Tula Giannini speaking at a previous Symposium
EVA London 2025 Symposium
Monday, 7 July 2025
Then and Now: From Digital Art to Generative AI
| Tula Giannini (Co-Chair) | Jonathan P. Bowen (Co-Chair) |
| Pratt Institute School of Information New York, USA http://sites.google.com/view/tgiannini |
London South Bank University School of Engineering London, UK http://www.jpbowen.com |
| giannini@pratt.edu | jonathan.bowen@lsbu.ac.uk |
Presentations
| Then and Now 1 Chair: Jonathan Bowen |
|
| Jonathan Bowen & Tula Giannini |
Introduction |
| Melanie Lenz V&A Museum, London, UK |
The Future Revisited: Art, Creativity and Technology |
| Valentina Ravaglia Tate Modern, London, UK |
A Guided Tour of Digital Art’s Origin Stories: Curatorial Challenges and Stakes of Tate Modern’s Electric Dreams exhibition |
| Break | |
| Then and Now 2 Chair: Tula Giannini |
|
| Jeremy Gardiner Vasari Research Centre for Art & Technology, Birkbeck, University of London, UK |
Heuristic Journeys: A painter’s odyssey in the 1980s from the Royal College of Art to the Media Lab of MIT and beyond |
| Tula Giannini (Chair) | Panel session |
Electric Dreams exhibition entrance at Tate Modern, with Jeremy Gardiner and Jonathan Bowen, December 2024
Overview
The 2025 EVA London Symposium explores themes of digital art and artificial intelligence (AI) regarding the field’s ground-breaking developments from the early days of digital media to the current rapidly evolving environment of Generative AI (GenAI). The program features three distinguished speakers, each providing their own viewpoint, drawing on their professional work and experiences in the arts, two as curators with an interest in the history of digital art, and one as an artist with a background in both traditional and digital media. The Symposium is intended to shed new light on the arts and artists who paved the way for the AI revolution from the 1970s to the present.
Background
The Symposium includes invited speakers as part of the EVA London 2025 Conference. It continues a series from the previous eight EVA London Symposiums held since 2016.
The Symposium series initially started in association with the Pratt Institute London Summer School, with an emphasis on digital culture and “digitalism” or “digitality”. A collaboration with the Royal College of Art developed, providing an artistic and philosophical angle to the Symposium. Aspects of digital culture continue in this year’s Symposium, which considers the theme of “Then and Now: From Digital Art to Generative AI”. The speakers for this 2025 Symposium come from varied curatorial and artistic backgrounds, bringing their own perspectives to the overall theme.
See also the detailed conference programme. An open-access Symposium summary paper will be available in the EVA London 2025 conference proceedings under DOI 10.14236/ewic/EVA2025.1