Artists from around the world are using Al tools to explore the outer edges of their creativity.
When we launched the Leonardo Imagination Fund last year, our goal was to support artists we saw using technology to push their craft into new territory.
From more than 500 submissions across art, design, film and interactive experiences, five projects were selected to receive $10,000 USD each as part of a $50,000 total grant - culminating in the finished works presented here.
These projects show how new technologies are igniting creative exploration and expanding what's possible for artists in every corner of the globe.
Meet The Artists
With work presented by Sotheby’s, Mia Forrest is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores how technology mirrors nature. For her Imagination Fund project, Orchids, Mia trained a model using images from the Australasian Virtual Herbarium to digitally create new species of flowers. These AI-grown orchids were then translated into the physical world. To do this, Mia engraved the flowers onto brass plates and printed them onto textured embossings.
By taking flowers created in the digital world and making them something you can see and feel, Orchids invites viewers to see how systems in technology and nature are more similar than they might have thought.
With work presented by Sotheby’s, Mia Forrest is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores how technology mirrors nature. For her Imagination Fund project, Orchids, Mia trained a model using images from the Australasian Virtual Herbarium to digitally create new species of flowers.
Mia
Forrest
Born in Bogotá and raised in Houston, Mateo Mejia is a writer and director who blends traditional filmmaking with generative AI tools. For his Imagination Fund project, Toymaker, Mateo created a surreal short film about two brothers who build a giant catapult to escape a totalitarian regime. The film was shot practically using built sets, DIY props, and in-camera visual effects before being manipulated and expanded using AI tools in Leonardo.
Toymaker treats technology as a creative tool rather than a replacement for craft. Mateo compares this shift to the way sampling changed music — opening up new ways to remix the shape of stories while keeping the artist’s voice at the center.
Born in Bogotá and raised in Houston, Mateo Mejia is a writer and director who blends traditional filmmaking with generative AI tools. For his Imagination Fund project, Toymaker, Mateo created a surreal short film about two brothers who build a giant catapult to escape a totalitarian regime.
Mateo
Mejia
A digital artist with Fellowship.xyz, Joyce Ng (aka Alsoguppyme) is known for work that transforms the ordinary into the surreal. For her Imagination Fund project, Human Error Rate, Joyce took videos of commuters and prompted an AI model to mirror their behavior.
Presented side by side, the contrasting scenes —sometimes funny, sometimes strange— show us the imperfect gap between everyday life and how machines reflect reality.
A digital artist with Fellowship.xyz, Joyce Ng (aka Alsoguppyme) is known for work that transforms the ordinary into the surreal. For her Imagination Fund project, Human Error Rate, Joyce took videos of commuters and prompted an AI model to mirror their behavior.
Joyce
Ng
Lucas Clément is a French digital artist best known for Anotherworld — a dreamcore social media project exploring the uncertain space between waking life and dreams. For his Imagination Fund project, Lucas expanded Anotherworld into a cinematic short film with a 360° VR experience built from the project’s core imagery.
By transforming his project beyond the constraints of the social grid, Lucas was able to tell a fuller, more immersive story in Anotherworld, unlike anything his audience has experienced before.
Lucas Clément is a French digital artist best known for Anotherworld — a dreamcore social media project exploring the uncertain space between waking life and dreams.
Lucas
Clément
Ivona Tau is a new media artist from Vilnius whose work examines memory, nature, and perception. For her Imagination Fund project, I Wish I Had Told You About the Fieldfares This October, Ivona worked with a personal archive of family films from 1960s–80s Soviet-occupied Lithuania that she discovered after her grandfather’s passing. Drawing from this material, she reconstructed her grandparents’ world using AI tools — restoring footage, generating synthetic voices, and creating an avatar of herself to engage them in conversation.
The final piece is an intimate dialogue between past and present. As we hear the replicated voices of her ancestors, it makes us question what it means to remember and grieve in a time when memory can be simulated.
Ivona Tau is a new media artist from Vilnius whose work examines memory, nature, and perception. For her Imagination Fund project, I Wish I Had Told You About the Fieldfares This October, Ivona worked with a personal archive of family films from 1960s–80s Soviet-occupied Lithuania that she discovered after her grandfather’s passing.
Ivona
Tau
