Dr Alan Warburton
(he/they)
A globally-recognised creative technologist working with CGI, AI, XR, VR and ML between art, industry and academia. Best known for his critical video essays which are fixtures in university curriculums worldwide, he’s undertaken lectures and residencies at Central St Martins, Somerset House, the ICA, the Science Gallery, the V&A, Carnegie Mellon, the AA School and presented at countless creative tech events. He has had solo exhibitions at Arebyte and The Photographers’ Gallery and been involved in landmark group shows at Carnegie Museum of Art, Baltic Gateshead, RMIT and many more.
Notable recent partnerships include 2023’s The Wizard of AI (commissioned by the Open Data Institute and featured in the Guardian), and 2021’s Better Images of AI, where he helped launch an influential stock image collection alongside the BBC R&D to counter obfuscatory myths of AI. Over the same period, he completed his PhD at Birkbeck’s Vasari Centre, a practice-led project that extrapolated on themes from the 2020 solo exhibition RGBFAQ and considered how multi-modal synthetic datasets inform the operation of machine vision systems.
A committed advocate for digital literacy, Alan’s contributions to Routledge’s The Networked Image in Post-Digital Culture (2022) considers the changing economies of digital labour and his chapter in Bloomsbury’s forthcoming Encyclopedia of Animation Studies discusses contemporary theories of rendering. His work has been discussed in The Guardian, Neural, It’s Nice That, METAL, Filmmaker Magazine, Sight and Sound, Creative Applications and by numerous scholars of art, animation and media including Marcus Verhagen, Jacob Gaboury, and Birgitta Hosea. He has a track record of securing cross-disciplinary research funding - from the AHRC, Creative Europe, the Arts Council England, Weiden & Kennedy and Tate Exchange.