Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity

A Foresight Lab report Noemi Ponzoni, Jac Sanscartier, Arina Mnatsakanyan, Jonny Freeman November 2025 Future in Praxis Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity An exploration of what creative practitioners’ negotiations around machine learning, platforms, and labour reveal about emerging patterns of change Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity An exploration of what creative practitioners’ negotiations around machine learning, platforms, and labour reveal about emerging patterns of change A Foresight Lab report Noemi Ponzoni, Jac Sanscartier, Arina Mnatsakanyan, Jonny Freeman November 2025 Driven by the UK’s leading Creative Industries experts, the CoSTAR Foresight Lab is researching the adoption, use and impact of new, emergent and convergent technologies in gaming, TV, film, performance and digital entertainment. Our findings will inform research, development and innovation across the Creative Industries, including the R&D taking place through the convergent screen technologies and performance in real time (CoSTAR) programme, the UK R&D network for creative technology. CoSTAR is a £75.6 million national R&D network of laboratories that are developing new technology to maintain the UK’s world-leading position in gaming, TV, film, performance, and digital entertainment. Delivered by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council, the programme is supporting new innovations and experiences that will enrich the UK’s creative industries, economy, and culture. The network comprises the National Lab, the Realtime Lab, the Live Lab, the Screen Lab and the Foresight Lab. CoSTAR is funded through UK Research and Innovation’s Infrastructure Fund, which supports the facilities, equipment and resources that are essential for researchers, businesses, and innovators to do groundbreaking work. You can find out more by visiting www.costarnetwork.co.uk. Foresight Lab partners and contributors Core Partners: Prof Jonny Freeman; Cimeon Ellerton-Kay; Jac Sanscartier (Goldsmiths, University of London) Prof Frauke Zeller; Prof Melissa Terras MBE; Dr Suzanne R Black; Gavin Inglis (University of Edinburgh) Prof Graham Hitchen; Dr Ekaterina Tarnovskaya; Dr Vicki Williams (Loughborough University) Rishi Coupland; Keir Powell-Lewis; John Sandow; Brian Tarran (BFI) Delivery Partners: Florence Mansfield (Arup) Prof Hasan Bakhshi MBE; Dr Tom Cahill-Jones; Prof Giorgio Fazio; Dr Sarah Najm (Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre) Brendan Miles (Data Thistle) Chiara Badiali; Natalie Highwood; Alison Tickell (Julie’s Bicycle) Arina Mnatsakanyan; Jodie Pearton; Noemi Ponzoni; Anna Stewart; Lewis Turner-Brown (i2 media research) Leon Forde; Marta Moretto; Joshua Dedman; Emma Openshaw; Peter Cobb; Kiera Obi; Lili Ruzsiczky (Olsberg•SPI) Patrick Bradley (Station12) The Lab is administered by Petra Lindnerova; Daniel McCarthy; Tom Steer. The CoSTAR Foresight Lab Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity i Contents Acknowledgements iii Foreword by Professor Jonny Freeman iv Executive Summary 1 Introduction to Humans 2 Moments and Humans 2 About this work stream 2 This report 3 Who gets to own machine learning? 6 AI, Games and the Future of Creative Interaction with Prof. Marco Gillies 6 Composition, ownership and prototypes with Delphos AI 10 Data, Civic Engagement and the Importance of Visibility with Domestic Data Streamers 12 What platforms will facilitate culture? 14 Control, Physics and Holographic media with Lore Oxford 14 Creative flows, Infrastructure, and Disintermediation with Olyn 19 Mirrors, Digital Attunement and the Body with Dr. Tiara Roxanne 21 How will creative work evolve? 24 Tech convergence, workflows and the reconfiguring of live performance with Halina Rice 24 Spatial sound, collaboration and multi-sensory ecosystems with MONOM 28 Scene polarisation, creative labour and the city with Andy Crysell 31 Patterns →Design Principles 33 Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity ii ii Foresight Board Our Foresight Board is a collective of leaders working in visual effects, gaming, extended reality, production, broadcasting, machine learning, worldbuilding, and the arts. This group was instrumental in the delivery of this report, as detailed on page 39. Dave Bull, Professor at University of Bristol and Director at MyWorld Darren Cosker, Professor at University of Bath and Principal Scientist at Microsoft Sarah Ellis, Director of Digital at Royal Shakespeare Company Steve Jelley, Global Head of Virtual Production at D-NEG and Co-CEO at Dimension Gaby Jenks, Digital Director at Factory International / Manchester International Festival Greg Maguire, Professor at Ulster University and Founder & CEO at HUMAIN Alex McDowell RDI, Professor at University of Southern California, Director at World Building Institute, and Co-Founder & Creative Director at Experimental Design Sylvia Pan, Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London Romana Ramzan, Producer at No Code Studio Francesca Sanderson, CEO at Figurative Bill Thompson, Head of Public Value Research at BBC R&D Lincoln Wallen, CTO at Framestore Lincoln Wallen, CTO at Framestore Nell Whitley, Executive Producer at Marshmallow Laser Feast Deborah Williams OBE, independent in the creative industries Alex Wills, Chief Experience Officer at disguise Audiences Cross-Lab Group Thank you to the researchers of the CoSTAR Network part of the Audiences Cross-lab group, in particular: Suzanne Black, Hazel Dixon, Ecem Ince, Maruša Levstek, Joe Williams and Andy Woods, and in memory of Laryssa Whittaker, who was with the group from the start. Acknowledgements Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity iii Foreword by Professor Jonny Freeman The creative industries are entering a period of profound transformation. Technologies once confined to speculative fiction are now embedded in the workflows of artists, producers, and creative organisations. Yet, as these tools accelerate, so too do the questions they raise: Who owns the systems that shape our creative futures? How do platforms influence not just what we make, but how we live and connect? And what does creative work look like when the boundaries between human and machine, physical and digital, dissolve? Futures in Praxis is our first step in answering these questions from the ground up. It complements our earlier Moments report by moving from systemic foresight to the lived realities of those designing, shaping, and experiencing these futures. Through conversations with practitioners, innovators, and cultural thinkers, we uncover patterns that matter, not as predictions, but as signals of possibility. This report is not about declaring certainties. It is about opening dialogue, surfacing tensions, and amplifying voices that challenge the hype with nuance and imagination. In doing so, we aim to equip the CoSTAR Network, and the wider Creative Industries with insights and foresight to inform responsible innovation, inclusive practice, and bold experimentation. The future of creative technology will not be written by algorithms alone. It will be coauthored by people, by their values, their desires, and their capacity to imagine otherwise. This report is our invitation to you to join that conversation. Professor Jonny Freeman Director, CoSTAR Foresight Lab Please cite as: Ponzoni, N., Sanscartier, J., Mnatsakanyan, A., Freeman, J. "Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity. An exploration of what creative practitioners’ negotiations around machine learning, platforms, and labour reveal about emerging patterns of change". CoSTAR Foresight Lab. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17541829 Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity iv This report introduces a new work stream (Humans) within our foresight work, responding to and expanding on the inquiry initiated in Introduction to Moments (2024). As Moments identified three areas of complexity shaping the future of convergent media (ownership of machine learning, the power of platforms, and the evolution of creative work), this report examines how these tensions are lived and negotiated in practice. Drawing from extended horizon scanning as well as from nine in-depth conversations with creative workers, industry leaders, and cultural experts, this report explores how people across the creative ecosystem are grappling with change. It situates artificial intelligence, platformisation, and threatened creative labour not as abstract forces but as lived conditions shaping daily decisions, career trajectories and visions of the future. The report translates these observations into Patterns (recurring dynamics and tensions) and Design Principles (strategic orientations for innovation), which then informed a participatory co-design exercise undertaken with our Foresight Board. Each Design Principle captures a tension: between automation and authorship, openness and control, scale and intimacy, experimentation and responsibility. Collectively, they express a set of shared values: modularity in systems and collaborations; the centrality of the creative worker; investment in the “middle” layers of the ecosystem; sensitivity to audiences’ embodied and evolving experiences rather than a technology-first logic; and a commitment to transparency within a potential parametric paradigm of design. In the final phase, the Foresight Board translated these Design Principles into four possible interventions: Capture the Body, The Independent Playbook, Threshold Licensing, and Art as Ensemble. Each offers a very early prototype illustrating how abstract principles might materialise as new forms of creative practice, governance, or technology. Across these inquiries, a coherent picture begins to emerge. The future of convergent media cannot be defined by technological capacity alone, but by how human agency is distributed within it: who authors the tools, who owns the infrastructures, who defines the terms of participation, and who benefits from creative labour. This report is written for those designing, funding, and enabling creative innovation (from policymakers and investors to cultural organisations, studios, and startups). It translates qualitative insight into principles and practical ideas that can inform strategic decision-making about where and how to invest in human-centred innovation. Ultimately, Future in Praxis (and this work stream more generally) argues that foresight in the creative industries must begin not from technology, but from people. It begins collecting the capacities, rights, and desires that will determine what kinds of creative futures we choose to build. Executive Summary Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 1 Moments and Humans Published by the CoSTAR Foresight Lab, Moments focuses on sector and technology foresight from a systems lens, using strategic foresight, investment awareness, speculative design, and technical expertise across CoSTAR to make sense of complex change in the sector. Moments sits alongside Humans, a complementary workstream exploring foresight from an experiential lens, for workers and audiences. Humans explores emergence using foresight, UX research, psychology, and design. Both research workstreams are informed by a board of leaders across the sector, comprising our Foresight Board, a diverse collective reflecting creative convergence. This is the first report of the Humans workstream. About this work stream “We live in times where every technological choice we make as society has exponentially impactful consequences & so we should value more the voices that instead of pushing further (often misinformed) hype, help us grow more inquisitive & resilient to the truly expansive challenges we are & will be faced with.” – M. Bielskyte1 The Humans work stream moves the areas of enquiry from Moments into empirical investigation. It does so by using a mix of UX research, Foresight, Psychology, Design research and Media studies. Humans centres the experiences of those designing, shaping, and interacting with these futures. Humans prioritises understanding of behaviours, needs, aspirations and the affective responses of individuals and groups of people as the foundation for meaningful innovation. Humans asserts that this inquiry should guide the direction of innovation, ensuring that emerging technologies align with the intentions and values of those they impact. Humans centres people not conceptually but as stewards navigating our post-Anthropocene reality toward awareness of our rights, roles and responsibilities within the broader ecosystem where we coexist with the planet and machines – recognising that our responsibilities towards both are fundamentally intertwined with our collective livelihood and survival.2 1 M. Bielskyte on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/monikabielskyte_linkedin-hive-mind-i-am-reaching-out-for-activity7302704006840147968-tcme/, accessed on 19 August 2025 2 The researchers involved in this work stream recognise the importance of ecosystem-based design approaches, which consider humans as part of broader interdependent systems. While other parts of the programme engage with this more expansively (e.g. Moments and Carbon), this work stream focuses deliberately on the human not to assert their centrality, but to rebalance the technology discourse. Introduction to Humans Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 2 This Report Serving as an introduction to the Humans work stream, this report aims to put forward a format of investigation for this work stream and of its dialogue with Moments, both of which will co-evolve as will be reflected in subsequent publications. The investigation in this report begins in direct conversation with Introduction to Moments (published one year ago), where three emerging areas of complexity were introduced as embodying “intense future uncertainty with no clear answer at present”.3 These areas (reintroduced below) are highly relevant to the future of convergent creative media technologies. For this reason, they invite open questioning and exploration which were initially pursued within Introduction to Moments itself, and which we are continuing to pursue in this report through different lenses. The three areas of complexity identified are: 1. Who gets to own machine learning? It is unclear what shapes machine learning will take in the creative industries, and what implications it will have on both socio-economic dynamics and artistic workflows and outputs. 2. What platforms will facilitate culture? Media production and distribution is transformed by digital platforms, which drastically influence both industry and human relationship with expression. 3. How will creative work evolve? We live in a complex time of drastic changes to creative work. The chaos in creative workforce has direct impact on high level dynamics like labour organisation, the role of creative industries, identities and cultural taste.4 This report begins to explore how these questions are currently asked in practice, across different creative spaces, communities and industries. By examining real-world cases, we seek to trace and understand how people are grappling with the three emerging complexities in ways that challenge, reinforce or transform existing paradigms. This exploration is naturally structured around the three questions above. Each question is unpacked in three conversations that focus on the lived experiences of different stakeholders: creative workers, business, and audiences (in the form of cultural and audience experts). These three ‘roles’ capture and reflect experientially distinct perspectives within the creative sector and act as nodes of the wider system. All conversations are ultimately about infrastructural technologies though, because of their exploratory nature, they bleed into adjacent areas of interest. Similarly to Introduction to Moments, the aim here is not to come to a univocal conclusion; instead, we are opening conversation that may surface patterns that unify different perspectives across the areas of complexity. We are recognising patterns, speculating and therefore negotiating the future through conversation. The format of the report also reflects this aim: the nine interviews (originally 60-minute semistructured) have been edited to maximise clarity while preserving the centrality of the human (and therefore subjective) perspective. Once again, one of the objectives of this report is to shine a light on a number of people working at fruitful intersections to investigate what is on their minds, what challenges they are facing and what excites them. 3 Sanscartier, J., Ponzoni, N., & Freeman, J. (2024). Introduction to Moments. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14420085 4 Id. Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 3 In addition to a conversation, we asked the three creative workers interviewed to write their own mini-scenarios rooted in the area of complexity they were speaking to. As introduced in our previous report, the scenarios are a glimpse into a plausible vision of the future: their scenes are often driven by intuition, emotions, meaningful signals, emergent technological possibilities and socio-political trajectories. These stories reveal what is on the minds of a small cohort of creative workers for whom the evolution of these complexities hold high stakes, and capture in particular those images that can’t come into focus yet via more structured interviewing, as they correspond to more uncertain, almost intuitive, territory. Initial directions (often referred to as patterns in this report) have been elaborated into five Design Principles (p. 33). There are, of course, more insights the reader can elaborate from the text, and it is our open invitation to you to do so based on your own experience and areas of interest. In foresight, patternsrepresent the nascent themes that emerge from qualitative research, offering both analytical insight and generative potential for innovation. They serve as the connective tissue between discrete observations and broader systemic understanding5 and hold multiple possibilities and contradictions – allowing for a nuanced interpretation of complex phenomena.6 They are always partial and emerge from specific perspectives and contexts rather than claiming universal truths, but offer a bridge between research insights and strategic direction (and can often spark ideas for tactical application). These patterns were elaborated into five Design Principles, summarising a strong tension that emerged from the interviews and proposing a path forward that addresses it. The principles are fundamental rules that may be applied to vastly different interventions. In turn, these were used as a baseline of both a number of practical implications and of a generative activity with the Foresight Board focused on outlining possible practical interventions (and which makes up the last section of the report). In October 2025, the Foresight Board was invited to develop early concepts for possible interventions: products, services or programmes that embody the design principles and exemplify innovation within convergent media. The activity aimed to synthesise how one or more design principles may be operationalised into tangible formats that respond to current lived experiences and express possible practical orientations. As a final introductory note, this report is written for anyone shaping the future of creative innovation: from policymakers and investors to studios, startups, and cultural institutions. It aims to equip decision-makers and practitioners with grounded insight into how technological and human capacities are evolving together, and where strategic intervention could enable more equitable, imaginative, and sustainable forms of creative production. 5 Schwartz, P. (1991). The art of the long view. 6 Le Guin, U. (1986). The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/mirror/u/uk/ursula-k-le-guin-the-carrier-bagtheory-of-fiction.pdf Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 4 outputs without enforceable copyright, the structure collapses. “Why would I go through the stress of recording an album if some AI company can just do it themselves?” Tolchenov asks. This is the message already expressed by many artists so far, in initiatives such as the silent album released earlier in 2025 by hundreds of artists including Kate Bush, Damon Albarn and Hans Zimmer in response to an announcement of the UK government’s plans to change copyright law. An AI Understudy for Every Artist Delphos’ intervention is to work at the level of composition rather than audio. Their models require as few as five tracks from a composer to learn stylistic patterns. The result is not an anonymous corpus scraped from the internet, but a “personalised understudy” – one tethered to the original composer. Though the high costs mean it is currently out of reach for most individual artists, record labels and publishers are already using the tool: one example is Zaytoven, the US producer known for collaborations with Gucci Mane and Future. A Zaytoven beat commands upwards of $6,000, pricing out countless aspiring rappers. With Delphos, Zaytoven’s style can be scaled. Hip-hop artists who could never afford his time now access beats shaped by his compositional DNA, at prices more aligned with their budgets10. The implications extend beyond pricing. In one case, a producer trained a model remotely and, when a major vocalist arrived at the studio, he generated several beats from the model, chose one, and recorded on the spot. Within hours, a new track was complete – and, critically, the original producer retained credit and royalties. “It functioned exactly as a normal song would,” Tolchenov explains. “Composition, master recording, streaming distribution, royalties: all intact.” Unlike ‘scraping’ models, the human source remains embedded in the process. This brings Tolchenov to our original question, which he also considers the central issue: ownership. Who owns the outputs of machine learning models, the user, the model creator, or the data source? His answer is unequivocal: “the data source”. He distinguishes between models whose outputs differ from their training data (e.g. beat detectors or tempo analysis tools) and those whose outputs compete with the originals. In the latter case (generative composition) ownership must remain with the original composers. (Who is the artist?) Where, then, is the balance between human creativity and machine support? Once again, history becomes a rich resource that Tolchenov invokes to challenge assumptions and to sharpen what is unique about this era of technological innovation: in the 1980s, sampling was initially dismissed as the death of music, “now we see that that hasn’t happened, it just allowed us to have way more diverse music”. And again: In XIV century Europe polyphonic composers were venerated as divine vessels, but as music theory was democratised, more people found out that this was something they could do, too. Despite finding some language at the intersection of music and AI “dehumanising”, such as calling music ‘training data’, Tolchenov hopes that AI may enable easier drafting and prototyping: “composers often become emotionally entangled with first drafts; the way we often work is: you write something and then you hate it, and then you spend a week thinking about what a terrible composer you are, and then you finish it”. Tolchenov’s hope is that AI may promote an “emotionally healthier way of working” for artists. 10 This raises interesting economic questions around demand and supply that are outside the remit of this report. Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 11 Data, Civic Engagement and the Importance of Visibility with Domestic Data Streamers Domestic Data Streamers (DDS) is a Barcelona-based studio. DDS transforms data into tangible, emotionally resonant experiences focused on storytelling and civic engagement. Founded twelve years ago, DDS has grown into an interdisciplinary studio of about thirty people (a cap deliberately set by the founders). Their work has been commissioned by the United Nations, UNICEF, and city governments; they have also collaborated with foundations, NGOs, and, occasionally, big technology companies like Google11. The multiand inter-disciplinary approach of DDS is exemplified in the recent project Forever Frequencies, a piece presented at the Barbican this year as part of the Feel the Sound exhibition. As part of the installation, visitors were asked to complete a quick survey about a past memory where music was involved and that the visitor would like to relive. The installation leverages locally run AI to analyse the responses and create a unique melody. For this piece, DDS also collaborated with four creatives, each contemplating their own personal bond with music and memory – their rhythms were available to visitors to listen. The work of Domestic Data Streamers stands out in a world where technology processes have become so opaque for the individual user that they are recognisable. In this context the means are either sublime or hostile, reflecting the dualism between techno-evangelism and luddism explored in Introduction to Moments. 11 It is interesting to point out that it is common for critical work in this space to be funded by the corporations who are directly or indirectly at the centre of the critique. Vara, V. (2025). Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. Random House. Forever Frequencies, DDS at the Barbican (2025) Forever Frequencies, DDS at the Barbican (2025) Culture & Auidences Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 12 We spoke to Pau Aleikum Garcia, co-founder and director of DDS Assimilation vs. Accommodation The studio’s long-standing focus is how data is instrumentalised, misinterpreted, and used to reshape reality. Their projects often grow into independent entities, such as Sixteen Times (air quality monitoring for hospitals and schools), Synthetic Memories (using generative AI for memory reconstruction in dementia care and displaced communities), and Cedra (developing ethical AI practices for international cooperation and public services). These spin-offs illustrate DDS’s strategy of letting research mature into infrastructures for social impact. At the root of these projects there is the belief that audiences are never passive recipients. Here, Garcia invokes the psychological framework of assimilation versus accommodation: the difference between new information that fits existing beliefs, and knowledge that disrupts and restructures them. This orientation towards audiences is embodied in the core of their methodological process: 1. Gathering data from unexpected places 2. Extracting insight from this unconventional data 3. Cultivating curiosity rather than over-explaining upfront 4. Building spaces of debate that ask good questions instead of simply presenting data 5. Promoting impact by providing tools for people to translate research findings into action or behavioural change “People take sides very quickly now. Our job is to create spaces where complexity can be felt before it’s rationalised away.” Politics of Visibility and Resistance via infrastructure A persistent thread in the conversation with Garcia is the politics of visibility. He draws a provocative analogy between electricity and artificial intelligence: both infrastructures are designed to be hidden, embedded within walls or interfaces, naturalised to the point of invisibility. This concealment is not accidental but functional: “the invisibility is functional, it generates less discussion and creates an imbalance of power.” For DDS, then, visibility is both an ethical stance and a design tactic. Many of their cultural projects deliberately open the “black box,” rendering legible the data pipeline through disclaimers, physical installations, or transparency in process. These acts are not only pedagogical but political: they resist the asymmetry of platforms where the transactional exchange of data is hidden. There are examples where the asymmetry was exposed and things were done differently as acts of reappropriation. Garcia mentions Te Hiku Media in New Zealand: a Māori radio station that resisted the commodification of their language by an American entertainment company, instead mobilising community participation and philanthropic support to develop a language model under their own governance. The example is poignant not only as a model of resistance, but as an exemplar of design and engineering to achieve self-sovereignty by a group historically outside of infrastructural authority. Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 13 As digital platforms have reshaped how culture is made, distributed, and experienced, they are also often invisibly determining what is visible, profitable, or valued. In this section, we examine how practitioners working across media production as well as community and audience engagement are contending with platform dynamics. Their reflections move between pragmatism and critique: recognising the utility of platforms as creative scaffolds while questioning their asymmetries. Through their experiences, we begin to see how cultural agency might be rebuilt within and beyond these architectures. What are the online spaces, tools and modes of coming together that reroute cultural power without replicating extractive and homogenising logics of existing platforms? Control, Physics and Holographic media with Lore Oxford Lore Oxford is a researcher, strategist and theorist with deep knowledge on the relationship between digital platforms and culture. She is particularly interested in understanding the architecture of online communities, the application of hype technologies, and the juxtaposition between desires for a digitally-enhanced society and a society in-sync. Currently leading insights and cultural intelligence at Reddit, she was previously Head of Cultural Insights at We Are Social, and throughout her career she has worked with all the mainstream platform and technology brands including Apple, Google, Netflix, TikTok and Meta. Her work has been featured on BBC News, D&AD, Campaign, Vox and more. But before this, she was a teenager on the internet. Oxford’s first contact with a digital cultural space was with Neopets: not as a space for cultural production, but as a way of learning how to navigate social dynamics with strangers online. Then came Myspace, circa 2004. “Myspace became a space to almost cosplay a new version of myself. It was where I constructed my first projection of self online, a way to navigate awkward social structures around me as a teenager, meeting other young people outside my immediate environment, and having more agency over who I wanted to be in the world.” What platforms will facilitate culture? Complexity #2 Creative Worker Lore Oxford as their online (platformed) self, and their offline self. Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 14 Culturing Online Oxford’s critical engagement with platforms began during her university studies in fashion journalism. Analysing fashion collections trained her to connect aesthetics with broader cultural contexts. Around the early 2010s, this sensibility expanded to memes and viral media, which no longer felt like mere reflections of culture but engines actively reshaping it. This pattern, of culturing where we spend time and make connections, grounds our reflections here. “At the time, people still wanted to draw a line between online and offline,” she notes. “That separation feels almost impossible now.” What has changed is not just the scale but the ontology of digital culture. Online platforms have become spaces where culture is constructed in real time, less an archive of social life than a generative force. Myspace, she argues, was an early template for how this was democratised. Its aesthetics, subcultures, and scenes demonstrated the seductive power of a fully curated world (i.e. long before worldbuilding became a buzzword in strategy decks). “We talk now about the vibe economy, where you can construct a world and sell people into it: the way Charli XCX did with Brat or tradwives do on Instagram. Myspace was technically a music platform, but I was more interested in the style and social worlds it created. It felt like an entire lifestyle, a value system. Seductive in the way a Wes Anderson film is: a coherent, orchestrated vibe. Platforms are brilliant at letting people curate a distinctive aesthetic others can instantly recognise and opt into.” Where people gather, culture crystallises, and platforms accelerate the process into lifestyle and economy. Control: A User’s Search If early platforms consolidated cultural life into singular hubs (e.g. Facebook rising as Myspace collapsed), today’s landscape shows a recurring pattern of users distributing themselves across multiple, bounded spaces. Oxford reads this not just as diversification but as a tactic of control: feeds are chaotic, so people manage the overwhelm by splitting their identities – professional updates on LinkedIn, a film diary on Letterboxd, a creative archive on Are.na. Research underscores this impulse. Studies link surveillance and collapsing contexts to negative affect12 13; fragmentation can be read as a coping strategy to reduce the psychic load of being constantly visible. Smaller, intentional platforms like Goodreads or Letterboxd feel bounded and safer, while at scale, Reddit’s subreddit model shows how communities carve governance structures to define their own cultural rules. This and tangential dynamics also suggest that users are retreating from larger spaces. Oxford mentions Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, inspired in turn by Liu Cixin’s prominent sci-fi Three Body Problem: in a dangerous universe, survival depends on concealment. Applied online, it suggests that users increasingly retreat to private or semi-private spaces to avoid surveillance, extraction and manipulation, and to reclaim agency over their participation in culture. 12 Loh, J., & Walsh, M. (2023). Time Heals: Context Collapse, Social Media and the Waning of Negative Affect. 