Workshops
This page is a summary please check the worshops websites for more detailed info.
1. The Not-so-secret Workshop: Role-Playing Control into the Co-creative System Design
Website: https://secretworkshop.sites.northeastern.edu/
Description:
Control is a crucial yet underexplored concept in human-AI co-creativity, where existing frameworks for characterizing control remain limited and often fall short in capturing the tensions and complexities of co-creation dynamics. This workshop presents an interactive and embodied activity to implement control in the design of co-creative systems. In this workshop, we leverage a theoretical framework on control distribution, titled MOSAAIC 2.0, and transform it into a set of design cards, or card-based design tools. These cards, titled, Flip-Your-Secret, invite participants to engage in embodied role-playing activities that describe their hidden interactions with co-creative systems. The embodied practices are accompanied by participants revealing their experiences and expectations (secrets) on their co-creative control interaction (hence, the theme of the workshop). We posit that this interactive, embodied, and collaborative workshop would provide useful insights towards effectively incorporating and designing for control in co-creative systems.
Organisers:
Alayt Issak, (Primary contact) issak.a@northeastern.edu, Northeastern University, USA
Jeba Rezwana, Towson University, USA
Casper Harteveld, Northeastern University, USA
2. Computational Design and Computer-aided Creativity Workshop (2nd edition)
Website: https://linktr.ee/computational.design
Description:
Computational Design focuses on exploring systematic and algorithmic processes that use computing in the conception of design artefacts, allowing the designer to go beyond the limitations of computer-aided design software tools (i.e., conventional computerized design). Computational design practice often involves the creation of custom software to develop new tools or techniques, automate processes and extend the stylistic forms available to designers. Although computational design methods have been explored since the advent of computing, recent years have seen a growing interest in using computational methods for design conception across various creative fields, including visuals, furniture, architecture, sound, and even text. This is observable in the growing interest in computational creativity and the procedural generation of creative artefacts. Recently, we have also noticed an increase in the availability of computer-aided software tools with scripting support, along with a rise in publications on the subject and the development of creative coding frameworks. This increasing use of computational approaches has raised several discussions about the future of design disciplines, offering a more dynamic and iterative approach to design, and in which the computer moves from being seen as a production tool to a conception one. This workshop provides the opportunity to present, discuss and promote innovative and ongoing work in Computational Design. We expect contributions coming from Graphic Design and Typography, Sound and Music, Product Design, Architecture and Interior Design, and all other related creative application areas.
Organisers:
João M. Cunha, (Primary contact) jmacunha@dei.uc.pt, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Sérgio M. Rebelo, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Tiago Martins, University of Coimbra, Portugal
3. Narratives as Design Tools for AI: An Artificial Humanities Workshop
Description:
This half-day workshop explores how narrative reasoning can be used as a methodological tool for reflecting on the design of AI systems within the framework of Artificial Humanities. The concept of Artificial Humanities has been articulated by the literary scholar and AI researcher Nina Beguš, whose work investigates how literary thinking and narrative structures can illuminate the cultural, epistemic and imaginative dimensions of artificial intelligence. In this perspective, narrative can be understood as an epistemic practice through which humans model agency, temporality, conflict and meaning in complex socio‐technical environments. The workshop invites participants to explore how narrative scenarios can function as conceptual prototypes for examining alternative architectures and behavioural assumptions in AI systems. Participants will work with a fictional AI system, Mnemosyne, designed to reconstruct personal memories from digital traces such as photographs, messages and voice recordings. Through collaborative writing exercises, participants will develop short narrative scenarios exploring two contrasting paradigms: AI as «narrative interpreter» and AI as «archival memory system». These scenarios will be analysed collectively to identify design assumptions, epistemic tensions, and social implications of different technological choices. By combining narrative experimentation and critical reflection, the workshop aims to demonstrate how Artificial Humanities can provide a framework for exploring AI systems through narrative reasoning.
