In 2026, we’ve become accustomed to the idea that we’re living through a time of radical change, and basically powerless to do anything about it. Multibillion-dollar companies move so fast (and break so much) that we can’t make sense of our new world before it whistles by, making way for the next thing. And because the public can’t keep pace with the rate of change – never mind glacial government regulators – new products and technologies are rolled out with a reckless disregard for their knock-on effects. So who’s left to rely on, to show us what’s really going on and how it might change our lives in years to come?

In the past, we might have counted on artists to offer us a glimpse behind the curtain. As filmmaker Adam Curtis told Dazed in 2025, art is at its best when it’s describing how it feels to live in the present day and “showing you how power works”. But today, does it really feel like art is equipped to describe the world we’re living in? Like the rest of us, many artists, performers, and musicians feel left behind, cast aside, and exploited by technologies like AI. A single painting or photo series can take months to create, in which time several companies could have lived and died in Silicon Valley. And then, you still have to wade through a sea of political propaganda and AI-powered slop to actually lay eyes on the finished product. Or actually go to a gallery... which is happening less and less.

In other words, if artists really are going to describe our radical times, it might require a radical rethinking of art itself. This isn’t unheard of. In the first half of the 20th century, for example, Dada artists presented found objects as art (see: Marcel Duchamp’s infamous urinal) as a disgusted response to the culture that started World War I, and in doing so reshaped art for decades to come. Could we see a similar revolution today, to catch up with our own troubled times?

This is one of the big questions that motivates Restless Egg, a London-based incubator for “artist-founders” (a term it uses for an “emerging genre” of creative people whose work sits between art, technology, and building commercial products). In practice, this takes the form of a six-month incubation programme for creatives experimenting with technology, plus investments of up to $200,000 in exchange for a stake in products that turn out to be a financial success. “The incubator responds to a moment that’s happening in the world at large, and at the specific intersection of arts and technology,” explains co-founder William Morgan. This moment is the product of a few different causes, he adds. “There’s economic precarity, as old funding mechanisms are hollowed out by austerity measures. And also aspects of technological innovation, as AI capabilities proliferate, as well as the existential crises created by them.” 

In late January 2026, Restless Egg’s first official ‘batch’ of artist-founders gathered at Sybil, a creative centre in Berlin, for an art and tech ‘salon’ themed around the question, “Did DeepMind need Theme Park?” In case that doesn’t mean anything to you, here's a quick anecdote: before founding the leading AI lab DeepMind, a teenaged Demis Hassabis worked on the video game Theme Park, which enabled players to create their own parks and manage everything from the rollercoasters to the placement of the bins and bathrooms. He has often credited the game’s simple feedback systems – put a food vendor too close to a rollercoaster and the virtual visitors would throw up – as the launchpad for many of his ideas about AI. In other words, his early creative experiments directly shaped the path of the technology as we know it today (and likely, therefore, the course of human history).

Over a frosty weekend in Berlin, vanguard artists including Mat Dryhurst, Ian Cheng, and Simon Denney spoke about how to get art back in the loop, in an age when it feels like Big Tech has tight control over narratives about what our future could look like. Meanwhile, a competitive salon format gave artist-founders an opportunity to showcase what they’ve been working on during the programme and debate it with the public. Can our iPhones be repurposed to produce a sense of awe and wonder, not just doom and despair? Would it be better if AI companions could get bored and choose to walk away? Is it ethical to watch two robots fight to the ‘death’? (Many of these conversations can be accessed via Soup, an interactive app by the writer and machine learning engineer Karin Valis.)

These questions are rarely asked by the people actually developing frontier technologies, which is why it’s on artists to set the stage for the conversation and push it into the public eye. Take Yaya Labs, for example: the company run by Ben Ditto, Siâna-Leànn Douglas, and Edwin Eyre has used its time in the Restless Egg incubator to lay the foundations for a competitive robot dog fighting league. “As a startup, we’ve spent years trying to explain complicated ideas to people, but you don’t need to explain this at all,” Ditto explains. “It’s robot dogs, fighting. That’s it.“

Designed to appeal to our “lizard-brain“ while its more intellectual implications fly under the radar, the project demonstrates how close we are to realising the dreams (or dystopias) of science fiction from decades gone by. “The amazing thing about technology in 2026,“ Ditto adds, “is that a lot of ideas which would have been [in the] pure sci-fi realm are now very accessible to the average person.“ There’s also a healthy dose of “dark humour“ in the project. But as Douglas points out: “You have to be embedded in the culture that you’re critiquing, in order to mirror the techno-dystopic landscape that we live in.“

