RCA AI Festival 2026 - Where Intelligence Meets Imagination

The Royal College of Art is proud to launch its first ever AI Festival, taking place from Monday 16 to Friday 20 February 2026.

The RCA AI Festival will be a high-energy gathering for thinkers, artists, leaders, and critics shaping the future of artificial intelligence in art and design. Through a visual exhibition, talks, workshops, live demonstrations, and debates, the festival explores not just what AI can do, but what it should do.

From cutting-edge research and practice-based applications to ethics, creativity, and human impact, the festival brings together experts and curious minds to challenge assumptions and confront uncomfortable questions. This is not a showcase, but a space for rigorous thinking and bold experimentation led by our research community.

Whether you’re developing AI systems, integrating them into art, business, regulating them, or simply trying to understand how they will reshape society, the RCA AI Festival will equip you with insight and perspective to engage with AI responsibly and creatively.

All events are free to attend with selected events open to the public. This festival is hosted by the Research, Knowledge Exchange and Innovation department and sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Find out more information and updates on the RCA Website here.

Please book tickets for individual sessions taking place each day. Arrive at least 5 minutes early to collect your festival wristband. All events are subject to space capacity. If you are no longer attending, we kindly ask you to cancel your ticket to allow others to register.

Location: Hangar Space, Studio Building and Level 7, Rausing Building. A map showing the buildings on the RCA's Battersea campus can be found here. Access guides can be found here for the Rausing Building and the Studio Building. Please note that there may be queues on entry.

Info: Join us to welcome the start of the AI Festival Week with an introduction from the Royal College of Art's President and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Christoph Lindner. Location: Hangar Space, Studio Building

Info: Location: Hangar Space, Studio Building

Info: This exhibition brings together a diverse group of five RCA doctoral researchers exploring how artificial intelligence reshapes perception, creativity, ethics and human experience. Featured as part of the RCA AI Festival, AI is treated not only as a technical tool but as a cultural, social and political agent. These projects interrogate bias and inclusivity in machine intelligence, examine how AI mediates memory, language and absence, and explore relationships between humans, cities and non-human agents.

Collectively, the exhibition invites audiences to reflect on how AI listens, interprets, remembers and acts—and what is transformed in the process. By foregrounding critical inquiry alongside creative experimentation, the works challenge dominant narratives of technological progress and propose more reflective, ethical and imaginative futures for AI within society. Location: Hangar Space, Studio Building

Info: Join us for a guided tour of the RCA Robotics Laboratory, where creativity, science, and technology intersect. The lab brings together inspiration from nature and art with experimental scientific approaches to develop innovative robotic technologies. During the tour, visitors will gain insight into how creative techniques, novel mechanisms, and biological principles inform the design of advanced robotic systems. Discover how this interdisciplinary research enhances access, safety, and performance across a wide range of industrial applications, and explore the lab’s role in shaping the future of human–robot interaction. Location: RCA Robotics Laboratory, Rausing Building

Info: Join us for a guided tour of the RCA Robotics Laboratory, where creativity, science, and technology intersect. The lab brings together inspiration from nature and art with experimental scientific approaches to develop innovative robotic technologies. During the tour, visitors will gain insight into how creative techniques, novel mechanisms, and biological principles inform the design of advanced robotic systems. Discover how this interdisciplinary research enhances access, safety, and performance across a wide range of industrial applications, and explore the lab’s role in shaping the future of human–robot interaction. Location: RCA Robotics Laboratory, Rausing Building

Info: Step inside a real robotics research environment for a hands-on STEM experience designed especially for young aspiring engineers! In this small-group workshop, participants will visit the Royal College of Art (RCA) Robotics Lab and build their own cart-pushing robot using simple and safe mechanical and electrical components. Children (ages 8-10) will explore how robots move, push, and carry objects while learning beginner concepts related to robotics, motion, and automation. The workshop emphasises curiosity, problem-solving, and safe exploration in a real-world research setting.

Please note: Parents or guardians must accompany their child for the duration of the workshop. If you would also like a guided tour before this workshop, please sign up for the tour separately. Location: RCA Robotics Laboratory, Rausing Building

Info: This live webinar presentation examines the role of artificial intelligence as a tool of automation rather than a creator. The session encourages a reflective approach to technology, and attendees will explore how the humanities provide a necessary framework for critical AI literacy. We will consider not only what these tools can do but what they should do.

