ruth Catlow (adviser) · Year: 2023 · Medium: Institutional research program — commissions, essays, and exhibitions engaging AI, blockchain, and computational practice · Substrate: Serpentine institutional infrastructure; commissioning program for artists working with emerging technologies · Place: London, UK · Institution: Serpentine Galleries Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London since 2006 and one of the most consistently-programmatic contemporary-art curators of the 21st century, formalized the Serpentine Arts Technologies research program in 2023 as a sustained long-term institutional commitment to digital, AI, and emerging-technology art practice. The program, under director Kay Watson and with senior advisor Ruth Catlow, has funded research residencies, commissioned new work from digital-native artists, and produced curated publications and programming that specifically articulate the Serpentine's position as one of the major international institutions supporting emerging-technology art practice. The Serpentine Arts Technologies program matters in this archive for a specific institutional reason. Through the 2020s, the major international contemporary-art institutions (MoMA, Tate, Centre Pompidou, MoCA LA, Whitney, SFMOMA) have each developed specific positions on digital-art practice, with varying degrees of institutional commitment. The Serpentine's specifically-research-oriented approach — focusing on commissioning new work, supporting artist residencies, and publishing theoretical reflection rather than on blockbuster exhibitions or collection-acquisition primarily — represents one of the more institutionally-ambitious and intellectually-serious approaches to the field. Obrist's broader curatorial career has been characterized by specific commitment to conversation-with-artists as a method; his Interview Project (ongoing since the 1980s) is one of the largest individual curatorial-documentation projects in contemporary art. The Serpentine Arts Technologies program extends this conversational approach into the digital-art space, with sustained engagement with specifically emerging-technology artists that is more patient and more theoretically-informed than most institutional programming in the field. The program has continued to grow through 2024-25 and has produced commissioned work from artists including Refik Anadol, Lawrence Lek, Lauren Lee McCarthy, and dozens of others. It represents one of the major current institutional commitments to sustaining emerging-technology art practice. Lore Hans Ulrich Obrist's institutional position at the Serpentine has given him unusually extensive access to funding and institutional resources for digital-art programming; the specific 2023 formalization of the Arts Technologies program reflected both Obrist's personal commitment and the broader Serpentine institutional commitment from its leadership and board. Ruth Catlow, the program's senior advisor, brings specific expertise from her own prior leadership of the Furtherfield arts-technology collective, which has sustained a three-decade institutional engagement with digital-art practice in London. The combination of Obrist's mainstream-institutional reach and Catlow's specifically-digital-art-native expertise has produced a program with unusual methodological depth. Sources • Serpentine Galleries — Arts Technologies program (serpentinegalleries.org). • Obrist, Hans Ulrich — Ways of Curating (Faber, 2014). • Catlow, Ruth (ed.) — Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (Torque Editions, 2017).