In March 2026, the studio opened its doors in Notting Hill to host the third edition of Layla — a series of intimate gatherings that brings together leaders from data, AI, and the arts. Co-hosted by Amin Hasan of InsightSoftware and Sara Beazley of Artlume, the evening offered guests the rare chance to experience the working studio where every artwork begins its life.

The event centred on a talk and Q&A, tracing a path from early studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture through to the sensor-driven, interactive works that now sit in private collections, museums, and institutions worldwide. Guests explored the studio's workshops and spent time with Sounds of Liberty — the real-time news artwork built on hand-painted digital butterflies, AI-synthesised voice, and live data — which served as a fitting backdrop for a wide-ranging conversation about technology, craft, and artistic intent.

A central thread of the evening was the studio's long relationship with AI and machine learning — one that predates the current wave by several years. Early butterfly works used machine learning to study and model the complexity of butterfly flight, and the studio was building its own generative AI tools before platforms like DALL-E and Midjourney existed. As Dominic put it during the talk:

"At no point have I ever been asking the machine to be an artist. It's always been about asking the machine to be an assistant and a witness to my process."

The conversation turned to a broader question facing the art world — what happens to value when anyone can generate an image with AI. Rather than seeing this as a threat, Dominic offered a characteristically direct view:

"If you present somebody with an image and then say it was made by AI, the value of that image drops to zero. Not down a bit — actually zero. But I don't think it is in any way a crisis for art. If anything, it's a clarification."

That clarification, he argued, circles back to something artists have always known:

"The artwork was never about just the image. It was about the consciousness behind it and the ideas behind it. It's the intention, the lived experience, the specific reason why someone has chosen that subject at that particular time, depicted in that particular way, through that particular process."

The discussion also touched on the studio's obsession with the quality of the pixel — each one carrying millions of possible colours, updated at sixty frames per second — and an emerging realisation that the pixel itself was never the real subject:

"The pixels were never actually the point at all. They were only the evidence that something had been thought and felt and decided at that moment."

Sounds of Liberty brought all of this to life in the room. Its AI-synthesised voices — deliberately flat and affectless, borrowing the neutral register of broadcast news — read live headlines against a background of scrolling long-form journalism. The tension between the transient beauty of the butterfly and the relentlessness of the twenty-four-hour news cycle gave guests a direct, real-time encounter with how technology can serve a conceptual proposition rather than simply demonstrate a capability.

Looking ahead, the talk previewed the upcoming Frontiers exhibition at Halcyon Gallery this September, a major new body of work depicting the world's most endangered animals — sensor-driven works where the animals track, breathe, and respond to each viewer. As Dominic reflected:

"It does feel that AI is just one of many tools that have finally caught up with my ambitions."

It was a privilege to welcome the Layla community into the space where it all happens.

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