Culture and technology have always had a close relationship but never more so than now.

Gaming, artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual worlds have had a huge impact on popular culture and if you walk around significant international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale or any major gallery or museum, you will likely find artists exploring our relationships with these and other technologies.

Everywhere, artists are creating new kinds of work with and about technology and experimenting with new ways audiences might experience it.

However, under the surface, a more profound transformation is occurring.

Over the last decade, a new generation of artists has emerged. They are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with new technology but they are not only adopting it as a creative medium. They also apply technological skills to rethink how their work is funded and distributed.

This signposts a significant shift in how the cultural sector might operate. But what does this shift look like and what are the implications?

"Culture stacks suggest alternatives to the current cultural system and this means the latter must change."

The rise of the ‘culture stack’

To grasp this change, we need to look less at the work artists are showing to the public and more at the new type of organization they are building, one that we are calling a “culture stack” – akin to the “tech stack” i.e. a set of technologies that work together.

Reading this article alone requires a hardware layer (a phone or laptop, for example), with an operating system as the layer “above” it, followed by an application (a web browser or similar) on top.

Similarly, a culture stack goes beyond making creative work and adds other “layers” to what an artist’s studio does.

Right now, we see artists opening their own museums, securing venture capital funding for technology development, releasing tools for other creators to use, publishing their development of new materials in high-profile scientific journals and much more.

What’s revolutionary about this is that this “routes around” much of the existing cultural ecosystem.

This teaches us not just that immersive experiences are popular but also that artists working with technology are positioned to disrupt expectations about how museums or galleries are owned and financed and by whom.

In turn, this implies we need to rethink our approach to cultural spaces and districts. In particular, we should consider what artists working with technology can now produce and what role more “conventional” institutions have alongside them.

2. Ethical foundations

Second, ethical technology development finds a powerful vehicle in culture stacks.

Culture stacks are not just using what tech companies make; they are building their own but from a “culture-first” point of view.

For example, Refik Anadol Studio’s DATALAND, a museum for AI art opening this year in Los Angeles, demonstrates how culture stacks can embed ethical principles directly into technological development.

While concerns about AI’s energy consumption and data practices grow, DATALAND commits to 100% renewable power for its AI systems and has made its “Large Nature Model” technology openly available for others to experiment with.

This suggests that culture stacks provide a new way to think about ethical tech development and regulation, very different from Silicon Valley’s historical ethos.

"...culture stacks raise new questions about what forms of capital or funding they might benefit from..."

3. Policy should follow suit

Third, culture stack funding models should inspire policy innovation.

Consider the work of artists Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon, who, like Anadol, are deeply committed to the development of ethical technology. Since their groundbreaking 2019 album PROTO, which pioneered the use of AI in music production, their work has evolved to include various experiments in digital governance and ownership rights.

Recently, this extended to co-founding Spawning, a venture-backed startup that develops ethical AI tools for creators and has released multiple open-access products.

Cases such as this raise the question of how cultural practices might be funded in future. At present, cultural funding is small-scale compared to tech and it is rarely configured as “investment” in the same way.

But culture stacks raise new questions about what forms of capital or funding they might benefit from and conversely, what it means for a Ministry of Culture, for example, to invest in an organization that creates tech products and services.

For these reasons, understanding the culture stack model is not optional for those shaping our policies, cities and institutions. Culture stacks represent an unprecedented opportunity to rethink cultural “business as usual” and pose an urgent challenge to established governance, investment and urban planning frameworks.

The question remains of who will be bold enough to act on this opportunity and set the standards that others follow.