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We are pleased to announce the Artistic Intelligence COST Action General Meeting 2026, hosted by the Faculty of Fine Arts of Pontevedra on the 26th and 27th of February. As our Action continues to grow, this two-day gathering serves as a touchpoint for aligning on our research objectives, sharing preliminary findings, and fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations to advance Artistic Intelligence across the research area and cultural sectors. The program will include keynote lectures, selected communications and workshops. The Faculty of Fine Arts Pontevedra is located on the CREA Campus of the University of Vigo, a hub where creativity is understood as the primary drive of knowledge across disciplines. We look forward to welcoming you to a space where perplexity, ideas, and research practices converge in unpredictable ways. We warmly encourage all members to participate and contribute to this important stage of our collective work. We look forward to seeing you in the historic city of Pontevedra. Read the Welcome Guide for COST Action GuestsImage
Meeting Focus and Working Group GoalsWG1 – ADAPTATION STRATEGIESWG1 focuses on how AI-related technologies are shaping artistic practices, research methods, and creative institutions, and how artistic and practice-based research can critically inform the development, evaluation, and governance of AI systems. The group provides a collaborative space for interdisciplinary exchange, experimentation, and the development of shared conceptual and methodological frameworks.
For this call, WG1 has identified two strategic projects:Project 1: Generative AI, Authorship, and Trust As boundaries between human and machine creation blur, concerns around authenticity, unfair advantage, and authorship have intensified. Systems designed to verify or police creative origin often disproportionately affect marginalised creators, turning doubt into a mechanism of exclusion. This project reframes artistic authorship not as a human–machine binary, but as a social relation shaped by trust, legitimacy, and unequal access across cultural, linguistic, geographic, and institutional contexts. The project will focus on boundary cases and hybrid practices, developing pathways for creators to claim AI-assisted or hybrid authorship without stigma, while addressing risks of wrongful detection. Activities will include the co-creation of a policy brief on Generative AI, Authorship, and the Arts (using a Delphi method), the development of joint grant applications (Horizon Europe Cluster 2 / Creative Europe), and the exploration of speculative narrative formats (e.g. Unverified, working title) to examine the human consequences of algorithmic verification in cultural production.
This project will systematically map how AI is used across European arts universities and cultural institutions, with a clear distinction between Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) practices. The aim is to build a shared understanding of AI maturity, diversity of use, and institutional strategies within artistic education, research, and cultural production. The project will adapt existing AI maturity models for artistic and practice-based research contexts, with particular attention to ethical, aesthetic, and organisational dimensions. The resulting mapping will generate comparative insights across institutions and produce policy-relevant findings that feed directly into WG4, supporting evidence-based dialogue on AI and European cultural policy. WG2 – COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCIESPolylocality is one of the guiding terms of collective intelligences. Complex systems—from ecosystems to communities to research processes—are inherently polylocal. They consist of multiple independent or autonomous locals, each with distinct internal coherence. These local modalities adapt and interact without collapsing into universal frameworks. This workshop of WG2 investigates the hypothesis that artistic intelligence operates by activating and preserving polylocal structures while enabling meaningful interaction across locals and beyond. Scientific intelligence, in contrast, often succeeds by creating universal frameworks that deliberately abstract away from local particularity. These particular questions will be addressed: Have you encountered or worked with the concept of polylocality in the context of a research project, e.g. in film and cultural studies? Do you have experience with related concepts, such as pluriverse, or in other contexts, such as assemblage theory or posthumanism? How would you describe the aesthetic potential of polylocality, focusing on specific, often even contingent, spatial and temporal experiences or situated knowledges rather than grand narratives, universal templates or abstract maps? What methods would you propose to strengthen and further develop the relationships and references between artistic research, cultural heritage and creative work, operating at diverse, interconnected places and scales? WG3 – REFERENCING FRAMEWORKSThe meeting will discuss the following topics: Current referencing practices: While there is a recognised lack of formal cross-referencing between projects, artistic research is deeply interconnected through practical lineages outside of traditional bibliographic formats. A primary objective of this working group is to map and inventory these diverse modes of citation and influence. Local and contextual knowledge: How can we deal with local knowledge and ambiguity that is not captured well in traditional frameworks or language-based search tools? Research Catalogue case study: how are expositions constructed and read in the Research Catalogue regarding referencing? How can we investigate the above questions within the context of Research Catalogue expositions? WG 4 POLICY MAKING AND RECOMMENDATIONS
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