Artistic intelligence : harnessing the power of the arts to address complex challenges, enhance soft skills and boost innovation and competitiveness

Expected Outcome

Proposals should contribute to the first two expected outcomes, and either the one listed under Focus 1, or the one listed under Focus 2.

• The potential of art-science and/or technology collaborations to address societal challenges and drive innovation is better understood. Guidance, toolkits, and actionable methodologies are developed to promote these collaborations, providing policymakers, professionals, and training organisations with clarity on intervention scope, applicability across various fields, and evaluation methods, metrics, or tools.
• New and existing national, European or international networks for art-science-technology collaborations are established or strengthened, expanding opportunities for artists to engage with science and technology.

Focus 1

Approaches, methodologies and model interventions for integrating arts and creative practices to enhance soft skills across public and private sectors are developed, tested and disseminated.

Focus 2

The effectiveness of critical artists’ engagement in interdisciplinary teams is demonstrated alongside the assessment of the viability of research-intensive emerging technologies through at least three low technology readiness level (TRL) pilot demonstrators.

Scope

Artistic research fosters inter-, multi-, and trans-disciplinary thinking, inspiring innovative problem-solving and offering new avenues for innovation across policy areas, akin to scientific research. EU initiatives such as SciArt and S+T+ARTS[1] show that art-science-technology collaborations enhance scientific and technological progress. Art acts as a catalyst for innovation, developing creative solutions to complex challenges and brings fresh perspectives to the scientific community. Artistic research is increasingly fostering mutual fertilization between the arts and academia. Collaboration with artists leads academics to adopt experimental practices, while artists increasingly engage with theoretical aspects of their practice. Closer collaboration between artists and companies in emerging technologies ensures that technological developments are guided by diverse, human-centred perspectives. Artistic research offers cross-disciplinary insights that challenge conventional thinking, spark innovation beyond technical efficiency, and address societal challenges holistically. Furthermore, artistic intelligence[2] makes complex concepts accessible and engages audiences emotionally and culturally. Artistic expression facilitates the adoption of innovative concepts and practices and catalyses social innovation, supporting sustainable and inclusive societal transformations and the cultural uptake of socio-scientific issues. Now is the time to consolidate understanding of the transformative potential of art-science-technology collaborations, distil it for application across policy areas and levels, and develop methods to evaluate their impact both quantitatively and qualitatively. Projects are expected to:

• Gather evidence on art-science-technology collaborations for addressing societal challenges and spurring innovation in science and technology.
• Collect case studies, produce and disseminate guidance, toolkits, and methodologies supporting policymakers in promoting these collaborations and strategies for cross-disciplinary innovation. Mechanisms, span of possible interventions, applicability to diverse fields and contexts will be clarified and exemplified.
• Develop concrete use cases, such as (but not limited to): artists supporting ethical, inclusive, human-centred AI; addressing societal challenges and complex transformations through art-science-technology collaboration, advancing emotional storytelling, experiential art and public engagement through AI and real-time data; public sector roles in the art-science-technology uptake; role of artists in catalysing innovation in policymaking; participatory art-science-technology initiatives and citizen science.
• Develop and test qualitative and quantitative methodologies and key performance indicators for evaluating such interventions, assessing their impacts, measuring their medium to long-term benefits and identifying what constitutes success.
• Increase opportunities for artists to engage in art-science-technology collaborations, through network establishment or consolidation, interdisciplinary initiatives or other methods.

Project consortia should include artists and creatives/representatives of creative industries. Through leveraging creativity, projects should boost EU productivity and competitiveness while improving artists and creative professionals' employment conditions and preserving the autonomy and freedom essential to artistic practice and democratic society.

Financial support to third parties of up to EUR 60.000 in the form of grants may be considered, with the aim of actively engaging artists and creative professionals, for example through residencies, to facilitate development of solutions and innovative experimentations.

In addition to the main focus area, proposals should choose between the following two focuses:

Focus 1. Enhancing soft skills through creativity and the arts

Policies and strategies for introducing creative thinking and cross- and transdisciplinary methods in education, research and the broader public and private sectors are needed. In the workforce, engaging with creative practices and the arts enhances soft skills -such as creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, emotional intelligence - crucial for productivity and competitiveness in an increasingly automated world[3] and to meet the demands of a changing market. Supporting research and innovation in this area will help individuals and institutions develop the skills and mindsets needed to thrive and increase creativity, productivity and well-being, including mental health, in a complex, interconnected society. Projects are expected to develop, experiment, and disseminate frameworks for using the arts and creative practices to strengthen soft skills in various public and private sectors, including education and lifelong learning, public administration and corporate environments, and showcase best practices. Proposals may choose their own areas of application.

Focus 2. Pilots on emerging technologies

Proposals should develop at least 3 small scale pilots on emerging technologies in interdisciplinary settings involving artists, to assess, demonstrate and streamline research-intensive technologies. Candidate technologies could include, among others, immersive arts, grid sensing networks, multisensuality, ubiquitous XR, spatial computing, VLM/LLM and historical data, crowd digitization or virtual reality. Pilots should demonstrate the effectiveness of artists’ engagement.

Proposals should clearly indicate the focus they have selected.

Proposals should consider the involvement of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) based on its experience, in particular with the SciArt programme, and with respect to the value it could bring in providing an effective interface between research activities and policymaking.

[1] For information on these initiatives, see https://science-art-society.ec.europa.eu/front and https://starts.eu/

[2] In the context of this topic, artistic intelligence can be understood as the collaborative capacity of artistic research and practice to generate and drive innovation, impact, and value by integrating creativity with scientific, technological, and cultural knowledge, particularly through cross-disciplinary collaboration, as demonstrated in initiatives such as STARTS and SciArt. Proposals can critically explore and develop the definition.

[3] M. Draghi (2024), The future of European competitiveness. Part B: In-depth analysis and recommendations, p. 258, 272.