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🎬 Where Film Meets the Algorithm

ExpressiveAI.net is a pioneering hub exploring the intersection of cinema, creativity, and artificial intelligence. Originally launched alongside one of the first international symposia dedicated to cinematic AI, it has since evolved into a diverse resource featuring experimental and mainstream projects, research materials, and collaborative initiatives that trace how machines are expanding human expression.

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🔍 Explore

Dive into an ever-growing collection of creative AI projects ranging from interactive cinema to XR, digital art installations, apps, and more! The archive spans both experimental and mainstream media, revealing how AI challenges and expands the language of moving images and creative practice.

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🧩 Contribute

ExpressiveAI is an open, community-driven resource. Scholars, artists, students, and enthusiasts are invited to share projects, articles, news, and teaching materials that engage critically or creatively with AI. Every contribution helps build a richer understanding of how machine learning transforms artistic practice and social perception.

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💡 Discover

Browse curated resources on creative AI tools, ethics, pedagogy, and emerging research. Follow links to films, installations, and case studies featured in our symposium series and partner events. Whether you’re a creator, researcher, or curious visitor, ExpressiveAI offers pathways to explore how technology and imagination converge.

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🧠 Our Vision

By connecting creative experimentation with technological affordances, ExpressiveAI.net seeks to make the evolving field of AI art more accessible, reflective, and inclusive—inviting dialogue across disciplines and communities.

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🎥 Our STORY

ExpressiveAI.net began as one of the first dedicated platforms and symposia focused on cinematic AI—a groundbreaking initiative connecting artists, technologists, activists, and scholars. Founded by Dr. Marina Hassapopoulou (Associate Professor, Cinema Studies department, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University), and co-developed with Da Ye Kim (doctoral candidate, NYU-Tisch), it has grown into an expansive and evolving database documenting the creative, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of AI in the arts and humanities. The platform is a strong advocate for the inclusion of the arts and the humanities into important conversations and regulations regarding AI.

What sets ExpressiveAI apart is its hybrid identity as both academic resource and curatorial platform. It connects scholars, artists, and technologists through open access to projects, case studies, and teaching tools, while also highlighting the human stories and philosophical questions behind creative AI.

The site continues to expand as a community-driven and crowdsourced repository, charting how AI transforms cinematic language, authorship, and participation across different media and computational tools.

A bit more background: The website was initially launched as part of the symposium titled, “Cinematic Experiments with Artificial Intelligence: Exploring the Expressive and Activist Potential of AI from an Arts and Humanities Perspective”, organized by NYU Cinema Studies professor Dr. Marina Hassapopoulou , who is the recipient of an International Research and Collaboration Award from the University of Cambridge’s Mellon Sawyer seminar “Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power”.

The name ExpressiveAI was inspired by the work of Michael Mateas, the co-creator (with Andrew Stern) of the first interactive drama storytelling video game Façade (2005), which you can still find online here. Mateas came up with the notion of “expressive AI” before our current AI landscape was taking place. According to Mateas, expressive AI is an AI-based mode of cultural production that combines AI art practice and technoscientific research.[i] Expressive AI combines “the thought experiments of the AI researcher with the conceptual and aesthetic experiments of the artist” in a “knowing-by-making” process.[ii] The “knowing-by-making” approach to AI has the potential to stimulate new research questions, provide a different perspective on old questions, and enable new forms of artistic expression that could also lead to scientific and technological breakthroughs. Read more about the fascinating pre-histories of AI and computational art/cinema in Marina Hassapopoulou’ s book, Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), particularly Chapter 3 on automation and non/beyond human interactivity.

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Now the site has grown into an archive, news resource, and directory of a broad range of creative experiments with AI, machine learning, algorithmic tools, and more!

For latest updates, check out the News & Events blog (drop-down menu) – contact us if you would like to be a guest contributor for upcoming events and projects.

The website also functions as an open archive for expressive and cinematic projects that incorporate, employ and/or critique AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology and aesthetics. While the archive attempts to cover a wide range of projects, exhibitions, archives, research labs and films across diverse disciplinary and national borders, we acknowledge that it is impossible to compile all the materials. As an ongoing and collaborative project, we are looking for your contribution. Please use the comment section or email addresses on the contribution page if you have something to share. You can also contact us directly and via email (mh193[at]nyu[dot]edu). Your contribution will be much appreciated and we will update the website as soon as possible.

Feel free to submit your work, contact us for guest contributions and curation for our News Blog & Opinion Pieces & Pedagogy & Viewing Room sections, and let us know how you are using ExpressiveAI.net! So far, this website has provided inspiration for new projects, innovative initiatives, events, and course syllabi. We would love to hear from you on how you are using our website to motivate us to keep growing even after the funding has ran out!

Thank you for visiting the website!

*Disclaimer about the images: The featured images on this website are either from Pixabay, an online database for copyright free images, or from the symposium’s featured artists’ websites under their permissions. The images on certain pages were created in collaboration with the Deep Dream Generator, an AI-driven image generating software.