ART + AI 2025: Experiences and Future Horizons. Webinar
- Dec 19, 2024
- 4 min read
Webinar titled “ART + AI 2025: Experiences and Future Horizons“ was held on December 19, 2024, as a final part of the public program of the AI Hokusai Art & Tech Research Project.
It's a special event summarizing the year’s achievements in the Art+AI sector and offering professional forecasts for 2025. During this webinar, we reflected on the most significant milestones and highlights of our project over the past year, showcasing key advancements, collaborations, and breakthroughs. Together with our experts and resident artists, we explored the future of the ArtTech industry, offering insightful predictions and discussing the trends that would shape the creative and technological landscape in the coming years.
Speakers:
Evgeny Merman — A multimedia artist, painter, curator and art professor. Curator of the AI Hokusai project
Vladimir Opredelenov — Expert in tech innovation and cultural development. CDO of .ART and founder of tech4.art, consulting on digital marketing and tech for the art sector
Elizabeth Markevitch — Founder of ikonoTV, TEDx speaker, AI adopter
Denis Belkevich — General Partner Fuelarts, creative Tech investor, art economist, Art advisor
Roxana Vazquez, Carlos Wyszogrod, Hyphae Collective — Resident artist
Julio César Palacio — Resident artist
Alex May — Resident artist
Saint Denis (Denis Semenov) — Resident artist
Oxana Fedchyshyn — Resident artist
Santiago Sares — Resident artist
Tomo Sone — Resident artist
Moderator — Anna Shvets, AI Hokusai ArtTech Research project curator, CEO of TAtchers’ Art Management
Key ideas
The discussion encapsulates the closing webinar of the AI Hokusai project, reflecting on a year of intensive artistic experimentation with artificial intelligence. The conversation revolves around how AI is reshaping the creative process, the challenges artists face, and the philosophical implications of machine collaboration.
Initially a skeptic, Evgeny Merman realized that AI is not merely a tool but a "creative partner". He notes that the public's fear of AI stems from the idea that it encroaches on the "soul" of the artist, unlike earlier technologies like photography. However, he views this collaboration as a way to push boundaries that artists couldn't achieve alone.
Instead of using generative AI, Alex May explored how AI sees the world using segmentation algorithms to track bounding boxes around human subjects. His work reveals how AI heavily reduces human complexity into mere categories, acting as a mirror that challenges our human-centric view of the world.
Looking to the future, Vladimir Opredelenov anticipates that AI will evolve to observe and collaborate with us in real-time. He is particularly interested in the creation of "digital twins" of artists, virtual versions that can support their continuous artistic processes.
Creating dramatic AI Noir shorts, Saint Denis (Denis Semenov) discovered that regardless of the medium — whether Hokusai's woodblocks or modern AI — human emotions like love, betrayal, and loneliness remain the core of art. He also advocates for "digital justice," suggesting that since big tech companies trained their models on artists' work, they should provide these AI tools to artists for free.
Santiago Sares uses AI to explore the concepts of time, chaos, and legacy, even creating an "emotion detector" that reflects human feelings through machine learning. He urges developers to stop focusing solely on hyper-realism and build more open-source, experimental tools that empower artists to train their own models without copyright hurdles.
Julio César Palacio, Roxana Vazquez and Carlos Wyszogrod highlighted a significant gap in AI capabilities: current AI audio tools are heavily biased toward pop music and struggle to generate abstract, ambient, or experimental soundscapes. Julio, who is creating the "sounds of the floating world," bypasses this by translating visual images into poetic text, and then feeding that text into sound generators. Julio also stresses the need for "techno-diversity" to ensure global access to AI.
Blending physical painting with AI sketches, Oxana Fedchyshyn dreams of a future "brain-to-image" AI interface that can instantly perfectly translate the exact details of human imagination into a digital image without losing the nuance in text prompts.
Tomo Sone mixes her physical dance with AI-generated video to explore the relationship between the human body and the machine. She intentionally incorporates her "fear" of AI into her art and desires a tool that can understand the emotional "temperature" and subtleties of body language.
Speaking via an AI avatar, Elizabeth Markevitch noted that AI is enabling real-time, immersive art that dynamically responds to viewer emotions, transforming the very language of creative expression.
Denis Belkevich concluded with a powerful reminder: despite the rapid advancement of tech, the most important tools remain the artist's humanity, talent, and skills.
Discussion Summary
The overarching consensus of the panel is that AI has transitioned from a mere technological experiment to a profound collaborative partner. The artists agree that AI does not replace human creativity; rather, it acts as a mirror, a collaborator, and an amplifier of human emotion. While artists face current technological limitations — such as a lack of experimental audio tools, clunky prompt-based interfaces, and copyright concerns — they remain optimistic. The future of digital art lies in embracing this symbiosis, pushing beyond simple image generation into real-time interactive experiences, and ensuring that the fundamental "soul" and emotion of the human creator remain at the center of the artistic universe.