13 Xuan Vu Huong. (2023). Exploring the Impactimpact of Social Mediasocial media on Mental Healthmental health from a Psychological Perspectivepsychological perspective: A Reviewreview of the Contemporary Literature.contemporary literature. International Journal of Current Science Research and Review, 066(10). https://doi.org/10.47191/ijcsrr/v6-i10-05 Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 15 Platform Physics14 If compartmentalisation provides a sense of control, it doesn’t resolve the tension between media production and consumption. Oxford describes today’s media environment as one of “binging”: a seamless flow of videos, sounds, and images consumed almost passively. For audiences, engagement feels implicit. For producers, however, the audience is always explicit: its presence, feedback, and demands are inescapable. At the heart of this lies platform design. Oxford draws on Caroline Busta and Lil Internet’s concept of platform physics: the idea that each platform has its own design forces shaping how content moves through it15. On Netflix, “gravity” is strong: when something spikes, it spikes hard, propelled by algorithms tuned for virality. “These differences aren’t cosmetic,” Oxford argues. “They change the very speed and flow of cultural circulation, which in turn shapes what and how producers make”. Oxford makes reference to another of Busta’s ideas, that of holographic media16: media ecosystems where communities themselves become a form of media, acting as filters through which multiple platforms are accessed, refracted, and linked17. In this model, content is not bound to a single environment but distributed, networked and composable. “Barbienheimer” (the viral coupling of the Barbie and Oppenheimer films at their release) or the universe around Charli XCX’s Brat both exemplify this new cultural form. They were not simply works of art or entertainment but gates to modes for participation. “The universe exists wherever your audience is,” Oxford notes. “It’s not unlike performance art, where the audience’s response is part of the work.” Remix culture, a cult mode of cultural interaction online once about subverting or recontextualising media, now finds itself pre-designed into the cultural product. Success means designing for dispersal, knowing the audience will multiply and mutate the work across platforms. 14 Busta, C. & Lil Internet. (2023). Holographic Media - Outland. Outland. https://outland.art/new-models-holographic-media/ . Accessed 21 August 2025. 15 Content is not the preferred word of the writer, but it is effective here to encompass different types of media, as well as how it is perceived by both industry and audiences online. 16 Id. 17 Id. Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 16 Scenario #1 by Lore Oxford: Liquid Media Amid radical personalisation, all media becomes iterative It’s 2040, and media streaming platforms now sync with neural interfaces that can read biometric responses to narrative elements in real-time, allowing stories to adapt moment by moment, bending to meet you where you are. One mother’s evening ritual begins when her biometric reader detects her stress levels and adjusts tonight’s episode of her favourite series: the protagonist’s anxiety is diffused through slower pacing, a warmer colour palette. Her eight-year-old daughter experiences the same base story but sees a world painted in brighter hues, with challenges that stretch her just beyond her current developmental stage. The technology emerged from therapeutic applications but has revolutionised all narrative media. Digitised books rewrite themselves based on reading age, speed and emotional response. Films exist in billions of versions, each one a unique conversation between human and algorithm. All media is iterative, and creatives are expected to build malleable narrative shells, rather than rich and nuanced worlds. The monoculture has dissolved altogether. Grassroots creative movements concern themselves with the question of whether genuine art can be experienced without friction, driving an uprising of intentionally controversial and un-alterable content. Meanwhile, cultural preservation societies emerge, hosting debate nights where groups experience identical, unmodified content, and are encouraged to argue about it. Hot takes from Letterboxd become a thrilling relic of nostalgia. Logan Voss 17 Scenario #2 by Lore Oxford: Creative Sanctuaries As platform burnout peaks, creative wellness is commodified By 2035, artists looking to protect their craft have migrated from engagement-driven platforms toward closed creative communities focused on process rather than output. These creative communities provide a relief from the rat race of the attention economy, and inevitable audience capture. On platforms discovered through peers in other forums or offline, writers gather for hours-long sessions where they share rough drafts without fear of screenshot or viral mockery. Musicians collaborate on works that may never see public release, finding joy in the process of creation itself. These platforms serve as both artist residencies and therapy groups: intimate, supportive, focused on craft. But while these spaces emerged from the exhaustion of performing creativity in public, only those with existing financial security can afford to access them. These platforms are highly exclusive, invite only, and charge substantial monthly fees, without monetisation tools, creating a clear boundary between creative practice and commercial performance. This is the wellness economy applied to creative fulfilment: proposed as healthy, but ultimately divisive. Meanwhile, younger artists and those without established revenue streams remain trapped in the attention economy, forced to optimise their crafts for algorithmic visibility while watching their more privileged peers disappear into protected ecosystems. Ruan Richard Rodrigues 18 Creative flows, Infrastructure, and Disintermediation with Olyn The transformation of media production and distribution over the past two decades is inseparable from the rise of digital platforms. Streaming services, social networks, and algorithm-driven ecosystems have altered how culture circulates, how value is extracted, and how audiences relate to expression itself. Yet as these platforms mature, cracks appear: homogenisation of content, the retreat from higher risk productions, and growing dissatisfaction among factions of creative workers who feel alienated from both their work and their audiences. Olyn is a direct-to-audience streaming platform positioned as an independent distribution service where creators get up to 90% of revenue. Its promise is to grant filmmakers control over their work and revenue share, while building direct audience relationships. By embracing decentralised, referral-driven distribution, Olyn aims to align niche storytelling with scalable monetisation. Films on Olyn have unique branded pages and analytics, with viewership being driven by social sharing rather than algorithms. We spoke to Ana Maria Jipa, co-founder and CEO of Olyn. Systems that don’t flatten Jipa has been fascinated “by the invisible mechanisms that shape our world” since she was a child in awe with how water and air moved. Circulation and flow became poles of enquiry that guided her to focus on both engineering and behavioural studies. The two concepts then became what underpinned Olyn: the ideas that the cultural flow wasn’t working properly and that “systems operated against the human experience, rather than for it”. So, Olyn emerged as an offer designed to “identify individuals rather than flatten them”, and to enable cultural participation to flow with more agency from filmmakers. Jipa’s analogy between streaming platforms and retail consolidation (with Olyn being dubbed as “the Shopify for filmmakers”) illuminates structural constraints in contemporary distribution systems. “Imagine Netflix, HBO, Prime, and other streaming giants as the Walmarts of the entertainment industry,” she observes. This comparison reveals how platform aggregation creates bottlenecks analogous to those that historically limited product innovation in consumer goods markets, where dominant distributors constrained variety and innovation by controlling market access18. The algorithmic curation systems that define streaming platforms optimise for engagement metrics and demographic categories, systematically undervaluing content that fails to conform to predetermined formulas. 