Sam Illingworth is a Professor of Creative Pedagogies at Edinburgh Napier University. His research focuses on GenAI, equity, and responsible innovation in education. He co-leads national studies on how students use AI and collaborates with schools, universities, and community partners to build more inclusive digital futures. Sam is the creator of Slow AI, a project that helps people use AI thoughtfully rather than automatically. Location: Event Space 3, Rausing Building / Online

Info: This session invites you to experience immersive presentations by PhD students, showcasing their research through innovative uses of the SNAP Visualisation Lab to explore the possibilities of AI. Designed as a multimodal, interactive virtual environment, the Lab enables the modelling of complex built and natural environments and the simulation of real-world scenarios.

Funded by the Spiegel Family Fund and supported by Research England quality-related research funding, the SNAP Visualisation Lab features a double-height, three-sided projection space with zero light and sound pollution. Its advanced capabilities include large-scale visualisation, interactive data analytics, motion capture, VR development, and immersive design reviews. This experience demonstrates how immersive technologies and AI can transform research, design, and future-facing innovation. Location: SNAP Visualisation Lab, Rausing Building

Info: 'Defending Jingjie in Front of His Interpreters' is a generative AI installation rooted in contemporary sound poetry, performativity, and liveness. It evolves from a seven-hour live recitation in which the artist vocalised 40,000 Chinese characters generated by a large language model trained to imitate their writing style. The resulting texts, audio recordings, and wall-mounted pages form the material residue of the performance.

In its installation form, the work becomes an interactive, improvisational system built with Somax2 in MAX/MSP. Using machine listening and sound-feature analysis, the installation fragments and reassembles the recorded recitations in real time, responding to audience voices through acoustic similarity rather than semantic meaning. Focusing on redundancy, identity dislocation, and the materiality of sound, the work invites audiences to participate in the deconstruction and reconstruction of voice, authorship, and self. Location: Hangar Space, Studio Building

Info: Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new ways for audiences to interact with fictional characters beyond traditional theatre and screen, while also presenting emerging tools for playwrights and scriptwriters. Research shows LLMs are useful for brainstorming and editorial support but struggle with conflict and taboo, key elements of dramaturgy, making role play one of their most effective uses.

This interactive workshop, based on research at the Royal College of Art, invites participants to explore these possibilities using a Character-LLM trained on the radio play script Proud Songster written by Stephen Todd, winner of Channel 4’s “The Radio Play’s the Thing” competition in 2008. Participants will have an opportunity to listen to the play, interact with its central character Sarah, and improvise new scenes in different expressive modes, before reflecting on their experience using an AI-powered reflection tool. Location: Event Space 3, Rausing Building

Info: This session is an internal event dedicated for RCA Research Students and Staff. Registration for RCA Students and Staff can be found on the intranet. Location: Event Space 3, Rausing Building

Info: This exhibition brings together a diverse group of five RCA doctoral researchers exploring how artificial intelligence reshapes perception, creativity, ethics and human experience. Featured as part of the RCA AI Festival, AI is treated not only as a technical tool but as a cultural, social and political agent. These projects interrogate bias and inclusivity in machine intelligence, examine how AI mediates memory, language and absence, and explore relationships between humans, cities and non-human agents.

Collectively, the exhibition invites audiences to reflect on how AI listens, interprets, remembers and acts—and what is transformed in the process. By foregrounding critical inquiry alongside creative experimentation, the works challenge dominant narratives of technological progress and propose more reflective, ethical and imaginative futures for AI within society. Location: Hangar Space, Studio Building

Info: How can intangible cultural heritage come alive beyond museum glass cases in the age of AI? RCA PhD artist and researcher Mi “Misha” Lin reimagines how Miao embroidery—an intangible cultural heritage from Southwest China—can be experienced beyond display. The exhibition presents her Generative Unravelling series, featuring ∞: Thousand Threads, Thousand Universes and Hand in Thought—Unravelling the Intangible. Using TouchDesigner generative systems and AI-assisted image generation, the interactive works translate cultural data into immersive, multisensory environments. Lin’s award-winning research has been featured in Aesthetica Magazine and shown at London Craft Week, the IEEE ICME AIART Gallery, and the Shanghai Art Museum. Location: SNAP Visualisation Lab, Rausing Building

Info: This exhibition brings together a diverse group of five RCA doctoral researchers exploring how artificial intelligence reshapes perception, creativity, ethics and human experience. Featured as part of the RCA AI Festival, AI is treated not only as a technical tool but as a cultural, social and political agent. These projects interrogate bias and inclusivity in machine intelligence, examine how AI mediates memory, language and absence, and explore relationships between humans, cities and non-human agents.

