The Project
Creative Symbiosis is an independent research project exploring how artists build sustained creative partnerships with AI, supported by a group of distinguished scholars.
Dr. Zafer Bilda
Researcher & Founder
Zafer Bilda is a creative practitioner and researcher whose work spans two decades at the intersection of creativity, cognition, and technology. His PhD in Design Cognition at the University of Sydney examined the micro-mechanics of visual reasoning and aesthetic judgement. His postdoctoral research at UTS's Creativity and Cognition Studios produced the creative engagement model, a framework for understanding how creative relationships develop through dialogue between participant and system. He co-founded an AI-powered video platform for personalised storytelling, works as a design consultant on human-centred AI projects, and explores AI-human collaboration through his own music production. Creative Symbiosis extends that empirical habit to the question of how artists develop sustained creative partnerships with AI.
Associate Advisors
Creative Symbiosis is supported by a group of distinguished scholars whose work spans digital art, practice-based research, human-computer interaction, and new media curation.
Dr Linda Candy
Independent Scholar
Linda Candy is a renowned scholar in practice-based research and the creative arts. She has authored and co-edited numerous influential texts, including The Creative Reflective Practitioner and Practice-Based Research: Foundations and Frameworks. As co-founder of the Creativity and Cognition symposia, her work bridges art, technology and research methodologies as well as fostering interdisciplinary creative collaboration.
Her research into how creative practitioners think, reflect and collaborate has focused on how digital systems can enhance and extend creative work. Other books include Explorations in Art and Technology, Interactive Experience in the Digital Age, Interacting: Art, Research and the Creative Practitioner, and The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research (2022).
Prof. Ernest Edmonds
Emeritus Professor, De Montfort University
Ernest Edmonds is an internationally celebrated pioneer in digital art and computing research. In 2017, he received two ACM Lifetime Achievement Awards: from SIGGRAPH for Digital Art and from SIGCHI for Computer Human Interaction. He is Founding Editor of the journal Knowledge Based Systems.
Edmonds' work continues to shape the fields of human-computer interaction and computational creativity.
Dr. Deborah Turnbull Tillman
Senior Lecturer, UNSW Art & Design
Deborah Turnbull Tillman is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art & Design for the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at UNSW. She is an educator teaching into the Masters of Curating and Cultural Leadership and a curator specialising in design, technology and new media.
Her current leadership role is an inaugural position (Executive, Culture and Technology), bringing educational scholarship to the forefront of Social Robotics research in the Creative Robotics Lab in Paddington. An editor, author and curator, Deb is interested in interactive and media arts and the audience's role in engaging with technology through art.
Prof. Craig Vear
Coming soon
Collaborate
I am actively seeking collaborators to extend this work. If you are a practitioner, researcher, developer, or institution interested in contributing, get in touch.