Musing on all the new institutions opening in 2026, I was recently struck by a point made by Efsun Erkiliç, co-founder, with Refik Anadol, of Refik Anadol Studio (RAS), about institutional “stamina”. RAS has been working this year with the Stephen A Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, Oxford University, enabling them to collaborate with the university department of botany in a deep archival dive for a new work, Archive Dreaming (2026); and also with academics at the university specialising in the ethics of artificial intelligence, with Refik Anadol becoming the first recipient of the Lau Fellowship in Creativity and AI at the Schwarzman Centre.
While in Oxford recently Erkiliç remarked not just on the flexibility and quick decision-making that university academics have shown but also the institutional staying power of a near thousand-year-old entity like Oxford University. In April, the artist Beeple had spoken to d.school students at Stanford University about AI and creativity, down the road from his mid-career show at NODE, Palo Alto, just a few weeks before Holly Herndon joined Refik Anadol on stage for a Schwarzman Centre panel discussion on “AI, Creativity and Ethics”, along with Professor Raphaël Millière, of the Institute for Ethics in AI, Oxford University, and Dr Kathryn Eccles, of the Oxford Internet Institute.
These examples of artists being offered institutional space to address society’s most pressing concerns feel indicative of how Schwarzman Centre, NODE, and their companion mould-breakers represent a genuinely innovative culture, one that places art of the digital era in custom-designed space, working with pre-release software or bespoke AI models. These events also represent an agile connection between artists, and the archival richness of established academic institutions, places that have what Erkiliç so precisely describes as “institutional stamina”, to examine long-range, long-form solutions to the world’s existential challenges.
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