The Southbank Centre launches weekend festival exploring the future of technology, creativity, and art

This September, Creative Intelligence takes over the Southbank Centre for a weekend-long festival exploring the future of technology and creativity.

Over three days (11-13 September), the Southbank Centre will become a playground for creative technologies, exploring how human agency and imagination interact and intertwine with technology

and innovation. The festival programme encompasses art, performance, live gigs, demos, and debate, with space for play and experimentation alongside learning and discussion. The offer ranges from hands-on activities for curious newcomers, to in-depth, specialist talks tailored for creatives and industry experts. Inspired by the spirit of innovation which powered the Festival of Britain in 1951, Creative Intelligence explores how art and technologies, including AI, are combining to shape the future. This is the first edition of an ambitious annual festival that will host debate, play, art, and technology. Creative Intelligence is commissioned and produced by the Southbank Centre and is curated with PACT (Planetary Art Culture Technology).

Running across the entire weekend, Peckham Digital – an annual, community-led festival and creative technology organisation in south-east London – will take over the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer to showcase London’s grassroots creative computing communities. Through a vibrant, three-day lineup of collaborative workshops, interactive drop-in sessions, and peer-learning activations, the takeover offers accessible pathways for anyone curious about art and technology.

This weekend also includes a Creative Summit (Friday 11 September), designed for the artists, writers, designers and engineers working at the intersection of art, creativity and technology. This summit is an opportunity to ask big questions and to explore what we know, what we want to know, and how to make sense of it all. Through talks, panel discussions and performances, the programme will showcase the ideas and people at the forefront of this ever-evolving field – with expertise covering everything from beauty and quantum computing to venture capital for art, film, and music.

After the discussions, attendees are invited to an evening listening session with pioneering artist Holly Herndon. A trailblazer at the frontier of music and AI, Herndon’s decade-long practice explores the idea that training an AI model is a profound act of creativity. Rather than just using AI to generate final tracks, Herndon and collaborator Mat Dryhurst meticulously compose their own training material and shape their own datasets, treating every step of the process as a form of authorship. Audiences will hear complete pieces alongside the raw source material, offering an insight into Herndon’s unique practice.