Material Encounters — Creativity in the Times of AI

About

Material Encounters: Creativity in the Times of AI is a forthcoming monograph under contract with Oxford University Press (provisional publication date 2027), co-authored by Dr. Caterina Moruzzi and Dr. Despina Papadopoulos. The book explores how creativity is conceptualized, practiced, and mediated through technologies of making — from artistic practice and material engagement to computational systems and artificial intelligence.

The workshop seeks to generate material and perspectives to integrate in the book, and to strengthen international collaborations between the University of Edinburgh and the Athens-based creative research community. Workshop participants will be invited to join the "Creativity, AI, and the Human" research cluster led by Caterina Moruzzi at Edinburgh Futures Institute, to facilitate longer-term collaboration.

Together, the authors bring a rare synthesis of philosophical insight and artistic experimentation, seeking to articulate new frameworks for understanding creativity as an emergent, relational process between minds, materials, and machines.

Format

A 2-day workshop bringing together 8 invited practitioners with deep material expertise from diverse backgrounds and practices: ceramicists, weavers, stone workers, digital artists, coders, and researchers. Participants will include both academics and practitioners, ensuring a balance between theoretical frameworks and embodied material knowledge.

Day 1 · Morning

Foundations and Mapping

The workshop opens with an introduction to the book's core themes, methodology, and key concepts around creativity, technē, intentionality, process, desire, and materiality, with particular focus on how AI challenges our understanding of material engagement. This is followed by a guided discussion in which participants map these theoretical concepts onto their own creative practices, identifying points of resonance, tension, and divergence.

Day 1 · Afternoon

The Language of the Material

Each participant presents a 20-minute demonstration of their material practice, focusing on moments when the material resists, surprises, or guides their work. The focus is on making visible the tacit knowledge embedded in material expertise: how one learns to read a material's affordances, recognize its limits, and develop competence through sustained engagement.

Day 2 · Morning

Material Exchange

Participants work in groups of three, engaging directly with each other's tools, materials, and processes. A ceramicist will experiment with code; a digital artist will work with clay; a weaver will explore algorithmic pattern generation. This hands-on exchange is designed to defamiliarize material practice and surface assumptions about skill, control, and creative agency across different material domains.

Day 2 · Afternoon

Reflection and Theoretical Implications

The final session synthesizes insights from the material exchange through facilitated conversation, with participants reflecting on how engaging with unfamiliar materials has shifted their understanding of their own practice. The day ends with a dinner and open dialogue where ideas acquire shape in a dynamic and lived manner.

Questions the workshop will address

Material resistance and agency How do materials assert their own logic? What does it mean when the material talks back?
Tool versus material Is AI a material to work with or a tool to work on materials? Where is the boundary?
Working with / working on What distinguishes collaboration with a material from instrumental use of it?
Material logic and constraint How do materials create productive constraints? When does constraint become limitation?
Temporality and response How do different temporal rhythms of material response — the drying of clay, the rendering of an image, the training of a model — shape creative process and possibility?

Organizers

Caterina Moruzzi

Chancellor's Fellow in Design Informatics · University of Edinburgh

A philosopher of art and technology whose recent work investigates human–AI co-creativity and the perception of embodiment in computational systems. Working at the intersection of the philosophy of art, history and philosophy of human and artificial creativity, and the philosophy of AI. Her insights on art practices and the art sector come from her background as a classically trained pianist.

As BRAID Research Fellow, she leads a project in collaboration with Adobe to promote the responsible integration of AI tools into creative practices. As Co-Investigator in the UKRI-funded CoSTAR and DECaDE projects, she investigates the disruptive effects that emerging technological innovations have on creative workflows. In 2024 she started the research cluster "Creativity, AI, and the Human" at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, which now counts more than 120 members from across academia, industry, and the third sector.

Published in the European Journal for Philosophy of Science, British Journal of Aesthetics, Leonardo (MIT Press), and proceedings of CHI and the International Conference on Computational Creativity. Co-editor, with Prof. Francisco Tigre Moura, of a Routledge collection on AI and the creative industry.

Despina Papadopoulos

Artist & Researcher · Philosophy Machines

An artist and researcher working at the intersection of affective intelligence and sensory design, developing alternative AI systems for human-machine collaboration. Challenging inevitability in technological discourses, proposing ways of engaging with technology that embrace complexity, sensuality, and unruliness rather than reduction and control. Her practice of making-as-theory — where the synesthetic materiality of ideas, encountered through wearable and embodied technologies, video essays and photographic assemblages — yields new ontological possibilities for how we inhabit technological systems. Over two decades of working with tangible interfaces and haptic systems, this practice has resulted in five patents in e-textile design and interactive interfaces.

Her PhD thesis (Royal College of Art), The Unruliness of Matter, argues that AI systems can be re-crafted from processes of reduction into expansive sites of co-creation through deliberate kinking of established patterns. This work was supported by a technē Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in collaboration with Google AI.

Love Robots — robots that love each other, not you, and serve as avatars for love — will premiere at the House of Beautiful Business Forum in Athens, May 2026.