MA in Artificial Intelligence & Digital Art

Royal College of Art

The Artificial Intelligence & Digital Art (AiDA) MA/MFA is a new programme, with its first intake in September 2027. The programme develops your artistic and technical agency to shape how AI is imagined, made and experienced. Through contemporary art, creative coding and computational practice, you explore how AI is shaped by culture, histories, data, labour, infrastructures and material resources. You work across photography, installation, performance, robotics, software, data, moving image and networked media, bringing computational systems into dialogue with social, political, material and cultural contexts. The programme supports you to develop critical and creative approaches to AI through experimental studio practice, research and making, while questioning the relationships that computational systems establish, reproduce and transform. While the intensive one-year MA route focuses on developing critical and technical agency through an Independent Research Project, the extended two-year MFA route builds on this foundation to cultivate sustained creative practice and professional leadership. Programme structure: Term 1 In Term 1, you establish your studio practice within one of several Conditions, experimental studio and research environments through which you explore Capture. You develop artistic methodologies for observing, recording and interpreting how computational systems encounter the world, working in small research groups to translate situated questions into material, spatial and experimental forms. Alongside this, Creative Coding develops the computational fluency needed to understand and intervene in the systems encountered through your work. Term 2 In Term 2, you work within a new Condition, providing a different context through which you explore Stimulus–Response. You investigate what happens when computational systems act within the world, exploring how they respond, interact, classify, decide and produce consequences across technical systems, bodies, environments and publics. The Systems units support you in developing these investigations into ambitious artistic propositions while preparing for your Independent Research Project. Also in Term 2, a choice of elective units allows you to shape your own learning journey. You can work alongside students from other programmes, bringing your practice into dialogue with different creative approaches. Term 3 In Term 3, the MA culminates in the Independent Research Project, bringing together the artistic methodologies developed through Conditions, the computational fluency established through Creative Coding and the approaches to realisation explored through Systems. Projects are presented publicly as part of the RCA Show, followed by a focus on professional practice, documentation, preservation and the continued life of your work beyond the programme.

School of Arts & Humanities