Creative AI Meetup: Neural Folklore, Improv and Poetic Embodiment

This event will host talks from artists and researchers presenting AI technologies and their creative applications. Event schedule: 18:00 Arrival 18:30 Introduction by curator Luba Elliott and venue host Subaita Rahman 18:35 Piotr Mirowski, Google DeepMind and Improbotics: 'Making Stuff up with LLMs and Staging AI as an Improv Partner' 19:00 Diana Alina Serbanescu, Transdisciplinary Performance Artist & Lecturer at UAL CCI: Acts of Poetic Embodiment 19:25 Atay Ilgun, Artist & Curator, Neural Folklore & Other Realities 19:50 Talks finish, networking 20:30 Event close This event is held at IDEALondon – a workspace for early teams and operators in science and tech. Founded by UCL Engineering and managed by WilbeLAB, they're home to London’s most ambitious builders. Learn more about their community, event space, and memberships. — More on talks and speakers: Piotr Mirowski, Google DeepMind and Improbotics: 'Making Stuff up with LLMs and Staging AI as an Improv Partner' The term “robot” first appeared in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R., but it took 80 years of technological progress to bring robots into live performances alongside actors. The coexistence of naturalism and artifice, of script and improvisation, allowed theatre companies to explore human-AI relationships, while the impressive developments in language and image models have both opened new creative possibilities for artists and surfaced ethical concerns. I will discuss AI as a creativity support tool, focusing on live performance with generative AI. Piotr Mirowski is the Director of Improbotics, a theatre company that pioneered improvisation with artificial intelligence and robots on stage, investigating the intersection of AI and human creativity. Piotr is also an AI researcher, currently Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and Visiting Researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. Diana Alina Serbanescu, Transdisciplinary Performance Artist & Lecturer at UAL CCI: Acts of Poetic Embodiment In her talk, Diana Alina Serbanescu aka Neranti will present her artistic practice, which is a quest for poetic embodiment and utilises dance-theatre and the creation of innovative technological artefacts. She will explore ideas and techniques framed by community engagement and feminist approaches to knowledge creation. Her works, each building upon the last, involve chance discoveries and emerging pathways, contributing to an ever-evolving practice. Diana Alina Serbanescu aka Neranti is a transdisciplinary performer, new media artist, and researcher. In her performance work, Diana creates a new poetic language in which the power of the expressive body is enhanced by hybridisation with the machine. Diana is currently active as an academic researcher and lecturer in Creative Robotics at the University of the Arts, London and continues her artistic practice as a choreographer, performer, and artistic director of REPLICA, an artistic platform she co-founded in 2017. Atay Ilgun, Artist & Curator, Neural Folklore & Other Realities This talk will focus on Atay Ilgun's music and artistic practice since 2016. His work examines AI’s function as both instrument and interlocutor and foregrounds its use in the creation of allegorical but real objects designed to trigger hallucinatory feedback loops, speculative systems of lore and machinic world-building. The talk will further consider the convergence of AI and blockchain through the lens of experimental, decentralised system design, reflecting on their implications for authorship, agency, and aesthetics in contemporary art practice. Atay Ilgun is a London-based artist, creative technologist, and curator whose work navigates the psychic and aesthetic dimensions of AI, blockchain, and experimental media. Rooted in cyber-folklore, machinic poetics, and reality systems, his practice explores how emerging technologies distort and reconstruct myth, identity, and perception. He has worked at IKLECTIK, performed at the University of the Arts London, and collaborated with organisations such as Moth Quantum, and has seen work featured in Most Dismal Swamp, The Wire, BBC, Café OTO and CLOT Magazine.