The Rocket and the Silo: Reimagining Art Education
The integration of AI into the art school system is at times treated with scepticism and framed as a modern invasion, yet we have been ceding human functions to machines for decades. Just as the spellcheckers on early Macintosh computers replaced the manual diligence once required by the typewriter, AI has quietly evolved in the background of the creative process. We have transitioned from the “Wright Brothers” era of basic automation to a “rocket-level” sophistication in generative technology. This evolution isn’t a future threat; it is a present reality already woven into the fabric of artistic education.
The urgent question is no longer whether AI belongs in the academy, but how students of painting, printmaking, ceramics, and sculpture—alongside art history and curatorial majors—will adapt. As the tools accelerate, students and professors alike must find a way to maintain their creative sovereignty in an age of automated craft. However, the most glaring obstacle to surviving this acceleration is the current siloed methodology of art education. Today, these areas of study are strictly departmentalized, creating a fragmented experience that stifles the very synthesis required by the modern world.
This wasn’t always the case. Decades ago during my postgraduate research, I witnessed a different model: a singular, expansive space where undergraduate and postgraduate students practiced performance, video, drawing, photography, installation, painting, and printmaking side-by-side. This environment was more than just a shared room; it was a site of constant, organic peer-to-peer learning. One could walk in at any time and gain insight from a master of a completely different medium. As one professor noted, it was a period of unprecedented creative vitality—a “best-of” era that unfortunately ended when the retirement of key faculty allowed the silos to return.
Years later, I asked that professor where the inspiration for that communal model had originated. He traced the idea back to a lecturer in the United Kingdom who had pioneered the concept to immense success. The striking irony is that this “big space” philosophy mirrors the architecture of Artificial Intelligence itself. AI is not siloed; it is neither linear nor chronological. It functions by pulling unique seams of knowledge from across its entire algorithmic landscape, connecting disparate ideas instantaneously. By clinging to rigid hierarchies, art schools are operating in direct opposition to the way information—and creativity—now moves.
A recent example of how this unsiloed thinking can succeed was evident at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (MoMAK). In the Collection Gallery’s exhibition, the curator bypassed traditional periodization to exhibit artists’ “pulses” in juxtaposition. This experience validates the Axiom of Delay: the understanding that artistic praxis exists in the non-temporal interval between seeing and doing, t₀ → t₀ + D. At MoMAK, the 1965 Informel-era work of IWATA Shigeyoshi sat in conversation with the 1895 silk compositions of FUKADA Chokujo. Despite being separated by seventy years, both works emerge from the same “sovereign space.” When we remove the “when” of a piece, its agency is restored as a living force.
This framework even allows a radical re-reading of Leonardo da Vinci. His unfinished works are often framed as failures of persistence, but through the Axiom of Delay, they become perfectly complete. For Leonardo, a work was finished the moment the scintillating energy of the concept reached its limit. To push further would be to slip into technical virtuosity—the habitual execution of craft—rather than the living presence of the Delay.
Ultimately, AI I think will help art students experience fine art as a pulse, not a clock. As the MoMAK exhibition revealed, the future of museum experiences—and by extension, studio praxis—lies in the scintillation of the artist’s work as it happens, rather than where it is located on a historical timeline. This is the pivotal difference. To compete with the rocket-level speed of AI, the academy must dismantle its walls. By fostering a big space that mirrors the interconnectedness of AI while protecting the uniquely human interval of the mark, we allow students to work not by the clock of the institution, but by the pulse of the creator.
