Professor Drew Hemment
Job title:
Professor in Data Arts and Society & Theme Lead in Interpretive Technologies for Sustainability at The Alan Turing Institute
Office:
Edinburgh Futures Institute
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkBiography
Professor Drew Hemment (he/him) has been a leading figure in the emergence of digital culture in Europe for close to four decades. As Theme Lead in Interpretive Technologies for Sustainability at The Alan Turing Institute and Professor of Data Arts and Society at the University of Edinburgh, he leads Doing AI Differently, an international initiative advancing a fundamental shift in AI development – one that positions the humanities and arts as integral, rather than supplemental, to technical innovation. He directs the Artificial Intelligence Humanities Sandpits for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and leads The New Real centre for AI, Arts and Futures research and Festival Futures at Edinburgh Futures Institute.
His research develops anticipatory methods for shaping technological emergence through artistic and collective inquiry. He investigates how interpretive approaches from the arts and humanities can inform AI systems capable of engaging meaningfully with cultural complexity. He originated and has led the development of experiential AI, developing systems that enhance, rather than replace, human interpretive capacity.
Hemment works at the intersection of emerging technology, artistic practice, and critical research. In 1995, he founded FutureEverything, named by The Guardian one of the top ten ideas festivals worldwide, and by Arts Council England as "one of the key touch-point organisations" connecting research and creative communities. In 2016, he founded GROW Observatory, the world’s first continental-scale citizens’ observatory. Between 1988 and 1992, he was a DJ and organiser of seminal events cited by The Observer as one of the five most influential moments in early UK electronic dance culture.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a member of the Editorial Board at Leonardo, Hemment is a frequent public speaker and media contributor. He has been an expert witness on AI for BBC's Moral Maze and a film critic for BBC Radio Scotland's Afternoon Show. His work has received 14 international awards, including the Soil Award (Winner), STARTS Prize (Honorary Mention), Lever Prize (Winner), and Prix Ars Electronica (Honorary Mention).
You can contact Drew on drew.hemment [at] ed.ac.uk.
Building Near Futures, Course Co-Organiser
Edinburgh Futures Institute, SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate)
This course develops students' agency and critical competencies in envisioning, articulating, and questioning ideas about the future. By introducing futuring frameworks, methods and tools, it equips students to investigate future scenarios, challenges and controversies with and for society. It explores how futures methods - including creative and experiential methods - can generate insights that can be implemented in the present to effect real world change. In teams, students create fragments of near future worlds, and work together to display those fragments in an online, near future publication or gallery.
Research
Research
Hemment, D., Kommers, C., et al. (2025). Doing AI Differently: Rethinking the Foundations of AI via the Humanities. White Paper. London: The Alan Turing Institute. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16421295
Kommers, C., Ahnert, R., Antoniak, M., Benetos, E., Benford, S., Bunz, M., … Hemment, D. (2025). Computational Hermeneutics: Evaluating Generative AI as a Cultural Technology. SSRN Preprint. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5409144
Hemment, D., Nathan, C. (2025). Doing AI Differently: Policy Note. London: The Alan Turing Institute. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16421465
Hemment, D. (2025). Doing AI Differently: Methodology Report – Innovations in intentional field formation and upstream humanities integration. London: The Alan Turing Institute. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16421557
Hemment, D., Murray-Rust, D., Belle, V., Aylett, R., Vidmar, M., Broz, F. (2024). Experiential AI: Between Arts and Explainable AI. Leonardo. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02524
Hemment, D., Vidmar, M, Koppel, K., Earl, S. (2024). Open Prototyping: The Co-creation Toolkit. The New Real. https://doi.org/10.2218/newreal.9613
Bryan-Kinns, N., Ford, C., Zheng, S., Kennedy, H., Chamberlain, A., Lewis, M., Hemment, D., et al., (2024). Explainable AI for the Arts 2 (XAIxArts2). C&C '24: Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Creativity & Cognition https://doi.org/10.1145/3635636.3660763.
Hemment, D., Currie, M., Bennett, SJ., Elwes, J., Ridler, A., Sinders, C., Vidmar, M., Hill, R., Warner, H. (2023). AI in the Public Eye: Building Public AI Literacy through Critical AI Art. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). Chicago. https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594052.
Hemment, D., Simperl, E., Sandler, M., Kennedy, K., Benford, B., Manghani, S. (2024). A manifesto for Intelligent Experiences. The New Real Magazine. Vol 1, No 1. https://doi.org/10.2218/newreal.9248
Hemment, D. (2023). Generative AI Arts: A Synthetic Future Foretold. The New Real Magazine. Vol 1, No 1, Editorial. https://doi.org/10.2218/newreal.9246
Hemment, D., Vidmar, M., Panas, D., Murray-Rust, D., Belle, V., and Aylett, R. (2023). Agency and legibility for artists through Experiential AI. In the 1st International Workshop on Explainable AI for the Arts (XAIxArts). ACM Creativity and Cognition (C&C) 2023. Online, 3 pages. https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02327
Hemment, D. (2020). Reordering the assemblages of the digital through art and open prototyping. Leonardo (Vol. 53, No.5). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p.529-536. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01861
Hemment, D., Bletcher, J., & Coulson, S. (2020). Open Prototyping: A framework for Combining Art and Innovation in the IoT and Smart Cities. In Eds. Hjorth, L., de Souza e Silva, A., Lanson, K. The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art. London: Routledge. pp,.270-283. ISBN 9780367197162
Hemment, D., Aylett, R., Belle,. V., Murray-Rust, D., Luger, E., Hillston, J., Rovatsos, M., Broz, F. (2019). Experiential AI. AI Matters. 5: 1. ACM New York. https://sigai.acm.org/static/aimatters/5-1/AIMatters-5-1-10-Hemment.pdf
Current PhD students
Bilyana Palankasova
Valuing festivals as incubators of digital creativity – capturing the process of commissioning and presenting digital art