unesco ai ethics residency
Somerset House Studios and UNESCO launch a new joint residency programme, which will commission three international artists to create new online works critically engaging with intercultural ideas around AI and ethics, supported by a remote residency. All three artists will take part in UNESCO’s annual Global Forum on the Ethics of AI in June 2026, (location tbc), sharing their research and works in progress to an audience of international policy makers, before presenting the final works on Somerset House’s online platform Channel at the end of 2026.
Somerset House Studios’ partnership with UNESCO is the first of its kind, an opportunity for three artists to:
Develop new work with support from both Somerset House Studios and UNESCO
Attend UNESCO’s Global Forum in 2026, to share research and works in progress directly with a global audience of policymakers from over 80 countries
Present final work on Somerset House’s online platform Channel at the end of 2026, contributing to discussions on the theme at an event in London
Applications are invited from artists in any international location and from any discipline, with an interest in critically engaging with intercultural ideas around AI, ethics, governance and regulation, in different cultural contexts. Engaging with human-rights-centred principles and / or policy areas of the Recommendation as a starting point, it is anticipated that artists will already be considering themes around ethics and AI in their work, and that they are interested in making work with the potential to impact policy. We are particularly interested in supporting international artists who bring a non-Western perspective to these themes.
Joining the Somerset House Studios community via a remote residency over a 3-month research and development period, and with mentorship from the UNESCO Expert Network, the artists will be supported to develop their project, with the final work presented online. We welcome ideas beyond the traditional format of a film, which are feasible within the available budget, but it must be possible to demo or present work in progress in a presentation format at the Global Forum on the Ethics of AI.
The opportunity builds on the previous Somerset House Studios’ residency PATH AI in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute and UAL’s Creative Computing Institute, which took place in 2022. Three artists were commissioned to make new works exploring ideas of privacy, agency and trust in human-AI ecosystems, with Nouf Alyowaysir’s commission Ana Mein Wen (Where Am I From?) winning the Lumen Prize for Moving Image in 2023 and released by The New York Times Op-Docs series in 2024, and Juan Covelli’s Los Caídos (The Fallen) receiving an Honorary Mention in the New Animation Art category at Ars Electronica in 2025.