People in the CCAI

Toby Butler is Head of Birkbeck's Immersive Learning Centre. He has led BA and MA programmes and taught courses in history and digital storytelling. He has also led several heritage and research projects, most recently leading a major AHRC-funded research project recording life histories of environmentalists for a new digital archive at the British Library.

Books include The 1943 Bethnal Green Disaster: an Oral History; Stories from Small Museums and Voices for Change. Toby's work is central to advancing innovative, technology-enhanced education across the institution. He is responsible for the smooth running of the CCAI facility and assisting with its development, alongside leadership of a sister-facility, the Immersive Learning Centre. He is particularly interested in AI tools that make creative endeavours more accessible/have potential to widen participation in creative projects.

Joel McKim is Reader in Digital Media and Culture, and Director of the MA AI and Creative Media. His research focuses on digital images and the impact of emerging technologies, particularly AI, on design and visual art.

He has completed a number of funded research projects exploring the use of generative AI for museums and cultural collections, including the AI for Cultural Heritage Hub (ArCH) at Cambridge and the V&A Design Generator project. His current research examines the recent AI shift towards world models, simulations and environmentally situated forms of machine intelligence.

Scott Rodgers is Professor of Media and Geography at Birkbeck. His research concerns the urban and local geographies of digital media: how platforms and their infrastructures recede into the routines and orientations of everyday urban life, and what that unremarkability means for urban politics and publics.

Recent projects include a study of place-named Facebook groups across Greater London and the platform governance work of their volunteer moderators. He is now extending this towards AI, asking how it is becoming the next ordinary mediating infrastructure of the city; a counterpoint to smart-city framings preoccupied with the sophisticated and the spectacular.

He has recently co-edited a Dossier on 'the synthetic city' in Mediapolis. He currently teaches Critical and Creative AI on the MA AI and Creative Media, where experimentation with language and text-to-image models become occasions for rethinking authorship, creativity and mediation.

Mark Blacklock is a novelist and cultural historian. He co-produces the audio-zine Offal, making creative use of AI text-to-voice platforms. Since 2023, Offal has explored the uncanny possibilities of voice-cloning, casting celebrity clones to parody the technologies used and to make "Daytime Radio for the Post-Truth Dystopia". A 2024 review in The Guardian described Offal as "a hilarious yet hauntingly uncanny Blue Jam-style fusion of horror, sketch show and soundscape".

As Offal Industries, Mark and his collaborators have also produced an installation piece for ArtAngel, given workshops at Goldsmith's CCA and performed live at Manchester's Peste. They also publish an annual journal of artistic oddities and offcuts, which provides some of the source material for the audio production.

Martin Paul Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at the University. His research work spans the topics of contemporary digital writing systems and their histories, subcultures of piracy, contemporary American fiction, and digital preservation.

The author of ten books and numerous academic awards, he was named by the Shaw Trust as one of the 100 most influential disabled people in the UK. His most recent and forthcoming work deals with creative practice and AI, including AI and genre (the interrelation between AI and the gothic), the copyright implications of AI for open scholarship, and the problems of AI for digital preservation systems. Previously, in 2017, Eve wrote about the forthcoming wave of AI, warning of the seismic changes to the discipline of English that these technologies might provoke.

Seda Ilter is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies. Her research explores the theoretical and aesthetic implications of new technologies and mediatised culture in theatre and performance.

Her book Mediatized Dramaturgy: The Evolution of Plays in the Media Age bridges theatre and media theory, examining how playtexts have evolved alongside a mediatised age - and how they negotiate, in both form and content, the realities of digital culture. Her current research turns to AI and 'dramaturgy of disobedience', investigating how theatre makers use AI in critical and creative ways to challenge dominant narratives about what it means to be human in the age of AI. She is also interested in theatre works that engage with digital-age concerns through minimal or no use of AI, and in the role AI and technology play in performance that explores climate change.

Kinga Koźmińska is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication, working at the intersection of speaking styles, language ideologies and voice-based AI technologies.

Kinga is interested in the different ways in which humans use their voice and how machines interpret it. Working with audio and audio-visual recordings from ethnographic projects, she studies how vocal forms are mediated through language ideologies, and evaluated and responded to by both humans and machines, in ways that mirror and challenge wider power dynamics.

Her current research agenda focuses on automatic speech recognition (ASR): what it means to be heard by these systems, and how listening AI is shaped by particular cultures of listening. Her work interrogates competing perspectives on language norms, fairness, and user experience, to advance discussions on AI ethics and ASR performance, use and perception.

Eleni Liarou is a film and media historian interested in the ways in which AI tools can, on the one hand, facilitate access to archives, and on the other, re-work and ontologically question the very idea of the archive, raising questions about ethics, transparency and geopolitical imbalances of power and knowledge.

