This weekend, the Southbank Centre in London becomes a playground for creative technologies during our inaugural Creative Intelligence weekend, curated by PACT, Planetary Art Culture Technology.

Emerging computational tools are fundamentally reshaping how art is made and experienced. For a public art institution and Europe’s largest art centre celebrating its 75th anniversary, this shift poses important questions about how to work with artists to innovate with technology whilst celebrating human creative agency.

It is this inquiry that has informed the collaboration between Southbank Centre and Google Arts & Culture to date, from celebrating Hayward Gallery at 50 and digitising Art by Post to hosting four interactive experiments from the Arts & Culture Lab in the public foyers this weekend.

A Public Playground for the Imagination

In the Royal Festival Hall’s Clore Ballroom and Exploration Bazaar, visitors can experience Google Arts & Culture interactive experiments that harness AI

• Dreaming with Flamingos by Yinka Ilori: Weaves West African folklore with Google DeepMind’s advanced AI music generation tool, Lyria, in an interactive riddle quest to restore a park's lost wisdom

Unlock Yinka Ilori’s musical playground

• Splash Canvas by David Li: Gemini and fluid dynamics power squishy sea creatures who act as your paintbrushes and real-time art critics

Paint on a squishy, fluid canvas guided by AI sea creatures

• Learn Everything: Uses Gemini to turn photos of everyday objects into visual metaphors for understanding complex topics.

Turn everyday objects into instant science lessons

• Say What You See: A puzzle game that sharpens prompt literacy by reverse-engineering AI imagery.

Learn the art of prompting

Visionary voices across the weekend

The wider weekend brings together leading artists whose practices explore art and code — including several Google Arts & Culture has collaborated with over many years:

• Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: The artist presents her algorithmic garden work Pollinator Pathmaker on the Riverside Terrace. The work uses an algorithmic tool to design living gardens for pollinating insects rather than human taste, transforming art into a platform for non-human agency. Google Arts & Culture was an early supporter of the work.
• Xin Liu: Ahead of her upcoming residency with Berlin's LAS Art Foundation and Google Arts & Culture, artist Xin Liu explores art, science, and ecology through a performance lecture.
• Lex Fefegha: Google Arts & Culture Lab Artist in Residence, Lex brings Future Inventions to Southbank Centre with Peckham Digital for workshops exploring creative tech through an Afrocentric lens.

Experience the weekend from Friday 11 September to Sunday 13 September 2026 at the Southbank Centre, or explore the experiments online via Google Arts & Culture.