Artificial, artifice, artefact — all materials with which artists have an intimate, historical familiarity. Today a new method — a new ruse — currently rears its simulacrum head at a speed and scale that boggles the mind.

And yet, the techniques behind the current trends in artificial intelligence are not exactly new. The foundations of AI are historically long and deep. The concept of generative artworks is an old dream, and the notion of a language model generating an infinity of improvised results based on novel situations could arguably be traced at least as far back as the Western Zhou period and its Book of Changes. In its current iteration, this contemporary tekhnê suggests a profound transformation — perhaps a new epoch — to which a certain suspension of judgement — an epokhē — is required for artists and designers to take stock of the contemporary state of their practice.

In his book Many Intelligences, the Italian designer Matteo Loglio asks the question “what do robots, starfish, and toasters think about?” A similar question could be asked of artists and designers. Their role, in this chaotic alien landscape, is to create alliances, hybrid and contradictory, that do not resolve any reassuring metaphysical separation between the artificial and the natural. But such has always been the contradictory interpenetrating natures of art.

An exhibition at the intersection of Art and AI makes its US debut in San Francisco. Anchored in the future of the creative professions, Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD – Genève) presents its take on artificial intelligence (AI) at Swissnex San Francisco’s Pier 17. The exhibition Assembling Intelligence – Hybrid Strategies for AI, Art & Design is open to the public from August 19 until November 30, 2024. It features research projects and artistic works from HEAD – Genève’s students and teachers, aimed at expanding understanding of the arts, and the boundaries of creativity. This is the first time these projects and artworks are showcased in the US.

About the exhibition The exhibition is free and open to a curious audience starting on August 19, 2024. Visitors of the exhibition have the opportunity to explore how HEAD – Genève’s initiatives in AI are shaping the future of digital creation and artistic expression. Through the dialogue between the artworks of Weiyu Chen, Léonie Courbat, Jeremias Fries, Alexandra Galian, Margot Herbelin, Elie Hofer, Quentin Piel Langlet, Mathis Baltisberger, Basile Brun, Chloé Richard, and Elsa Wagnières, and the research projects of Sylvie Boisseau, Sabrina Calvo, Kévin Donnot, Élise Gay, Guillaume Helleu, Sonia Laugier, Nicolas Nova, Anthony Masure, Alexia Mathieu, Étienne Mineur, Douglas Edric Stanley, and Frank Westermeyer and David Zerbib, the exhibition seeks to inspire and provoke thought about the intersection of AI, art, and design. It showcases how these fields can collaborate to push the boundaries of creativity.

Significance of the exhibition The techniques employed in current AI trends, such as generative artworks and language models, may seem novel, yet they are rooted in long-standing dreams of expanding the possible. Assembling Intelligence – Hybrid Strategies for AI, Art & Design embraces a variety of approaches that blend the old and the new, fostering a form of “lateral thinking” in our rapidly evolving technological landscape.

“Art has always been able to challenge our perceptions, evoke deep emotions, and inspire innovation. We don’t know yet what we’ll find at the intersection of Art and AI, but I am certain that it is a space ripe with potential that could lead to breakthroughs in unexpected areas.” – Emilia Pasquier, CEO of Swissnex in San Francisco

Hybrid Strategies This exhibition assembles a sub-sample of recently produced works at the Geneva University of Art & Design that testify to a diversity of hybrid approaches that do not oppose the old and the new. Our multiple, often divergent methodologies should therefore be read neither as luddite, nor as techno-optimist. Taking inspiration from the unicorn designer/engineer Gunpei Yokoi, our response to an emerging world of artificial intelligence is to employ strategies of “lateral thinking.” This exhibition therefore collects what should be considered lateral creative strategies in an epoch of massively accelerated generative AI.

“In our contemporary world of rapidly expanding mechanical neural networks, the scale and speed of change boggles the mind. In such an alien landscape, it is precisely the role of the artist to reach beyond the boundaries of binary thinking and find new alliances that do not map neatly into metaphysical separations of the artificial and the natural.” – Douglas Edric Stanley, Professor, HEAD – Genève

Several mediums within the field of Visual Communication have already started to feel the pressures of generative models that can now replace the human hand. Cheap illustrations — both in price and in quality — have all the potential to quickly flood the zone. In a series of workshops with Étienne Mineur, designers from various fields within Visual Communication at HEAD explored co-creation strategies where AI worked as a creative collaborator mixed in with human creativity to produce narratives, both fictional and historical, involving artificial intelligences. These narratives were brought to life through different forms such as images, posters, animations, short films, books, and games. In these videos, Étienne Mineur, Margot Herbelin, and Léonie Courbat discuss their process of collaboration with image generators and how they integrated them into their overall design process.