To explore some of these questions, Eleni recently organised a workshop on Originality, Creativity and Copyright in the Age of AI: A Film Archive View with BFI’s Annie Shaw as the guest speaker. As a teacher, Eleni describes herself as an AI-sceptic, supporting students to complete assessments in a what she calls an ‘AI-free zone’, an approach focusing on developing original voices, and drawing upon cultural experience, subjectivity and research independence.

George Magoulas is Professor of Computer Science at Birkbeck's School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, and Director of the Birkbeck Knowledge Lab, where he investigates how machine intelligence and data-driven methods reshape learning, cognition and creative practice.

His research on intelligent learning environments, deep learning for psychophysiological data and autonomous systems intersects with questions of authorship, agency and accountability in computationally mediated creativity. Across research and education, George is interested in how sceptical, critical engagements with AI can inform the design of creative tools and learning technologies that follow human-centric principles and prioritise human values, situated judgement and the role of uncertainty in creative practice.

His affiliation with the Centre for Creative AI (CCAI) at Birkbeck enables him to connect that work with CCAI's broader community, and contribute to shared conversations about the future of AI in creative and educational contexts.

Tim Markham is Professor of Journalism and Media. His current research investigates digital media from a phenomenological perspective. This means looking at everything from subjectivity to citizenship through the lens of everyday experience, especially the things we find ourselves doing with and amongst digital technologies - including artificial intelligence.

How are personal feelings like mood and emotion tangled up in digital architectures that we spend much of our time amidst? How should we feel about the suffering of distant others that we encounter tangentially as we scroll through our feeds? What does it mean to be a citizen when we rely on AI to sort through endless content and identify the issues that matter to us and, potentially, what we think about them?

Rather than denigrating what these technologies are doing to selfhood, community and politics, Tim's research is especially interested in the creative potential of the mundane digital practices of ordinary life.

Dorota Ostrowska is Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Media at Birkbeck and Programme Director of the MA Film and Screen Media.

Through a two-year CLASP Fellowship at Bard College she developed a writing-rich pedagogical practice that has led her into sustained critical engagement with generative AI. She believes that generative AI is a significant disruptor of pedagogical and research practices within academia, and that constructive and critical engagement is needed to find ways of using it ethically and effectively.

She is developing the concept of 'slow AI': an approach that draws on slow scholarship and critical pedagogy to argue for purposeful, mindful and embodied engagement with AI as a collaborator in learning and research rather than a replacement for either. This work has generated international workshops for academics within the Global Higher Education Alliance for the 21st Century (GHEA21) network, a forthcoming Routledge chapter on AI as voice and multimodal composition, and a proposed journal article on slow AI and writing-rich pedagogies.

Felix Reidl is Director of the Birkbeck Institute for Data Science and AI (BIDA+) and a Reader in Algorithms in the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences. He organises the annual Critical Voices on AI seminar, bringing together speakers from across disciplines to explore critical perspectives on AI technologies and provide a counterpoint to prevailing narratives around them.

As a member of Birkbeck's AI Working Group, he contributes to the university's efforts to understand the implications of AI for higher education.

Damien Roach is a London-based artist, designer, musician, and lecturer in Digital Media and Creative AI at Birkbeck. In 2023 as 'patten' he released ‘Mirage FM’, the first album made from text-to-audio AI samples. His RCA PhD, ‘Acid Realism: Aesthetic Disclosure in the Age of Generative Media and Planetary Computation’, explores AI, machine vision, and non-human planetarity.

He has exhibited internationally, including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Venice Biennale, Saatchi Gallery, immersive installations at SXSW London, KOKO, and live AV performances at ICA, Tate Modern, across Europe, North America, and Japan.

Recent projects include Google Creative Lab, Ableton/The British Library, ArtEO, creative direction/design for Caribou's live audiovisual tours and 2026's Daphni album 'Butterfly' as 555-5555.

Frequent panels, symposia and podcasts include Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon's 'Interdependence', and TV interviews for BBC 'Tech Now' and Reuters.

Michael Tsang is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies. He is interested in investigating how AI impacts literary and translation production in particular and the creative sector in general.

In his teaching practice, he demonstrates to students how AI is already required to be used in the translation industry, not only to give them a realistic picture in terms of employability, but also to encourage constructive discussions on what AI cannot (yet) do so well, e.g. transcreation. One activity he has designed involves asking students to compare four different versions of a translated Japanese story and discuss which was the one translated by humans and where each version does well or needs improvement.

In general, he does not believe in encouraging students to incorporate AI use into preparing for their assessments. More broadly, he is interested in exploring the use of digital media in student assessments, by for example asking students to produce video essays in lieu of AI-prone written essays.

