Exeter alumnus Alan Lau (1993, Engineering Science) has been instrumental in the establishment of a new University-wide Fellowship exploring creativity and artificial intelligence.
The Lau Fellowship in Creativity and AI has been made possible through a generous donation from Mr Lau and will be based at Oxford University’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. The Fellowship will bring a leading practitioner in culture or technology to Oxford each year to collaborate with academics across the Humanities Division on projects examining the evolving relationship between technology and human creativity.
The first recipient of the Fellowship is media artist and AI pioneer Refik Anadol, whose immersive works using machine learning and large-scale datasets have been exhibited internationally. During his Fellowship, Mr Anadol will work with Oxford scholars, including researchers in literature and ethics, and with collections held by the Bodleian Libraries, to explore new approaches to generative AI and cultural archives.
Mr Lau is Chief Business Officer of Animoca Brands and Vice Chair of M+, Asia’s global museum of contemporary visual culture. An engineer by training, he has built a career spanning technology, finance and the arts, and has long supported initiatives that encourage collaboration across disciplines and sectors. He also serves on international museum acquisition committees, including at Tate Modern and the Guggenheim Museum.
Speaking about the Fellowship, Mr Lau emphasised the importance of dialogue between the humanities and emerging technologies, noting the potential for artificial intelligence to reshape not only artistic practice but wider creative processes that influence everyday life.