In the post-apocalyptic graphic novel Ada, a lonely character rummages through the rubble of withered technologies and lands upon a talking artificial entity. The story and the illustrations were written in a collaborative back-and-forth with AI and the designer and illustrator Margot Herbelin. This includes discussions with a chatbot, parts of which were directly copy-pasted into the dialogues. Each illustration is a hybrid mix of human-drawn and AI-drawn strokes, intimately woven into one another.

In her fictional costume-book for an opera of curious creatures re-inhabiting the opera Faust, Léonie Courbat used Midjourney to re-design the various stages of her typical workflow as an illustrator. Replacing Internet mood-boards with prompted mood-boards allowed her to create a starting dataset of references. From these references she then drew her own sketches that she fed into the machine, receiving a new set of generated images that she could prompt-engineer into her final cast. Final drawings shaped these creatures into the final output that she fashioned into a duotone Risograph publication.

Chamonix-Sentinelles is a tabletop role-playing game about the future of mountain areas. It provides an opportunity to discuss the alpine lifestyles emerging in response to the multiple challenges of the climate crisis, and suggesting potential futures based on a set of textual and visual elements presented in the manual. In addition to presenting the rules of the game, the booklets contain a description of the game’s back-story that relies on a chronology made of a series of textual entries about the last three centuries, as well as fictional documents about the future. This material is enriched by an iconography created with generative artificial intelligence based on archival pictures, or by photos taken during the project. They are used throughout the manual, as well as in a second book, a field notebook of an explorer of this region between 2068 and 2086.
  • Title: Buddy Construction
  • Artist: Quentin Piel Langlet
  • Date: 2024
  • Medium: 3D Image, Backlit Film Print, Lightbox
  • AI: ChatGPT
  • Department: Fine Arts

In this piece, Quentin Langlet explores the notion of authenticity and interpretation by creating an artifact that appears convincingly antique. Buddy Construction is a term invented by Jenny Plecash to critique the heteronormative translations and interpretations of historical myths and legends. These interpretations often depict queer couples and mythical heroes solely as “best friends,” erasing their homoeroticism in favor of reinforcing a masculine ideal.

To embody this concept, the artist worked from a text generated by ChatGPT that adheres to the conventions of ancient texts. He then interpreted this text by digitally sculpting a bas-relief whose iconography leaves no ambiguity regarding the homoerotic relationships. The staging of the artwork within a luminous display case enhances the object’s credibility. The mist and dirt obscuring its contents create a parallel between its rediscovery and the varied interpretations throughout history.
  • Title: Goodbye/Hello
  • Artist: Chloé Richard
  • Date: 2024
  • Medium: Lambda print on aluminum
  • AI: Midjourney
  • Department: Fine Arts

Goodbye/Hello reflects on the interaction of technologies. It illustrates how one can transcend the limitations of each by manipulating the notion of reality.

Capturing a seemingly simple image of a fire burning against a white wall is unattainable. The photographic lens struggles to distinguish between the light emitted by the fire and the surrounding white light. Therefore, to overcome this photographic inability and capture humanity’s oldest technology — fire — Chloé Richard uses artificial intelligence in one of its most recent forms. The image-generating software Midjourney facilitates a visual deception that replicates a highly familiar scenario, mimicking the photographic medium to create something that would be otherwise impossible to capture.
  • Title: Bismuthocris Chrysallis
  • Artists: Alpha Syn & Elsa Wagnières
  • Date : 2024
  • Medium: 3D printing, silicone sculptures
  • AI: Stable Diffusion
  • Department: Fine Arts

Bismuthocris Chrysallis is the materialization of one of the species envisioned by the software Stable Diffusion as part of Elsa Wagnières’ Master’s project titled Vermins. In her thesis, Elsa crafted a fictional bestiary illustrating 52 fictitious species that have adapted to the environmental upheavals caused by the extraction industry of components found in an iPhone 5S. Among these 52 species is the Bismuthocris Chrysallis, a type of chrysalis found near the open pit mine of San Cristobal in Bolivia. At first sight inert, these sculptures realized in collaboration with Alpha Syn emerge as a species adapted and integrated into an environment marked by the Anthropocene. Utilizing man-made materials for camouflage and sustenance, it has succeeded in surviving and thriving.
  • Title: The Romantic Fox was no Good Match for my Brand New Dress
  • Artist: Alexandra Galian
  • Date: 2023
  • Medium: Oil on painting
  • AI: Visual Contagion
  • Workshop: AIAIA Sweatshop
  • Instructors: Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel & David Zerbib
  • Department : Fine Arts