“You have to be embedded in the culture that you’re critiquing, in order to mirror the techno-dystopic landscape that we live in“ – Siâna-Leann Douglas

Of course, a product that explores complex ethical ideas, via a sport with “awful“ associations like dog fighting, isn’t necessarily an easy sell to risk-averse moneymen, no matter how entertaining you make it. That’s where Restless Egg comes in. “In the past, we’ve had a bunch of different ideas and approached various investors, but no one really knew what to make of us,“ says Eyre. “When we found Restless Egg, it was like they totally understood our vision, and paved the way for a broader network of investors to understand us.“

For Jack Self and Chau Pham, the brains behind Self Engineering, the Restless Egg incubator also served as a bridge between two distinct worlds. “I’ve spent the last 10 years working in the tech industry, mostly in engineering roles,“ says Pham. “I didn’t know that you could do technology in other ways, to interrogate it with a more creative sensibility, until I stumbled upon Restless Egg through a friend. That’s how I met Jack.“ Now, the pair are working together to build software that prioritises the user over the platform. “We are overwhelmed by the media that we consume, and by our inability to control what we see, and as a result we’re losing a sense of ourselves,“ Self says. “We have a long term product that we think can help people with this, but right now we’re working on a small, free piece of software. If it works, not only will you not use social media ever again, but you won’t miss it.“

Again, this creative application of technology is a hard pitch in a tech industry that’s built on selling ads and stealing our data, but both worlds could benefit from colliding more, Self suggests. “My initial experience is that the tech sector understands a lot less about culture than I thought, and that I know vastly less about tech than I thought. But we’ve all got those friends who are a really weird couple, and it shouldn’t really work but somehow it does. I think Restless Egg is that meeting space where these two completely different worlds are trying to make a go of it, and that’s very exciting to me“

Morgan goes a step further, describing experiments with frontier tech as an obligation for artists who want to help decide what the future could look like. “Technologists are in the greatest position of power they’ve ever been in, and the engineering class is increasingly empowered to govern,” he explains. “So if artists want a say in what the contours and character of society look like, they don’t have a choice but to participate in the conversation about technology.”

“If artists want a say in what the contours and character of society look like, they don’t have a choice but to participate in the conversation about technology” – William Morgan

It would be a mistake, after all, to think that artists have zero input on the evolution of human technologies. “There’s definitely a feedback loop,” Ditto suggests. “What good creatives bring to it is critical thinking, aesthetics, and culture. The bad thing that creatives bring to it is absolute Luddite thinking.” Everyone is familiar with the flood of comments under any AI discourse online, which reject it on principle. “That’s fine,” he adds, “but it's not going to do anything to the discourse. China and America have trillions of dollars pumping into this thing. We’re modeling whole countries around AI infrastructure. You’re posting a ‘Fuck AI’ GIF. There’s a call for the art world to educate themselves about technology properly, so that they really understand what’s going on. If you don’t really understand what tech is doing, and where it’s going, you can’t have an interesting discussion about it.”

Halcyon Mesh is another group of Restless Egg artist-founders – Dean Grenier, Pearl Wong, and Justin Boreta – who support the opportunity for artists to work as technologists and build products, as the clearest route to wresting back control over our future. “It means we might actually have a chance to build the world that we spend our time in,” says Grenier. Channelling experience in music, design, and machine-learning, they aim to transform our phones into ‘generative field recorders’ that create a visual record of the local soundscape.

“We’re really obsessed with invoking awe and wonder,” says Grenier. “In the marketplace today, technology is all too often being used to distract us, and make us feel terrible about ourselves. We want to make technology that allows people to connect with the moment, and with their bodies. We’re kind of utopians. We’re the hippies in the room.” But, as Wong cuts in, they’re also “battle hardened and pragmatic” from years in the “rave trenches” – and while “startup land and artist land are very egocentric places”, Restless Egg has served as a hands-off container to let that idealism and experience flourish.

According to Restless Egg co-founder Sam Lipnick, the cross-pollination between art and technology also goes some way to solving the dilemma posed earlier: how can art compete with the speed and scale of Big Tech as we move through the 2020s? “The best way to get an idea in front of as many eyes as possible 100 years ago was the written word, a few years later it was radio, and television a few years after that,” he points out. “Now, it’s the computer in your hand, where millions of people can see it at once.” As a creative person, why would you deny yourself that audience?

