Image: Serpentine Galleries, London
Serpentine Arts Technologies has launched the inaugural ‘Future Art Ecosystems (FAE) R&D Fellowship: Art x Convergence’, a six-month low-residency programme for practitioners working at the intersection of art and advanced technologies. Applications are open until midnight BST on 7 June 2026, with four fellowship places available for artists, curators, technologists and organisers. The programme is scheduled to run from September 2026 to March 2027 in a hybrid format combining biweekly online cohort sessions with three in-person weekend intensives in London.
According to Serpentine, the fellowship is designed to support early-stage creative research grounded in process, dialogue and shared learning rather than finished outcomes. Each of the four selected fellows, whether individuals or collectives, will receive a £10,000 award, along with travel and accommodation support for the London weekends. The programme also includes specialist seminars, workshops, structured peer learning and public-facing process sharing.
The fellowship’s 2026 theme, ‘Art x Convergence’, is framed as an invitation to consider how AI is reshaping cultural and societal systems. Serpentine describes convergence here not simply as the coming together of different fields, but as a more structural condition in which previously separate systems begin to interpenetrate. The programme text points to questions around embodiment, robotics, legal constructs, markets and planetary organisation, and asks how artistic research might respond to those entanglements.
Future Art Ecosystems is presented as a project supporting organisational innovation in the arts, specifically around ecosystem design for art and advanced technologies. Serpentine says FAE has brought together artists, technologists, cultural institutions and civic actors since 2019, with an emphasis on building systems that drive creative and organisational innovation. The fellowship sits within Serpentine’s broader Arts Technologies programme, which the institution says explores the impact of technology through art, research and experimental projects.
Arts Technologies at Serpentine focuses on areas including artificial intelligence, blockchain, video games and life sciences, and brings together people working across art, technology, law, policy and academia. On the fellowship page, Serpentine presents ‘Art x Convergence’ as a prompt for research rather than a fixed brief, with prompts including bodies and machines, the real and the simulated, ownership and accountability, living with entanglement, and planetary stakes. The programme is open to international applicants, provided they can attend the three London gatherings.
The fellowship will be selected in two rounds. Serpentine’s Arts Tech team will shortlist ten candidates for interviews in June, followed by an external jury in the second selection round. The selected fellows are to be announced in September, and Serpentine says it is also developing a broader programme of events, gatherings and opportunities connected to the research emerging from the fellowship.
The open call arrives alongside Serpentine’s wider Arts Technologies activity, which includes ‘I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT’, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s online game project, and the archive display ‘processing… Art and Advanced Technologies at Serpentine’, presented in the Education Space at Serpentine South from 20 July to 6 September 2026. For the fellowship itself, applicants can register for an online information session on 22 May 2026 and apply through the online form on Serpentine’s website.