In The Romantic Fox, Alexandra Galian transcends the application of artificial intelligence in art to generate merely bizarre or surreal imagery. Galian’s usual focus on depicting everyday spaces and objects is enhanced by AI through Visual Contagion, a platform that generates collections of real, non-artificial images from extensive global libraries using simple prompts or personal photos. For this work of art, Galian shared a photograph of her new patterned dress, which led the platform to present images of tapestries and a specific fox embroidery which inspires the central element of her piece. This piece, structured to mimic an open laptop, acknowledges the significant role of technology in its creation, diverging from Galian’s typical portrayal of her immediate surroundings.

Design & Machine Learning was a research project which examined the mutations of graphic design in contact with contemporary artificial intelligence. The goals were (I) to grasp the current uses (projects, opportunities, etc.) and problems (blockages, shortcomings, etc.) of machine learning technologies for designers, and (II) to initiate a “research-creation” process to set up prospective scenarios adapted to independent design studios.

Several outputs were produced:
– 15 interviews with European graphic design studios pioneering the use of machine learning, conducted by Alexia Mathieu
– A multi-media theoretical essay: Artificial Design: Creation Versus Machine Learning
– A ChatGPT-augmented website design-machine-learning.ch
– An innovative communication campaign created with AI (“Davinci’s insights”): a poster series and 3D short film, awarded at the Biennale de design graphique de Chaumont (France)

The essay Artificial Design: Creation Versus Machine Learning by Anthony Masure explores three research questions: How can the paradigm of automation be redirected on a smaller scale, in a “tailor-made” way? How can machine learning foster invention and curiosity? How can design help to counteract the dominant culture of AI? The essay is available in various open access digital formats: PDF, HTML, ePub, MP3.

“To ask whether artificial intelligences can create is not framing the problem correctly, firstly because AIs are in no way magical, and secondly, because the vocabulary of creation, when detached from material contingencies, gives rise to an incapacity to envision technique as a space of exploration, and thus, of ‘production’.” – Anthony Masure, Artificial Design: Creation Versus Machine Learning, p. 102

“One must deconstruct two other myths regarding so-called creative artificial intelligences: the first being that artists or designers have total control over their production, and the second that the machine can be totally autonomous. A more interesting way to proceed would be to explore the scope and location of chance when introduced into the phases of production.” –Anthony Masure, Artificial Design: Creation Versus Machine Learning, p. 80

The website design-machine-learning.ch contains 15 interviews by Alexia Mathieu with artists and graphic design studios pioneering the use of machine learning: Boyd Rotgans, Cristobal Valenzuela, Deniz Kurt, Feileacan McCormick, Kévin Donnot, Marta Revuelta, Martin Tricaud, Meredith Thomas, Nadia Piet, Nicolas Barradeau, Rifke Sadleir, Simone Rebaudengo, Superposition Studio, Étienne Mineur. The goal was to better understand the current state of the art and the problems associated with integrating artificial intelligence into a graphic design workflow.

Artist and designer Douglas Edric Stanley created an experimental website (design-machine-learning.ch) that takes all the texts (interviews + essays) from the research project and remixes them in real time using text and image generators. The interface was inspired by Smalltalk-76, the first interface of a complete desktop publishing system.

“Something that will continue to happen is that designers will have more of a role in curating: deciding where to go but also what to feed these algorithms. Depending on what you feed, you’ll get different answers. You’re also curating your own algorithms. What you put into the system to train will influence what you get out of it. And so, you’re an editor at the beginning and you’re an editor at the end.” – Cristobal Valenzuela, Runway

“If you want to do something more advanced, you’re going to have to delve a lot deeper into the tools and this can be technically quite demanding. These tools aren’t meant to replace us, they are an expansion of the toolkit, the pencil is still relevant. There are things you can do with a pencil that you cannot do easily with a neural network, and never will.” – Feileacan McCormick, Artist