“Maybe some old forms need to be reinvented, maybe some new ones need to be adopted, maybe others need to be abandoned” – William Morgan

The project goes beyond just making art for phone screens and robots, though. Restless Egg also encourages creatives to reimagine how they create, distribute, and monetise their work on a large scale. This echoes a broader shift in the art world today, as artists like Dryhurst and Holly Herndon experiment with new forms of creative ownership in the age of AI, and entrepreneurs like Yancey Strickler push for the creation of new economic structures like Artist Corporations. The NFT market – despite its infamous crash – serves as yet more evidence of the hunger for a new way of doing things. Controversially, perhaps, Restless Egg borrows more from the strategies of the tech startup, aiming to foster artists and artworks that double as “venture-backable, scalable companies [and] products that people want”. 

Already, as Morgan points out, the “Instagrammification of the artworld” has seen social media feeds become a professional tool that artists are compelled to participate in if they want to reach an audience. “There’s all of these mechanisms that grind artists to a pulp,” he adds. “How do you navigate that? Maybe some old forms need to be reinvented, maybe some new ones need to be adopted, maybe others need to be abandoned.” Ideally, adds the third Restless Egg co-founder, Sylvan Rackham, new models for art could also place the means of production in artists’ hands; this would allow them to “nudge the direction of technology” rather than adapting their own work for billion-dollar corporations that rarely have their best interests at heart.

For artists like the oil painters-turned-game designers Fisheye and Riven Chen – AKA Hidden Fish, who are developing an aquarium for networked AI companions that evolve alongside the user – this has required making some radical changes. “When we create work as independent artists, we never ask for feedback, and we don’t care about how people feel [about] or perceive our works,” Fisheye explains. “But for a product, it’s 100 per cent the reverse. From the start, we observe deeply and empathise with the target audience. It’s exciting. For me, it’s about bringing our creation to a much larger world, to really impact people’s lifestyles.” Erica Hu and Serene Liu, the artist-founders behind Glia, have a similar desire to touch physical reality via their “sentient interface” that helps people remember, relive, and reflect upon moments, people, and places in their lives. “The question we think about a lot,” says Hu, “is how to engineer and design empathy within a piece of technology.”

“The next era of tech requires founders who can create products that aren’t just built for stickiness, but for making meaning... and for having fun on the computer again” – Sam Lipnick

To some, of course, adopting the tactics of Silicon Valley will seem defeatist, and phrases like “venture-backable, scalable companies” will leave a bitter taste in the mouth. On the other hand, Restless Egg see the artist-founder model as the best way to help change the dynamics of the tech industry itself, and define a new kind of ‘value’ that goes beyond just making another billion dollars. “The last era of tech was optimised for engagement, and that Silicon Valley model produces real harms,” says Lipnick. “What the next era requires is founders who can create culturally relevant products that aren’t just built for stickiness, but for making meaning, for more embodiment and a greater capacity for joy... for having fun on the computer again.” Even as AI forces businesses to change in many ways, the odds of this change taking place don’t look good for as long as developers and CEOs are left to their own devices.

“There is this lingering specter of engagement, click rates and time-on-device,” Lipnick adds, “and I think if we continue down that path, we’ll continue to see more of the obvious negative effects. I genuinely believe that the next era of technology has to be built by artist-founders.”

“It really does feel like there’s some something restless, almost like the pendulum is finally swinging back because we’re so fed up with how Big Tech has monopolised and capitalised on our attention and our data,” agrees Hu. “There’s almost this collective awareness: how can we take the future back into our hands again?” 

For the founders of Restless Egg, and many of the artist-founders in its 2026 cohort, Brian Eno’s idea of the “scenius” is a constant reference point for how to channel this collective awareness. In case you’re unfamiliar, Eno coined the word in the 1990s to describe “the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene” that can produce something greater than the sum of its parts. As a concept, it pushed back against the art world’s myth of the lone genius, but also highlighted the value of collaboration and freely-shared ideas. For Self Engineering’s Chau Pham, this is a major component of the incubator itself. “Obviously, the funding is important,” she says. “But it’s also really helpful to be in the room with people with similar sensibilities and experiences, going through the process together and asking the same questions.”

“There’s this collective awareness: how can we take the future back into our hands again?” – Erica Hu

Has Restless Egg managed to find a model that can actually sustain this emerging scenius, enable its best work, and make it stick? Even the founders admit that it’s probably too early to say. With one official cohort under its belt – plus last year’s ‘Batch 0’ – the incubator is planning to support up to 100 new artist-founders over the next few years. “For us, it’s a series of experiments,” says Rackham, with the goal of figuring out the infrastructure required to create “something that’s more than a flash in the pan” or reliant on a volatile crypto token. In the meantime, it could at least spark some fresh ideas about how to change art and tech alike – and hopefully get a grip on the present in the process.