Artist Sam Skinner selected for Pharos AI artist residency focussed on centring the human in AI and cancer care

The residency forms part of the public engagement activities taking place as part of the PharosAI research project, a partnership between King's College London, Queen Mary University of London, and two of the country's leading NHS hospital trusts - Guy's and St Thomas' and Barts Health, which is building an AI-powered platform trained on cancer data, with the aim of expediating cancer drug discovery and precision medicine. The project is funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).

Sam Skinner's project will explore the role of AI in healthcare contexts with focus on the questions: Where are we now? Where do we want to go? and How will we get there? Engagement activities with project stakeholders will invite experimentation with AI text analysis tools, feeding into the development of graphic artwork in a range of formats.

Sam Skinner works as an artist and curator with a particular focus on using participatory and interdisciplinary processes to explore relations between community, technology, health, and nature. Using a variety of methods, from archival research to interviews, murals to papermaking, his projects seek to develop outcomes led by the specificities of particular sites, communities, and projects. Often working with printing and text, Sam co-directs the art and technology focused publisher Torque Editions, which has published work by over 100 artists and researchers on subjects such as AI, blockchain, DAOs, and the post-digital library.