CAPABLE Project Artists Collaboration

Alex May and Anna Dumitriu joined the CAPABLE project in 2020 as artists collaborating with the research team. Funded through the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, CAPABLE was developing a virtual cancer coaching system to support patients, home carers, and clinicians through personalised medicine, drawing on artificial intelligence, big data analysis, and wearable technologies.

The collaboration was not positioned as illustration or outreach added at the end of a technical process. Instead, May and Dumitriu were brought into the project to engage directly with its research and to help shape how complex medical, ethical, and social questions could be communicated through artworks, workshops, and public discussion. That made the collaboration part of the project’s thinking as well as part of its public-facing activity.

For May, the project extended an ongoing interest in how digital systems alter care, decision-making, and lived experience. CAPABLE brought those concerns into the context of cancer treatment and support, where questions of trust, interpretation, and human agency have immediate consequences. The collaboration later informed new work developed through the project, connecting emerging medical technologies to wider cultural questions about responsibility, access, and how technical systems are understood.