Simone Wesner is Reader in Creative Industries Policy and Management. Her research sits at the intersection of inscribed technological participation, normative ethics, and cultural value. She explores how ancient (weaving) and contemporary technologies (generative use of AI) are shaping artistic practices and creative ecologies.

Currently she is exploring the use of artificial intelligence for provenance research on hand-woven materials and how machine learning can support the interpretation of complex material histories through the analysis of textual, relational and visual data from crafted objects, including weaving patterns, material characteristics, signs of repair, use, wear and transformation over time. Could AI aid visual analysis and reveal hidden connections between objects, places and communities, generating new insights into provenance and cultural value?

By combining visual analysis with contextual narratives from makers and users, she analyses how visual AI systems classify and interpret cultural artefacts, questioning whose knowledge is encoded in datasets and what forms of expertise may be overlooked. She is researching if, how and why the selected recognition of visual features extends into interpretation of provenance as a dynamic and contested process of meaning-making.

Stephen Willey is a poet, writer and Lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck. His creative and critical work explores experimental writing, archives, performance, sound and concrete poetry, institutional mediation, and the body as a site where language is processed. One strand of a new fiction project set in Finland and currently titled Lumiarkisto, engages with artificial intelligence through SON, a fictional system whose name derives from Syvä Ongelmanratkaisu Neuroverkko: a deep problem-solving neural network.

Rather than using AI primarily to generate creative work, Willey is interested in AI as a literary, critical and methodological problem. However, in developing SON, he has used AI dialogically to test, map and understand the fictional system's logic. Through SON, Lumiarkisto asks how digital systems convert uncertainty, refusal and desire into signals, feedback, weighting and pathways for further use, and what machine-mediated language reveals about archives, compulsion, error, harm, care, interpretation, and the unstable boundary between producing language and understanding it.

Martin Young is a Lecturer in Theatre and Technology at Birkbeck and a member of the cross-institutional Performance and Political Economy Research Collective.

Building on a professional career as a stage technician, his published research engages the relationships between technology and labour in the production of live performance, as well as the broader economic, infrastructural, and regulatory contexts in which creative work is made. His research into AI centres on questions of intellectual property and how performance can be 'owned', as well as work with members of the actors' trade union Equity on the impact of AI on the performance sector.

Yasmin Ali is the Creative Inclusive Learning Operational Lead, a creative technologist and MSc graduate of UAL's Creative Computing Institute, working across creative computing and human-computer interaction. Their practice explores the relationship between people, technology and agency, drawing on computer vision, motion tracking, and projection mapping to create interactive installations and experiences.

As CIL Operational Lead at Birkbeck, Yasmin oversees the operational delivery of Birkbeck's Centre for Creative AI and Immersive Learning Centre, leading on equipment, systems and administrative processes, and providing technical guidance and consultations to staff and students. Their focus is on enabling staff and students to engage confidently with emerging technologies across teaching, learning, and research.

Luca Battiston is a Digital Education Consultant, creative technologist and University of Hertfordshire Master's graduate specialising in game development, photogrammetry, motion capture, and immersive media. Blending artistic vision with technical precision, Luca builds high-fidelity digital worlds and interactive experiences.

Working across Unreal Engine 5, Blender, DaVinci Resolve, and the Adobe Substance Suite, Luca focuses on crafting cinematic, real-time content that merges storytelling with cutting-edge technology now available at the CCAI. Luca delivers workshops, training sessions and advice on the use and development of the virtual production facilities in the CCAI.

Rishi Shukla is a Digital Education Consultant, and a specialist in audio experience design and development. His PhD researched novel approaches for music discovery via interactive, immersive binaural audio synthesis, using lightweight embedded computing.

He has applied his technical and research skills in roles at BBC R&D and KEF. Prior to research, Rishi spent his early career in frontline music education and then in developing chart-topping, award-winning mobile, web and desktop apps for ABRSM. He has been a senior examiner of A Level Music Technology for 15 years.

Leading Digital Education's support for audio-based content in teaching and learning is a key part of Rishi’s work at Birkbeck. He advises the CCAI on hardware and software facilities for sound recording, processing and production, contributing to training across these areas. Rishi sees the expansion of generative audio as a vital area of interest for the CCAI.

Lucy Trewinnard is a Senior Digital Education Consultant with expertise in digital accessibility, digital media, and creative technologies. She manages Birkbeck's staff-facing video and podcasting facilities, supporting colleagues in the creation of high-quality digital content, and supports the operation of the Creative Centre for AI's production suite.

As Co-Chair of the Bloomsbury Learning Exchange Digital Media Group, Lucy works collaboratively across the sector to advance media innovation.

Stephen Walkes is an Audiovisual and Digital Technologist with a background in art and illustration. He provides digital media training and support to staff and students at the Centre and administers equipment loans, studio bookings and inductions.