18 Dobson, P. W., & Waterson, M. (1999). Retailer power: Recent developments and policy implications. Economic Policy, 14(28), 133–164. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0327.00048 Business Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 19 Disintermediation and value chain restructuring Traditional streaming platforms extract value through their role as intermediaries, capturing audience data and revenue shares while maintaining algorithmic control over discovery processes. Olyn’s architecture instead positions technology as utility infrastructure that enables direct relationships between cultural producers and audiences. This disintermediation operates across multiple dimensions simultaneously. The platform’s referral system monetises human curation and establishes it over algorithmic recommendation. Viewers who share films through referral links receive revenue shares, transforming passive audiences into active distribution participants. This mechanism crowdsources the curatorial function that platforms typically reserve for proprietary algorithms. Case studies demonstrate the practical implications of this disintermediation. Katja Meier’s TV series $hare was rejected by streaming platforms because its target audience (women over 50) was deemed commercially invalid. Using Olyn’s infrastructure, Meier bypassed these gatekeepers and successfully connected with her intended demographic. Similarly, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, which won seven Golden Globes after being labelled "un-distributable", exemplifies systematic failures in established evaluation mechanisms. These examples reveal what Jipa characterises as the suppression of “middle-tier” films, i.e. culturally significant content that doesn’t conform to either art house or blockbuster categories. The disintermediation model potentially serves cultural niches that platform-mediated systems systematically undervalue due to their optimisation for mass-market engagement. Platform design as economic architecture Olyn’s affordances may function as economic instruments that reconstitute fundamental relationships within cultural production systems19. The platform’s design embeds specific assumptions about value creation, circulation and capture that diverge from the extractive mechanisms characteristic of many digital platforms. The referral link architecture exemplifies this principle. By embedding revenue-sharing mechanisms directly into content distribution URLs, the platform transforms every recommendation into a potential economic transaction. This technical design choice eliminates the traditional separation between cultural advocacy and economic participation. Arguably, the technical affordance of automated revenue distribution thus constructs and formalises a new form of cultural labour. Similarly, the platform’s granular access controls and geo-blocking capabilities function enable creators to implement territorial and temporal release strategies previously available only to major distributors. These technical capacities reconstitute the filmmaker as an autonomous economic actor rather than a dependent content supplier. Effectively, the platform transforms creatives into creative shops with a direct channel to audience. Jipa identifies peers experimenting with reconfiguring product and infrastructure design: Kinema (community screenings), Seed&Spark (crowdfunding and audience building), and Creator Camp (grassroots training) – initiatives pointing to new formats of interactions between funders, producers and audiences that propose reshaping of creative and financial control. 19 Hutchby, I. (2001). Technologies, Texts and Affordances. Sociology, 35(2), 441–456. https://doi.org/10.1177/s0038038501000219 Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 20 Scenario by Halina Rice: The Spiritual and the Stadium Technology finds new ways to facilitate the human pursuit for meaning in connection and grandiosity. In response to a world saturated with easily generated content a greater desire for escape to meaningful connection emerges. At a grass roots level, small venues evolve to become multipurpose event spaces with modular formatting catering to an audience interested in experiences that heighten selfawareness, well-being and the spiritual. Collectives of a new genre of interdisciplinary artist forge cross immersive audio with visual and interaction technologies - blurring national boundaries they work together remotely; new music scenes derive from interests rather than locality. High-end sensory ‘experiential shows’ comprising 360 visuals, spatial audio and lighting catering for large audiences are funded by large scale corporate investment to service a desire for stadium size spectacle. Tanya Prodaan 27 Spatial sound, collaboration and multi-sensory ecosystems with MONOM MONOM is a Berlin-based experimental performance venue and spatial sound recording studio working across sound art, music, theatre, opera, dance and immersive. It houses the original 4DSOUND system: an omnidirectional audio environments using 48 speakers arranged in a grid and subwoofers placed under an acoustically transparent floor, immersing up to 400 listeners physically and sonically. MONOM hosts both artist residencies and public performances, and its team collaborates with artists and festivals globally from ideation to exhibition. MONOM’s mission is to “provide space and time for anyone who wants to expand the dimensions of their creative practice and to enrich communal and individual experiences of sound and art”23. 23 About MONOM — monom. https://www.monomsound.com/aboutmonom accessed on 11 September 2025 © Monom Business Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 28 We spoke to William Russell, founder of MONOM. This conversation provides insights into how creative enterprises are born around a technology system, and how labour practices, collaborations and audience relationships transform alongside it. As spatial sound sits at an inflection point between an innovator’s playground and broader adoption, it is a useful case study for understanding how this technology has reconfigured habits and economics so far, and where this fits within the performance ecosystem and changing audience demand. The Immersive Potential of Sound Not dissimilarly from the other two interviewees in this section of the report, Russell notes a stark division in live performance spaces between large commercial venues and grassroots. His critique focuses on what ‘content’ is facilitated in this polarised landscape, where visuals and spectacle take the main stage and acoustics becomes a lower priority, often in competition with monetisation and logistics priorities. We have encountered this idea before in our interviews, such as the idea of commodified sound as background rather than foreground (p. 13), but is proposed by Russell here under a different angle which is both cultural and technical, and speaks to the promise of spatial sound as a force that ties together live performance. The integration of spatial sound with other technologies illustrates how convergent media creates new possibilities for creative practice. Russell describes current explorations with AR and VR where their system “can recreate sound in virtual reality without headphones” and where “the hologram of the sound [is] in the room”, synchronised with visual elements. This is innovation for audience experience, but it is for creative work, too. Creators can “grab and “throw” sounds around the space – Russell himself uses a glove sensor to move the sound around in a way that is “more organic”. Embodied interaction models crop up again as emergent and creative-led formats of interaction with technology. Co-Production Hub Model MONOM’s evolution to a co-production studio reflects broader transformations in cultural labour. Early on, MONOM paid artists to present works. Over time, it shifted toward collaborative creation: onboarding artists into its 4DSOUND system, supporting them through iterative processes, and having stakes in the resulting works, often completely new. Dynamic networks of people and shared rights mean distributed risk. For MONOM, the shift reduces financial exposure (no longer relying on event ticket sales), and builds an archive of works that can be licensed, toured, and remixed. When the decision not to put on their own events anymore was made, Russell explains, it was to give more space to the possibility of commission or working with discrete communities that have their own scene. Russell sees this shift more broadly in the industry: venues handing over some of the programming to communities “because they are the ones to bring [groups] into your space and therefore have a better grasp on audience size and ticket sales”. Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 29 The Evolution of Performance (and the Spaces that Host it) Conversely, creative spaces are evolving towards “black-box-type spaces”, which invite multiple modes of interaction rather than maintaining the fixed stage-audience relationship. This structural shift reflects a broader movement towards “interactive, immersive, non-stage, non-binary interactions and towards a holistic multi-sensory ecosystem”. This aligns organically with what audiences seem to be looking for more and more: increasingly, people understand the value of spending time at a space like MONOM as places away from the screen of their phone This desire is becoming well documented, as young people are driving the return to the cinema as a “no-distraction zone”24. 24 Campbell, S. (2025, August 13). ’I don’t touch my phone. At home, I’d be scrolling’: why young people are flocking to independent cinemas. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/aug/13/why-younger-people-are-flocking-to-independent-cinemas Accessed 4 September 2025 Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 30 Scene polarisation, creative labour and the city with Andy Crysell Andy Crysell is a writer, cultural strategist and entrepreneur. He spent the 1990s as a music and subculture journalist interviewing artists from Wu-Tang Clan to Bjork. He later founded insights agency CrowdDNA and built it into a leading global cultural strategy consultancy helping clients such as Nike, Spotify, LVMH and Netflix. The consultancy focused on emerging behaviours across media, technology and entertainment – translating emergent phenomena into cultural strategy. Crysell’s recent book, Selling the Night, explores exploring the co-evolving role between commerce and culture in nightlife. Alongside his writing, he sits on the advisory boards of the Museum of Youth Culture and the 20/20 Levels charity. The polarisation of nightlife One of the prominent themes of Selling the Night and of our conversation with Crysell is the hollowing out of the middle ground of live performance. Club culture, Crysell notes (not dissimilarly from the other interviewees) now seems to be split between two poles: the hypercapitalised and mega-venues on one side, and grassroots and community spaces on the other, with very little in between. This is not a minor shift, and it is reflected in the UK Night Time Industries Association’s (NTIA) report last year, which notes the number of night clubs continuously shrinking. Since 2020, “more than one in four late-night venues have shut their doors” and grassroot venues decreased by 125 in 2023, with many of the remaining ones making a loss due to high rent costs.25 Audience behaviour mirrors this polarity: “there’s a tendency for going to bigger events (less frequently) over smaller ones (more frequently)”, which also speaks to the “festivalisation” impacting attendance patterns. For artists, this means finding it much harder to build an audience gradually before moving onto bigger stages or to find a way to make a life out of their creative work. While technology democratises access to creative production, the jump is now from ‘bedroom producer’ to ‘headliner’ – something immense to bridge for most emergent artists. This creates two polarised figures: the hyper-professionalised and spectacular star, and the precarious two-jobs gig worker. There are no surprises if one follows the money: venture capital firms have become very much part of the nightlife ecosystem and are likely playing a part in this polarisation as they focus on luxury markets and venue investments with high ROI potential. “A growing number of institutional investors are translating this interest into equity positions in dance music’s biggest names. Dubai’s luxury focused Five Holdings acquired the Pacha Group (including the Pacha club chain) for $363 million in 2023”. The private equity-backed Superstructure Entertainment (…) has taken stakes in a number of dance festivals, events and platforms including Boiler Room and Sonar. Plus* Equity,an offshoot of Plus* Records (…) bills itself as an investor in ‘early opportunities at the intersection of entrainment and tech.”6 This is interesting for our enquiry for their impact on the nature of creative work and because these investments tend to focus heavily on the role of technology in the production and distribution system as an essential part of what they are investing into (that being hardware or software; ticketing or live-streaming; AI or VR). 25 Makortoff, K. (2025, August 26). One in four UK late-night venues have closed since 2020, figures show. The Guardian. https://www. theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/26/late-night-venues-closed-uk-night-time-deserts accessed on 9 September 2025 26 Crysell, A. (2025). Selling the Night (p. 307). Velocity Press. Culture & Audiences Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 31 An interesting player in this space is Best Nights VC (BNVC), Jägermeister’s venture capital investment unit, who “invest in consumer tech startups that are connected to the global nightlife and entertainment industry with the aim of bringing people together in real life”27. Their portfolio is testament to this inclination towards technology-enabled offers (both software and hardware), as well as other themes explored in the report such as audiences’ search of IRL connection and marketplace platforms facilitating in-industry exchanges. Creative labour and creative workers Technology has always been very much part of club culture, though Crysell points out that “AI feels profoundly different” from a drum machine or a sampler. Instead of transparently expanding the creative toolkit, as earlier and other technologies have done, AI systems intervene in the very processes of authorship and raise anxieties about originality and ownership. One response that Crysell has noted from artists is the turn of the spotlight back to the labour behind a creative piece. Increasingly, artists fold process into the aesthetic, showing the workflow on screen or staging it as part of performance. The economics of creativity is one of the topics that feels most urgent and unresolved to Crysell, the lingering idea (now at risk of being propelled by AI) that creative work involves “no labour” or “is not hard work”. This has clear consequences on the composition of the work force, as the creative industries remain one of the least diverse sectors across the board28 29 despite the huge cultural debt they owe to minoritised communities and the working class whose aesthetics, narratives, and efforts have historically fuelled mainstream creative economies without equitable recognition or reward. DIY entrepreneurialism At the roots of this story lies the DIY entrepreneurialism of the Thatcher years. Crysell traces back the atmosphere in which British club culture was born. This spirit (which rebelled against and mirrored the spirit of time), “grafting”, inventive, precarious, defined the energy of the early scene. It is interesting to find this exact terminology in another of our creative worker interview for this area of complexity, AV artist Halina Rice, who described herself as a “DIY artist. “There is a question hidden here then, as the spirit still exists today in grassroots R&D and experimental artists. Which conditions can be incentivised to encourage, maintain and let flourish creative workers in scenes which manifest enormous cultural and economic value — for decades to come? This is not a vague opportunity, as Crysell makes clear, it’s the foundations of much of the cultural value the UK continues to profit from today. 27 BNVC. https://bestnights.vc Accessed on 12 September 2025 28 Creative UK. (2025, April 10). Cultural and Creative Industries Stats – Q1 2025 26. Creative UK; Creative England. https://www. wearecreative.uk/cultural-and-creative-industries-stats-q1-2025-26/ 29 Carey, H., Giles, L., O'Connor, K., Sissons, P., Gowin, ES. (2024). Beyond growth: promoting inclusive development of creative clusters in the UK. Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (Creative PEC). https://do.org/10.5281/12795943 Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 32 Five Design Principles A Need for Creative Technical Interfaces ↓ P1. Design modular tools that translate technical complexity into creative-native languages Polarisation in Creative Ecosystems ↓ P2. Reinforce the cultural middle ground as essential connective tissue for resilient creative economies Embodied Counter-Practice to Digital Saturation ↓ P3. Creative futures must honour the body and design for embodied presence Opacity Feeds Creative Power Asymmetry ↓ P4. Transparency is a foundation of equitable creative systems The Rise of Parametric Outputs and Audience Integration ↓ P5. Design creative systems as parametric architectures rather than fixed products Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 33 Patterns → Design Principles arts and culture remain (…) often reduced to their contribution to GDP rather than their ability to shape an economy.3010 The preceding interviews surface recurring dynamics: not fixed conclusions, but patterns of behaviour, expectation, and contradiction. These Patterns form the connective tissue between lived experience and strategic insight. From them, we derive a set of Design Principles intended to guide action and experimentation: orientations that can inform how institutions, funders, and creative organisations design policy, investment, and practice in response to emerging change. Need for Creative-Technical Interfaces → P1. Design modular tools that translate technical complexity into creative-native languages. Prof. Gillies' observation that “machine learning doesn't have to be difficult or technical, because it's not about code as much as it is about gathering data” exemplifies a fundamental shift: creative expertise is becoming central to technological implementation rather than peripheral to it. The data that powers machine learning systems (textures for artists, movement for dancers, conversational patterns for scriptwriters) represents the core knowledge domains of creative practitioners. However, while the conceptual barriers between creativity and technology diminish, practical tools remain (a) at times inaccessible to non-programmers or (b) available to engage with at a “vibe coding” level (with limited replicability, difficulties in trouble shooting, etc) or (c) powered by dubious model training practices and owned by big tech interests. Halina Rice's evolution into a “DIY artist” illustrates the emerging expectation that successful creative practitioners (within the CoSTAR area of enquiry) must develop sufficient technical depth across multiple domains to maintain creative control. This pattern suggests that the future competitive advantage will belong to those who can navigate both creative and technical systems fluently, and to platforms that successfully translate complex technical capabilities into creative-native interfaces. Implications • Investment in creative-technical education (e.g. STEAM) becomes critical. • Investment in creative-native tool development, especially if from UK-based companies can actively support Industrial Strategy goals. • Organisations that can bridge the gap between sophisticated technical capabilities and creative practice will capture significant market opportunities. • Develop open creative sandboxes where artists can directly stress-test early-stage technical infrastructure, not just polished tools. 30 Mazzucato, M. (2025). The Public Value of Arts and Culture: Investing in Arts and Culture to Reimagine Economic Growth in the 21st Century. UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/publications/2025/sep/ publicvalue-arts-and-culture Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 34 Polarisation in Creative Ecosystems → P2. Reinforce the cultural middle ground as essential connective tissue for resilient creative economies. A consistent pattern of polarisation emerges across multiple creative domains, characterised by the systematic elimination of middle-tier opportunities. Both Halina Rice and Andy Crysell observe a split between high-investment, technologically advanced venues and grassroots venues operating in precarity. In parallel, Olyn's Ana Maria Jipa describes streaming platforms as systematically suppressing “middle-tier” films that don't conform to either art house or blockbuster categories. The economic mechanisms driving this polarisation involve investment patterns that prioritise massive scale with high sought-after returns. The analysis provided in the House of Commons’ Grassroots music venues report published last year demonstrates institutional acknowledgment of systemic crisis, adding observations that this polarisation requires coordinated policy intervention rather than market-based solutions alone.3111 Implications • This pattern suggests a possibility for private investors (VC, brands) to begin a conversation with organisations like NTIA (the Night Time Industry Association) and MVT (Music Venue Trust) to identify mutually beneficial investment opportunities around the “middle”. • With regards to urban planning, the concentration of cultural activity at polar extremes creates cultural voids that fragment the distributed amenity networks that sustain accessible and resilient cities. This pattern may offer an additional case for strengthening proximitybased planning (e.g. 15-minute city) in the UK, and a reminder of the centrality of the city at night when designing urban plans. • Explore and evaluate mid-term co-ownership or cooperative investment vehicles for cultural middle-ground venues (e.g. community + brand + local authority). 31 House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Grassroots Music Venues. (2024). https://committees.parliament.uk/ publications/44704/documents/222242/default/ Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 35 Embodied Counter-Practice to Digital Saturation → P3. Creative futures must honour the body and design for embodied presence. A pronounced pattern emerges around embodied practices as conscious counter-response to digital overwhelm and content saturation. This doesn’t as much point to biometrics as to a broader approach honouring the presence of the body, and manifests across multiple domains: Halina Rice's identification of audiences seeking “experiences of introspection and connection” through sober raves and pitch-black playback events; William Russell's observation that visitors to MONOM are increasingly keen to put away phones during spatial sound experiences; Dr. Tiara Roxanne's emphasis on breath as regulation for our bodily existence in digital environments. This pattern extends beyond audience behaviour to creative practice itself. The integration of ritual, ceremony, and somatic awareness into creative work represents more than aesthetic choice. The embodied counter-practice pattern reveals a fundamental tension between technological acceleration and human temporal-biological requirements. Audiences are actively seeking spaces and experiences that restore embodied presence (and practitioners are aware of and delivering on this yearning), suggesting that successful creative technologies must account for somatic and neurological considerations rather than more linearly optimising for engagement or efficiency. Implications • Venue operators are invited to audit and consider if reconceptualising their space toward holistic, multi-purpose environments would be beneficial. This includes re-thinking the rigid stage-audience physical configurations that reinforce passive consumption paradigms. • There are existing models and frameworks rooted in psychology principles that can allow HCI researchers and practitioners to understand how technology designs support or undermine basic psychological needs, thereby increasing motivation and engagement, and ultimately, improving user wellbeing3212– and therefore design tools for healthier technology. Whose responsibility is it to enforce an existing or new model that safeguards users’ mental wellbeing and nervous system regulation? • Artists interested in the intersection between art, wellbeing and embodiment find interdisciplinary development opportunities in competencies spanning neuroscience, somatic awareness, and neuroaesthetics. Conversely, education providers have an opportunity to form artists and creative technologists around these and other related disciplines. • Develop certifications or kitemarks for embodied/neurologically healthy cultural tech. 32 Peters, D., Calvo, R.A., & Ryan, R.M. (2018). Designing for motivation, engagement and wellbeing in digital experience. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 797. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00797 Future in Praxis: Tracing Changing Creative Practice Around Three Areas of Complexity 36