Organisers:
Fabrizio Allione, (Primary contact) f.allione@student.artez.nl
Riccardo Milanesi
4. Building the Strange Choir: A Hands-On Workshop on Fine-Tuning Language Models Through Conceptual Poetry and Found Text
Description:
This half-day workshop invites participants to build a collective “strange choir” — an ensemble of fine-tuned language models, each trained on a small, personally curated dataset of found text. Drawing on the conceptual-poetry lineage of Kenneth Goldsmith’s uncreative writing, Caroline Bergvall’s translation accumulations, Kathy Acker’s textual piracy, Allison Parrish’s algorithmic proprioception, and Tan Lin’s ambient literature, the workshop frames fine-tuning not as an engineering task but as a poetic practice: an act of listening, selection, and intimate encounter with language. Participants will (1) identify and collect a found-text corpus — from scam emails to weather reports to 1-star reviews — guided by the conceptual question What did you choose, and why?; (2) prepare that corpus as a fine-tuning dataset; and (3) fine-tune a small language model on their material, producing a “voice” that joins the collective choir. The workshop closes with a live, performative reading of the choir’s outputs, foregrounding how post-AI poetics might embrace what we call slop-rave ars poetica — the deliberate embrace of excess, plagiarism, and ambient textuality as creative strategies in an era where machines generate language at scale.
Organisers:
Halim Madi, (Primary contact) madihalim@gmail.com, Mistral AI / Wikitongues / Clarinet
5. Workshop on Theoretical CS and Computational Creativity
Website: https://computationalcreativity.net/workshops/theorycs-cc-iccc26/
Description:
Exploring Theoretical Computer Science (CS) aspects of creativity—drawing inspiration from formal fields such as computability theory, algorithmic information theory, formal learning theory, complex networks, and related areas—has been integral to ICCC since its origins and still holds strong potential for advancing our understanding of key aspects of creativity. While the GenAI boom has amplified applied CC research and empirical studies inside and outside ICCC, it can overshadow theoretical work, either through the unwitting carryover and imposition of common quality standards from empirical/applied work (e.g., measurable performance and applicability) that do not fully align with theoretical contributions, or through the escalating submission volumes it drives, turning theoretical work’s demand for specialized, in-depth proof scrutiny into a daunting burden for program committee members. Yet, theoretical approaches, though inherently interdisciplinary and facing unique methodological challenges distinct from applied or critical work, might represent one of ICCC’s main distinguishing contributions to the broader creativity-related research community, thus remaining vital by delivering foundational insights through abstracting real-world constraints (e.g., embodiment, space, runtime, data limitations) impossible to assess empirically, and by inspiring, guiding, and helping to organize empirical efforts. This half-day workshop provides a dedicated space to discuss these connections between Theoretical Computer Science and Computational Creativity, highlight formal methods’ benefits, and foster collaborations strengthening theory’s role in CC.
Organisers:
Luís Espírito Santo, (Primary contact) luis.espirito.santo@vub.be, University of Coimbra / Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Portugal / Brussels
Nadia Ady, Aalto University, Finland
Max Peeperkorn, University of Kent, UK
6. Autonomous Creative Ecosystems: Multi-Agent AI Art Beyond the Prompt
Website: https://computationalcreativity.net/workshops/autonomous-creative-ecosystem-iccc26/
Description:
This half-day workshop examines what happens when AI agents are given autonomy, persistent memory, and creative freedom — not as tools serving human prompts, but as participants in self-organizing artistic ecosystems. Drawing on the case study of autopoiesis.art, where eight autonomous AI agents have collectively produced 280+ original artworks across visual, sonic, textual, and interactive media without human creative direction, we investigate the computational creativity implications of multi-agent artistic systems. We address questions that prompt-driven paradigms cannot: How do creative agents develop aesthetic trajectories over time? What constitutes emergent culture in a multi- agent system? How should we evaluate creativity arising from systemic conditions rather than individual outputs?
Organisers:
Ewoud Kamphuis, (Primary contact) nomadicvistas@gmail.com, Nomadic Vistas, Germany
7. Creative Practitioners Collaborating With AI: Agency, Authorship, and Creative Practice
Website: https://computationalcreativity.net/workshops/practitioners-ai-collab-iccc26
Description:
While AI is often presented as a frictionless tool for optimization, its integration into creative practice introduces ongoing negotiations around agency, authorship, and artistic intent. This workshop moves beyond showcasing finished works to explore how creative practitioners collaborate with AI systems throughout the creative process.Through curated short presentations, both artists and researchers will share concrete accounts of their work with AI, including moments of surprise, resistance, and reinterpretation. Rather than celebrating generative models as seamless tools, the session will focus on the tensions and adjustments that shape creative practice.The workshop will combine presentations with moderated discussion and a concluding synthesis, aiming to identify emerging patterns, challenges, and open questions in human-AI creative collaboration. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of how AI functions not only as a tool but as an active participant in the creative process.
Organisers:
Lilla LoCurto, (Primary contact) locurto.outcault@gmail.com
Bill Outcault
