Creative AI Meetup: Machine as Author, Audience and Critic
This event will host talks from artists and researchers presenting AI technologies and their creative applications. It is organised by curator Luba Elliott.
Event schedule:
18:00 Arrival
18:30 Introduction by Luba Elliott
18:35 Vadim Epstein, Digital Artist: AI as Post-VJ: From Flow to Factory
19:00 Veera Jussila, Computational Artist & Engineer: Performing for machine audience
19:25 Parashkev Nachev, Neurologist and Neuroscientist at UCL: The (AI) Artist as Critic
19:50 Talks finish, networking
20:30 Event close
This event is sponsored by Phoenix Court, home of LocalGlobe, Latitude and Solar.
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More on talks and speakers:
Vadim Epstein: AI as Post-VJ: From Flow to Factory
This talk is an illustrated field report on the devolution of “generative” through personal practice: from live VJing's compilative flow — where the remixed statement outruns the author — through procedural graphics that privilege process over product, to contemporary AI production that obscures the process altogether. We’ll trace the movement from artifacts to automation to hermetic synthesis, follow the arc from VJ as cultural antenna to AI as collective unconscious, and argue for subtracting the person-as-brand in favor of generativity-as-behavior and procedure-first pipelines.
Vadim Epstein is a digital artist, creative coder, educator, and VJ, with a background in IT and theoretical physics. Engaged in multimedia art since 1996, with the focus eventually shifted towards visual media combining generative methods with figurative imagery and algo narratives. Focused on AI/ML since 2017.
Veera Jussila: Performing for machine audience
In my practice, I’m intrigued by machines as a specific kind of audience for physical interactions. Recently, I’ve explored how multimodal LLM agents can observe a musician and form a feedback loop with them. Vague classifications, grey areas in computer vision and slightly off ML models are all techniques I have embraced in my practice, to create ambivalent communication systems with an element of surprise in their outputs.
Veera Jussila is a computational artist and engineer who builds experimental AI systems to introduce alternative forms of communication. She holds a Master’s degree in Computational Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been shown in CVPR AI Art Gallery in 2025 and 2021. She is part of artist collective In-grid .
Parashkev Nachev: The (AI) Artist as Critic
The value of an artwork must be found in what cannot be paraphrased, or else a piece and its description would be interchangeable. What, then, is the objective of art criticism? Contrary to common belief, it cannot be to explain, least of all theoretically, for the art is in the residual of any explanation. Here I argue for a metacounterfactual function of criticism that multimodal deep generative models are ideally placed to perform, and outline an approach to its implementation, with illustrative empirical examples.
Parashkev Nachev is a neurologist and neuroscientist at UCL with a research and artistic practice focused on complex modelling of the brain and its expression in thought and behaviour.