“It really surprises me sometimes when I do things that are supposed to be really wrong. I don’t use well cleaned data sets on purpose. Ev- eryone tells you that you must have a clean data set because that’s the way to get good outputs. What is interesting for me is not good outputs but exploring even the data set as a medium to express new ideas”. – Simone Rebaudengo, Designer

“The way people talk about the models they’ve trained, it’s like people talking about their babies. If you raise a child and you’re really horrible to it, it will probably turn into an adult who sees the world as this horrible place and acts accordingly. And it’s kind of the same with machine learning — what you input into it is kind of chaotic. And before you fully train it up, it will say some really ropey, out there, stuff. Kind of like a toddler or something.” – Rifke Sadleir, Designer

“What’s interesting is that, you can have a conversation with anything, you can have a conversation with Pluto as a planet, and suddenly you have a bot basically impersonating and having a point of view of a planet.” – Simone Rebaudengo, Designer

Graphic designers Élise Gay and Kévin Donnot (E+K) were invited to produce a carte blanche communication campaign for the essay Artificial Design. Their proposal, entitled Davinci’s Insights, questions the relationship between graphic design and AI through a series of five posters and a 3D short film.

E+K: We want to explore the possible images that could convey the links between design and machine learning. How would you picture these issues and their interplay?
Davinci: With a Rubik’s Cube
E+K: Why?
Davinci: This object symbolizes the complexity of machine learning and its ability to solve complex problems.
E+K: That’s a game. Why do you think that a game is relevant to depict machine learning and design?
Davinci: A Rubik’s Cube is a great object to represent the complexity of machine learning because it is a game that requires problem-solving skills and analytical thinking. Just like machine learning, solving a Rubik’s Cube requires an understanding of algorithms.
E+K, Davinci’s Insights
  • Title: Dead bird lying in the street painted by William Turner
  • Artist: Jeremias Fries
  • Date: 2024
  • Medium: Diptych, Print on Aluminum
  • AI: Midjourney
  • Department: Fine Arts

For several years, Jeremias Fries has been accumulating photographs of deceased birds found on the street: macabre, violent, yet undeniably fascinating data. His diptych illustrates a role reversal that unfolds during his creative process. While creativity was once considered a uniquely human trait, this ability can now, to some extent, be replicated by machines. Through his poem, Jeremias outlines his creative journey wherein he suspends his intellectual faculties and mechanically selects from the options provided by the AI Midjourney. Responding to the prompt, the AI interprets these images in the style of William Turner. As a result, the visual outcome—style, perspective, and form—is generated through the combination of the artist’s mechanical actions and the machine’s interpretation.
  • Title: Autopoiesis
  • Artist: Weiyu Chen
  • Date: 2023
  • Medium: Zine, publication
  • AI: Wombo Dream AI, ChatGPT
  • Department: Fine Arts

Autopoiesis is a zine that mixes the concept of connect-the-dots games with a prospective approach. Unlike typical connect-the-dots games that use simple images, Autopoiesis uses scans and AI-generated pictures. Originally meant to improve hand-eye coordination, this game now challenges players with complex images. Throughout its pages, Autopoiesis presents a thought-provoking exploration of a near future where humans and intelligent machines engage in profound and complex interactions. It raises questions about the implications of their increasing interdependence in the digital era.

Mathis Baltisberger and Basile Brun composed two pieces for the opening of the exhibition.

  • Fogbound Harmonies
  • Oh Deer (Basile Brun)
  • Medium: Sound design
  • AI: Mubert, Aitubo
  • Tools: Ableton Live, ShaperBox 3, Valhalla Supermassive, 84hp Eurorack modular synth with Mutable Clouds, Error Instrument, and Bizarre Jezabel effects, Teenage Engineering EP 1320 Medieval, OPZ, Arturia Microfreak
  • Department: Media Design
not so intelligent · Fogbound Harmonies - oh deer

Influenced by ambient music and the various subgenres of electronic music, the project Oh Deer made its debut on the Lofi-HipHop scene around 2016. Having built his practice closely aligned with the contemporary electro, trap, and techno scene in Lausanne, each new track is a unique blend of his many influences, creating a blur in terms of the musical style offered. From drone music to techno, including dubstep cumbia, Oh Deer offers an auditory journey in polyrhythms, immersing the listener in a dreamy, dark, and melancholic universe. He is currently part of several collective projects, such as BRRR and Human Footage.

