Wednesday, 25 March 2026
2:30 — 3:30 pm
Online
TEAMS LINK
Creative Technologist, Artist, and Co-founder of Ricebox Studio
Maria Than FRSA is a Vietnamese-British-French creative technologist, artist, and co-founder of the award-winning practice Ricebox Studio. She is currently an Adobe Creative Resident at the V&A Museum x Adobe Residency Programme 2026, where she is focusing on AI and Digital Worlds. In this role, she is consulting with the Schools Programme on approaches to integrating critical and creative AI within education.
in Homage To Quan Âm, arebyte Gallery, London, 2024.
Alongside this work, Maria is exploring locally hosted models and ‘Slow AI’ practices inspired by Buddhist principles, with the aim of guiding creatives towards alternative and more ethical approaches to image-based AI. Her multidisciplinary art practice spans augmented reality, illustration, moving image, and creative AI, and explores themes including fragmented identities, Vietnamese and Tibetan Buddhism, intergenerational trauma, and escapism.
In this talk, Maria will discuss her process of working with AI alongside sketching and hand-drawing, as well as her current research at the V&A Museum and her experiments so far with ComfyUI and Kohya. She will reflect on the questions that have shaped her recent work around AI and Buddhism, and on the ethical and creative challenges that have emerged through this practice.
She will also reflect on how working within a museum context has sharpened her sense of due diligence when approaching ethical AI within the boundaries of an institution. The talk will introduce her thinking around Slow AI and Ancestral AI, explain why she is focusing on Vietnamese Buddhist Pure Land images, and outline the workflows and frameworks for transparency that underpin her practice.
This talk will offer an overview of Maria’s evolving research, creative methodology, and ethical framework for working with AI in ways that are critically informed, spiritually grounded, and artistically experimental.