Recent & Upcoming Exhibitions

Desire & Intimacy in the Age of AI

Adam Cole delves into the complexities of intimacy and identity in the age of AI, crafting immersive experiences that explore desire in the shadow of artificial representation. He integrates advanced AI technologies, film, and installation within an expanded cinema practice to challenge the normative fantasies embedded in AI networks, seeking more diverse, poetic, and sensual alternatives. As a lecturer and doctoral candidate at the Creative Computing Institute, University of the Arts London, Cole merges a rigorous technical foundation with innovative artistic experimentation. Drawing on the history of images, he extends a rich queer tradition of subverting popular media conventions to reveal unspoken double meanings and hidden desires.

Cole’s work has been exhibited worldwide at prominent galleries, film festivals, and media arts conferences, including the SXSW Film Festival, Sheffield DocFest Alternate Realities, Sonar+D Barcelona, Le Lieu Unique, and SIGGRAPH Arts. His installations have been recognized by multiple prestigious awards—including the Lumen Prize, Aesthetica Art Prize, and Asia Digital Art Award—and won the XR Audience Award at SXSW 2024.

Significant Awards

SXSW Audience Award: XR Experience Special Event
SXSW Film & TV Festival, March 2024

Lumen Prize for Art & Technology
BCS Futures Award Shortlist Finalist, September 2023

Aesthetica Art Prize
Longlisted Artist, February 2024

Asia Digital Art Award FUKUOKA
General Category/Moving Images Finalists' Awards, Fukuoka JP, November 2023

Best Short Award for Kiss/Crash (Video)
AI ShortFest (ICCV), Paris FR, October 2023 

Jury Prize for Kiss/Crash (Video)
+RAIN Film Festival, June 2023

TECHNÉ AHRC Research PhD Studentship
AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, October 2023

Selected Press

Artist Statement

I am a creative technologist and experimental filmmaker using AI to explore themes of desire and the expanding gap between real experience and artificial representation. My practice challenges the premise that AI signifies some unprecedented break with the real by pointing to the ways our society is already drowning in the artificial.

Through an expanded cinema practice that merges performance, multi-screen projection, and interactive installation, my work appropriates the most iconic fantasies from our cinematic visual history and subversively refracts them through various AI lenses. These experimental audiovisual pieces place AI within the history of image-production technologies meant to incite and homogenize our desires, hinting at how our most intimate experiences will continue to be stretched and shaped by artificial representations at an accelerating pace.

In keeping with a rich queer tradition that merges poetry and transgression, my immersive film interfaces offer critical self-reflection. They reveal how AI perpetuates fantasies of conformity while simultaneously exploring its potential to unlock queer, sensual, and joyful possibilities when pushed beyond its limits.