Fogbound Harmonies is a track composed of several musical parts inspired by ambient, witch house, hyperpop, and other musical styles, evolving together to transform into a mass of decomposed sound styles. These elements move and exude their references, blending them into something that is both nothing and everything at once. They evoke deeply human emotions, despite the use of generated samples, combining melancholy and light. The use of AIs Aitubo and Mubert allowed for the generation of several sound textures, which were then reworked through various synthesizers and modular effects. The initial textures were generated by asking to represent fog in a sonic form. The voices were generated by mistake during experiments with Aitubo, which interpreted the requested styles as melancholic texts about underwater dreams. Sound layers from multiple synthesizers and medieval percussion were then superimposed to reappropriate and unify the random generation.

♫ Lights fade deep blue sea ♫ Dreams glow lost in me ♫ Bells ring waves crash free ♫ Silent tears flow gently ♫
♫ Bass thump heartbeats slow ♫ Gamelan echoes below ♫ SFX whispers low ♫ Shadows dance in the flow ♫
♫ Underwater dreams ♫ Lost in techno beams ♫ Hyperpop extremes ♫ IDM schemes ♫

  • Arrival
  • Resto Gastro (Mathis Baltisberger)
  • 2024
  • Medium: Sound design
  • AI: Mubert, Suno
  • Tools: Ableton live, 2x84hp eurorack modular synth, Behringer edge, Korg monologue, Korg sq64, Korg volca kick
  • Department: Media Design
not so intelligent · Arrival - RestoGastro

Arrivals is an immersive sound work that evokes the entrance of a ship into the port of San Francisco at the dawn of the industrial revolution. This soundscape, both dark and tranquil, unfolds in a heavy fog-laden atmosphere, where every sound seems to emerge from the depths of the burgeoning industrial city.

The creation of this piece was accomplished using audio samples generated by artificial intelligences, particularly Suno AI and Mubert. These AI-generated sounds were then reworked through a modular synthesizer, giving rise to a unique sonic texture. Layers of synthesizers and percussion were subsequently added, bringing an organic dimension to this mechanical atmosphere.

  • Title: magnalumina
  • Designer: Elie Hofer
  • Date: 2023
  • Medium: Large language model, txt, 3d modelling
  • AI: GPT-NeoX, Huggingface Transformers
  • Workshop: Queering AI
  • Instructors: Sabrina Calvo & Douglas Edric Stanley
  • Department: Media Design

While the world lost its mind with the arrival of powerful AI mimicry chatbots, the Media Design Master program organized this one-week workshop to help participants take a step back, explore how such synthetic text generators work, how they are initially trained, and how they can be reinvested using new bespoke datasets. Moving beyond the fear and the hype of these new technologies, participants were asked to collectively reflect and explore how these algorithms convey biases from their creators; biases that are located at the level of their datasets these technologies have been trained on. By “queering” the baseline trainings, toxic words and their over-coded historical biases could then be released with care into new, more fluid semantic territories where binary suffering opens onto multi-chromatic poetic landscapes.

These retrainings were then used as bespoke, small-scale textual models that each student could use to guide them to build a virtual world using classical 3d modelling tools. For his project Inner Composition, Elie Hofer trained his own interfaith chatbot using a huge repository of historical descriptions of architectural structures from multiple religions. As Elie designed his 3D virtual world, he consulted his personalized textbot for guidance on what to model next, creating a collaborative process where the chatbot assisted in the worldbuilding process.

The HEAD Continuing Education program encourages creative professionals from various fields of art and design to reflect on the profound capabilities and potential risks of emerging generative AI tools for image, text, video, and 3D. The speculative fiction 1930 started from an article in Le Temps about an invasive species of ants in Kenya. Discussions with a chatbot led to the generation of a sce- nario taking place in a specific period with real historical elements. The final form represents a fictional teaser created as part of an exercise to pitch an original production to Netflix.

