ARTiculation Prize Silver Position for Xavier

Our bid to win the prestigious, national ARTiculation competition 2023 was hard fought for at the end of last week by Xavier P (Lower Sixth), who had been previously selected by a panel of school judges to represent the school at the regional semi-final in Folkestone on Wednesday 22 February. The internal heat was a highly engaging event, held in November and was initially entered by 25 Lower Sixth Form pupils with six shortlisted to present their talks.

The competition requires each contestant to talk for ten minutes about an artwork of their choosing and celebrates contextual understanding, personal opinion and oracy skills. Xavier’s presentation on the rise of AI artwork and the work of Jason Allen using the algorithms in Midjourney was judged by renowned artist Jyll Bradley. She was highly impressed with the presentation – although she said she did not understand all of it! She asked whether AI collaboration with art would be something he could see himself doing – he gave an excellent answer about the importance of collaboration. She pushed him about whether he himself would like to do it and he replied he would but only on the technical AI side.  It is exciting for us to see the hybrid interests of a scientific pupil such as Xavier being bold enough to enter a national arts competitions. Xavier gained second place out of seven regional finalists which was really impressive and only narrowly missed out being in the final ten pupils presenting at the final at the National Gallery next month.

Members of audience were very impressed with the AI art Xavier had “created” and his talk opened up many important questions about the use of AI in creative work.