Collectively, the exhibition invites audiences to reflect on how AI listens, interprets, remembers and acts—and what is transformed in the process. By foregrounding critical inquiry alongside creative experimentation, the works challenge dominant narratives of technological progress and propose more reflective, ethical and imaginative futures for AI within society. Location: Hangar Space, Studio Building

Info: This session invites you to experience immersive presentations by PhD students, showcasing their research through innovative uses of the SNAP Visualisation Lab to explore the possibilities of AI. Designed as a multimodal, interactive virtual environment, the Lab enables the modelling of complex built and natural environments and the simulation of real-world scenarios.

Funded by the Spiegel Family Fund and supported by Research England quality-related research funding, the SNAP Visualisation Lab features a double-height, three-sided projection space with zero light and sound pollution. Its advanced capabilities include large-scale visualisation, interactive data analytics, motion capture, VR development, and immersive design reviews. This experience demonstrates how immersive technologies and AI can transform research, design, and future-facing innovation. Location: SNAP Visualisation Lab, Rausing Building

Info: As technological acceleration reshapes society, innovation is too often reduced to tools and systems. Drawing on her experience as an award-winning researcher and innovation leader, Gwozdz argues that innovation in the age of AI is a cultural transformation grounded in people, not technology. Challenging dominant narratives, she asserts that “companies don’t innovate, people do.” Introducing the concept of 'Cultural Innovation', Gwozdz presents a model rooted in diversity, multidisciplinarity, and systemic inclusion. Informed by her work at the intersection of AI, inclusivity, and sustainable development, she advocates for a science-based, purpose-driven approach that moves beyond siloed thinking toward relational co-creation. Situating AI within wider social theory, the talk explores the growing gap between technological speed and cultural, ethical, and democratic life, concluding with a call to align AI with diversity and sustainability goals to shape more just and resilient futures.

Info: This hands-on workshop, led by Archana Prasad invites participants to engage with Beyond Bias, an ongoing initiative that reimagines generative AI through ethics, cultural diversity, and community agency. Participants will review and contribute to the Open Manifesto, and work directly with prototype tools to create fine-tuned generative models. Through the creation of still and moving images in their own chosen visual styles, participants will critically explore how acts of making can surface ethical questions and cultural assumptions embedded in AI systems. The workshop emphasises reflective discussion around ethical guardrails, bias, and responsibility, with participants contributing feedback toward the improvement of the tools themselves. Beyond Bias challenges the dominance of Western-centric visual norms in AI by fostering co-creation with artists, cultural practitioners, archives, legal experts, and under-represented communities. Location: Event Space 2, Rausing Building

Info: With its launch in 2022, ChatGPT introduced the novel AI technology of Large Language Models (LLMs). Using natural language as a “creative tool” has greatly influenced design and artistic practice and theory by disrupting established epistemologies. Consequently, LLM-generated creative content has been the subject of debates regarding what creative agency humans are left with and how such a technology can be used to develop new forms of collaborations.
Ferrarello discusses an exploratory process that harnesses GenAI interventions to co-develop creative content that can also comply with current IP regulations in the EU and UK. This session describes how GenAI agency and autonomy can be encoded in human creative processes and stimulate new modes of thinking. These creative collaborative interactions build from contextualising GenAI image processing within the human inherent capacity to “design” stories that frame creative intentions.

Info: Join us to mark the conclusion of the festival week with an opportunity to reflect, connect, and celebrate achievements. Guests are invited to enjoy drinks from the bar and light refreshments in a relaxed setting, alongside fellow speakers, partners, and attendees. This closing celebration provides a final moment to continue conversations, acknowledge contributions, and bring the AI Festival to a close in an atmosphere of community and celebration. Location: Hangar Space, Studio Building

Info: This exhibition brings together a diverse group of five RCA doctoral researchers exploring how artificial intelligence reshapes perception, creativity, ethics and human experience. Featured as part of the RCA AI Festival, AI is treated not only as a technical tool but as a cultural, social and political agent. These projects interrogate bias and inclusivity in machine intelligence, examine how AI mediates memory, language and absence, and explore relationships between humans, cities and non-human agents.

Collectively, the exhibition invites audiences to reflect on how AI listens, interprets, remembers and acts—and what is transformed in the process. By foregrounding critical inquiry alongside creative experimentation, the works challenge dominant narratives of technological progress and propose more reflective, ethical and imaginative futures for AI within society. Location: Hangar Space, Studio Building

Info: A general workshop that provides researchers or those seeking additional knowledge about industry practices around responsible AI and governance.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

RCA Rausing Research & Innovation Building, 15 Parkgate Road, London, United Kingdom

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