Does AI have any business in arts and culture?

Since 2018, Freya Salway has supported artists’ experimentation with AI through residency programmes and bespoke collaborations, partnering with renowned artists, innovators and cultural organisations. She is head of the Google Arts and Culture Lab, “a space that brings creative and tech communities together to explore and experiment with the application of emerging technologies for arts and culture”.

One of the areas of exploration at the arts and culture lab is how emerging technologies like AI could help address a challenge a Google partner faces and support artist experimentation with emerging technologies. It also has a long-running artist-in-residence programme at its base in Paris. 

For Google, the word ‘culture’ contains many different strands. “For us, culture is not just the artworks you see in a museum,” Freya explains. “It’s sports, it’s food. For example, we’ve done big projects on food in Nigeria, Spain and Pakistan,” she explains and goes on to mention projects involving sports, crafts and cultural preservation. 

“It’s very diverse on a global level, but we look locally as well, engaging with communities and local cultures that aren’t known on a global scale – engagement with local culture can yield like different perspectives, and that also helps our understanding of one another,”

Emerging technologies

 “My role is more to look at – as there’s the rapid advancement of emerging technologies, particularly in the space of the advancement with AI – how these technologies can support our engagement with arts and culture,” she says. 

So where do technology, arts and culture align? “We’ve been working in this space of AI and creativity since 2016, and how these technologies can support our engagement with arts and culture,” she says. 

“What we’ve always been really interested in is AI as a tool and as a collaborator – for artists and how they might be using it in their process of creating work and how it can support and augment a creative process.”

Technology has had its place in the arts throughout history, she points out, citing photography as an example, and she now believes that AI has a place in creative expression. 

“I think what is quite interesting with AI, is the ‘how’ it can help us. There’s so much information – I go to a library, there are so many books to read. I’m like, where do I start? And often we go to what’s comfortable and what we know. And I think it’s interesting how AI could perhaps expand our frame of reference and offer new insights and connections with vast amounts of cultural collections and data,” she says.

I was still interested in artist development, [so] I set up some scholarships.

Looking at whether artists will embrace AI to create work or to stand against it, it will be a personal preference. “Maybe they’ll do it in a more background way, maybe research and how it supports research in almost like an invisible way, and have no interest in AI, in terms of what it may be able to produce, or AI as a collaborator in their creative practice. I think it’s what we’ve always seen with all technological advancements.”

From drama to tech

All this interest in arts and technology seems a far cry from young Freya, who studied drama at Hull University with the dream of being a theatre director, but that course set her on the path to an enlightened career. She looks back on the time as a grounding to the hard-working, supportive woman she is now. 

“I just loved theatre and its form of storytelling,” she says. The course, aside from being academic, gave her a good work ethic. “In year one, you would be a junior stage manager, and you’d work your way up, supporting the older students in delivering their shows, whether it was costumes or set design.

“When I graduated I felt like I had to be in London to be a theatre director – I used to sign on at the jobcentre to be able to get enough money to go down to London to do a job interview. Those interviews were an internship at the Barbican and things like that – I just wasn’t getting anything, and I was really stressed so I just started applying for random things, which included, at the time, the Sky TV marketing graduate programme.”

“I had no knowledge of marketing or real interest in it, but I was desperate to get to London, and I knew I couldn’t get to London on a free job, I needed some money,” she says. 

Passed up for yet another assisting job, in the same breath she was offered the gig at BskyB and it was her ticket to London and subsequently into Sky Arts.  

“I always planned to leave and become a theatre director, I planned to go for a year or two but then I discovered Sky Arts – I’ve always been really interested in artists and different forms of creative expression and how we tell stories so then I just became interested in the broader space.”

Value of scholarships

“But because I was still interested in artist development, I set up some scholarships. It began with the Sky Arts Futures Funds, then became these academy scholarships for emerging artists – where the majority of the fund could go on living costs, and that was really important for me,” she explains. 

“One thing that I always really valued at Sky Arts is that they recognised the importance of cultural programming and access to the arts. And it wasn’t necessarily about audience numbers; it was about the different interest areas of the public, some might be quite niche,” she says. 

Outside of her role at Google, Freya can be found supporting arts and culture through her roles as a board member or mentor. She has recently joined the Darbar Festival in London as a trustee and supports Right Up Our Street, in Yorkshire, a community-led creative people and places arts programme funded by Arts Council England, in a mentorship role. 

The Google chapter

After Sky, she set up her own company, so she could focus on artist development, providing support to artists. Her interest in the use of emerging technologies in the art space, which had been born in Sky Arts, led her to explore the area more and she had the opportunity to work with Google Arts and Culture as a contractor. 

“As we get older – we can lose a sense of play and the joy in play for learning as well so I think that’s what we try to tap into.

“And then an opportunity came up [in Google] and I thought, although I decided I didn’t want to work for a big company again, I wanted to do things on my own, I also thought this is a space that allows me to do things I can’t just do on my own. I thought the work they were doing was really interesting and aligned with my interest areas,” she explains.

Still living in London the mother-of-two has been with Google for eight years now. 

“I like to think of it as like a nourishing scroll,” Freya says, describing the Google Arts and Culture app feed. Keeping up with the fast pace of how the public consumes their content these days Solway thinks about creative ways to inform and entertain content consumers. 

Having fun

“We learn through play”, she says it’s a way to engage the audience and get them ‘inspired’. We have a focus on a broad audience, an online audience. We don’t necessarily think about creating – for a particular age group. We did this experiment, which went viral a few years ago, called Blob Opera, and you can play these blobs – an experiment by an artist called David Li – a playful interface that allowed you to explore essentially the types of operatic fonts – lots of people like to play with these blobs,” she says.  The success of Blob Opera (it is ridiculously good fun) even had teachers using it as a tool in the classroom. 

“As we get older – we can lose a sense of play and the joy in play for learning as well so I think that’s what we try to tap into,” she says. 

When asked what contentment looks like Freya replies, “I think it’s like accepting imperfection, and I think it’s finding a balance”.

From the young woman who wanted to be a theatre director but found a career in helping bring arts and culture to a global audience through emerging technologies while continuing to support her love for live performance in her own time, it feels like she’s struck that balance.