Originally titled Les voies du désastre, this teaser was produced with visuals created in Midjourney, animated by Runway AI, accom- panied by an AI-generated soundtrack from Suno, and a voice-over from ElevenLabs. Set in 1930s Kenya, the storyline features an international team of researchers dealing with the ecological disruption caused by the invasive black ant Pheidole Megacephala. The narrative follows their race against time, the establishment of a mobile lab in a train wagon, and the parallel struggles of lions adapting to changes in their hunting grounds. The researchers discover the local ant species Crematogaster is being decimated, leading to deforestation and food chain disruption. Desperate measures include using the railway to distribute a biological agent to stop the invasion, with long-term consequences revealed decades later.
  • Title: Inside Inside
  • Researcher: Douglas Edric Stanley
  • Date: 2021-2024
  • Medium: Interactive installation, video game, cinema
  • AI: Bespoke neural network
  • Project: Playable Cinema
  • Department: Institute of Research in Art & Design
  • Funding: HES-SO

Playable Cinema is a research project currently in development. It explores the use of classification models for real-time interactions across various audiovisual mediums: in this case, video games that can be remixed in real-time with images from the history of cinema. The starting point for this research project is Inside Inside, an installation that uses an AI-modified PlayStation to analyze players’ movements inside of the game Inside, developed in 2016 by the Danish studio Playdead. As players control a small boy — perhaps human, perhaps something else — a remixed film using clips from science fiction is edited in real-time to match their movements.

Since their very beginnings, video games have established a kinaesthetic relationship between the body and the image — essentially inventing a new kind of audiovisual perception nervous system. Throughout the history of cinema, especially in the science fiction works of Michael Crichton, David Cronenberg, and Shinya Tsukamoto, cinema too has sought to understand its own particular form of kinaesthetic influence on human perceptors by exploring the technological, mythological, and biological limits of this perceptual-emotional relationship. The installation Inside Inside juxtaposes these two mediums — cinema and video games — and attempts to reveal their common images of persecution, and how each medium dreams in its own way of the prosthetic powers of the image. Long live the new flesh.

With the launch of services such as DALL·E (2021), Midjourney, and ChatGPT (2022), generative AI invites artists and designers to consider the integration and consequences of machine learning technologies for their practices. Through a series of practical exercises, this manual aims to equip art schoolteachers with methodological tools to familiarize students with generative AI. Collaboratively designed and field-tested between HEAD – Genève and École de Condé (Paris), it is intended to be shared, supplemented and re-appropriated by as many people as possible.

Title: The Free Man – with AI
Artists: Sylvie Boisseau & Frank Westermeyer
Date: 2019
Medium: 4K video 7’43’’
Departments: Visual Arts, IRAD
Funding : HES-SO
Publication: Playing At Being Human

Does the algorithm know us better than we know ourselves? How will we behave when our access to information is permanent and unlimited and artificial intelligence answers all our questions in an instant? What happens when the unknown disappears? What new desires will arise from the awareness of this technology? And what do we do with the time we gain?

Man asks - machine answers is the initial situation to which Boisseau & Westermeyer subject their main character ƒ. In constant dialog with his AI assistant, ƒ’s questions reveal what he imagines, fears or strives for. Nevertheless, his connection to the algorithm has not turned him into a machine, but, paradoxically, his very human characteristics emerge through the AI, which is no less dangerous.

About the scenography
Artificial intelligence is currently moving at a breakneck speed. The new APIs feel less like emerging infrastructures and more like a house of cards. Our scenography reflects the speed of this evolution. Move fast and break things. Ask forgiveness, not permission. No time for solid materials. Construct now with what you can grab. Hoover all the things, synthesize the rest: art, music, poetry, language, images, ideas, noise.
  • Assembling Intelligence Exhibition Opening Event
  • Format: Exhibition
  • Partner : Geneva University of Art & Design (HEAD)
  • Location: Swissnex San Francisco
  • Date: August 22, 2024
  • Time: 4:30 - 9:00 PM
  • 4:30 - 5:30 PM [Invite-Only]
  • Panel “The Last Original: The Future of Creative Practices”
  • 5:45 - 9:00 PM [Vernissage]
  • Exhibition opening, with an explanation by the curator

HEAD – Genève

Created in 2006 from the merger of two prestigious schools, the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the Haute École d’Arts Appliqués, HEAD – Genève draws on a rich cultural and artistic heritage to nurture young creative talent nationally and internationally. Renowned for the quality of its bachelor's and master’s degrees in Fine Arts, Cinema, Interior Architecture, Space and Communication, Visual Communication, Media Design, as well as Fashion and Accessory Design, it has established itself as one of the leading schools of art and design in Europe.

HEAD – Genève has strong ties with the local artistic community and promotes international exchanges and interdisciplinary collaboration. Emphasizing freedom and responsibility, its teaching philosophy fosters individuality through dialogue between teachers and students. HEAD – Genève is part of the HES-SO Geneva (University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Geneva), which comprises six educational institutions offering internationally recognised university level degrees focusing on professional practice.