lectures + events

Atlas of Intelligence -  How Generative AI shapes knowledge and creativity. Talk by Moontae Lee

Generative Al is transforming how we understand, create, and interact with information. Large Language Models (LLMS) comprehend contexts, answer non-trivial questions, and spark creative ideas. This talk introduces the evolution of these models, highlighting the most recent advancements in planning, reasoning, and evaluation. The talk also touches on the critical considerations for both model developers and users, carefully addressing limitations of LLMs as well as ethical and societal implications. Finally, the talk provides ongoing directions in research and production: from the rise of personalized Al agents to the future frontiers of Al.

Moontae Lee is the Director of the Superintelligence Lab at LG Al Research and an Assistant Professor of Information and Decision Sciences at the University of Illinois Chicago. His journey with Large Language Models began as a visiting scholar at Microsoft Research in 2019, continuously consulting the Deep Learning Group at Redmond until joining LG. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Cornell, an MS from Stanford, and BS degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Psychology from Sogang University.

Artist Talk : Caroline Garcia 

Caroline is a culturally promiscuous, interdisciplinary artist. She works across performance, moving image, and installation through a hybridized aesthetic of cross-cultural movement, embodied research, and new media. Her practice traverses a highly personalized aggregation of distinct systems that interlace ethnotraditional forms of knowledge (such as dance, botany, poetry, and ceramics) with digital technologies (including green screening, robotics, motion capture, extended realities [AR/VR], and 3D processes).

Caroline’s research inquiries are uniquely shaped to create archipelagic constellations that intersect the past, present, and future. Using found footage, archives, and artifacts, she digitally samples popular culture and colonial imagery to critically re-appropriate problematic narratives of cultural representation, further complicating them through cultural cannibalism. In her work, she centers peripheral bodies by assuming the role of shape shifter — sliding into the gaps between cultures and experiences of alterity. Her practice involves a reimagining of forgotten choreographies to provide alternate ways of viewing images of the past that eschew classical myths.

Decolonial Art Anthology : A workshop series with Tara Asgar 

This three-part seminar/workshop was designed to introduce students to the concepts of decoloniality in art, helping them critically engage with the legacies of colonialism and find ways to create art that challenges dominant narratives.  

The workshop covered the following topics:

• Understanding Decoloniality in Art

• Exploring Decolonial Aesthetics and Methods

• Creating Decolonial Art as a Collective

Tara Asgar is a Brooklyn-based Bangladeshi Transgender (she/her) artist, educator, and activist. Tara’s hybrid practice utilizes archive, history, and personal narrative to create political and community-engaged collaborations around LGBTQIA+ liberation, Immigrant stories, and decolonial methods. Through public performances, texts, and videos, Tara explores themes of gender, desire, displacement, trauma, and migration.

Conversation with Luis Chude-Sokei: Crystal Fleming as Moderator

Crystal Marie Fleming, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, is a critical race sociologist, the author/editor of four books and an internationally recognized expert on racism and antiracism. Her work empowers people of all backgrounds to become change agents and dismantle white supremacy. Dr. Fleming’s passion for speaking truth to power and promoting social transformation infuses her scholarship, writing and pedagogy. She earned a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in Sociology from Harvard University and graduated with honors in Sociology and French from Wellesley College. Her research appears in leading journals such as Social Problems, The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Poetics, Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race and Mindfulness.is a critical race sociologist, the author/editor of four books and an internationally recognized expert on racism and antiracism. Her work empowers people of all backgrounds to become change agents and dismantle white supremacy. 

Ancestral Archives: Josie Williams and Daniella McPhatter

Cultivating new connections between revolutionary leaders of the past and a future generation of critical thinkers, Ancestral Archives brings historically significant Black leaders, who inspired artist Josie Williams, to present-day communities in the form of virtual poets and authors: Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Octavia Butler. This work explores how generative AI can be enriched with the connections, experience, and knowledge of the past. In doing so, it leverages the learning capabilities of deep neural networks with Black culture to create a thoughtful, one-of-a-kind physical and digital experience, showcasing the power of harnessing technology for positive human impact and building a better world.

Artist Talk: Glenn Cantave

Glenn Cantave is an activist, performance artist, and social entrepreneur. Past pieces include running the NYC Marathon in Chains, a slave auction pop/up AR exhibit and a 30 day water fast in Times Square for the duration of Black History Month 2020 calling for a more equitable blueprint of NYC. Glenn was recently named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for education entrepreneurs, he is also a Camelback Fellow, and Eyebeam Alum. His TED Talk on ‘How Augmented Reality is Changing Activism’ was featured on the homepage of TED.com in July 2019. He is also the Co-Founder of Kinfolk, a nonprofit that uses the arts and emerging technology to maximize the impact and accessibility of Black and Brown Narratives. Kinfolk was recently featured at the New York, New Publics Exhibit at the MoMA and recently won the Special Jury Prize at Tribeca Festival.

Artist Talk: Valencia James

Valencia James is a Barbadian freelance performer, maker and researcher interested in the intersection between dance, theatre, technology and activism. Valencia’s work explores remote interdisciplinary collaboration with creative technologists and how emerging technologies like machine learning and computer vision might enhance creativity in her contemporary dance practice and vice-versa. This research has resulted in collaboratively built, novel open-source software tools that push the boundaries of live performance. 

Artist Talk: Miljohn Ruperto

Miljohn Ruperto is a cross-disciplinary artist working across photography, cinema, performance, and digital animation. His work refers to historical and anecdotal occurrences, and speculates on the nature of assumed facts and the construction of truth. Often involving replicas, modified versions, and enactments, Ruperto takes cultural and historical references and untethers them from their original context to challenge our perception and generate something altogether new. Through a richness and diversity of lenses and preferencing the obscure, mysterious and the magical, his work challenges fixed conceptions of truth and history, and instead speaks of an indeterminacy and subjectivity of experience that renders truth and fiction near indistinguishable. 

Artist Talk: Dorothy Santos

Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. (she/they) is a Filipino American storyteller, poet, artist, and scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in Film and Digital Media with a designated emphasis in Computational Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor for the Everett Program for Technology and Social Change in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Artist Talk: Agnieszka Kurant

Born in Poland and based in New York City, Kurant probes the “unknown unknowns” of knowledge and the speculations and exploits of capitalism by integrating elements of science and philosophy, and analyzing certain phenomena—collective intelligence, emergence, virtual capital, immaterial and digital labor, evolution of memes, civilizations and social movements, artificial societies, energy circuits, and the editing process—as political acts. She explores the hybrid and shifting status of objects in relation to value, aura, authorship, production, and circulation. Many of her works emulate nature and behave like living organisms, self-organized complex systems, or bachelor machines.

Lecture: Dr. Jennifer Rhee

In her research Rhee analyzes artificial intelligence and robotics technologies in relation to race, gender, and labor. More specifically, she examines the different visions of humanness that shape AI technologies and bring these technologies into conversation with theorizations of AI in speculative fiction and art. Her scholarship and teaching are in the areas of speculative fiction studies, literature and science, feminist science and technology studies, critical AI studies, and ecocritical media studies. 

Artist Talk: Mother Cyborg

Mother Cyborg grows out of more than twenty years as a musician, technologist, community organizer and educator. I am motivated by a vision of the future where the greatest possibilities for collective liberation, art and technology merge. I develop music, art, and educational tools to reveal the complexities that occur where technology intersects with social spaces, economies, and relationships.

Artist Talk: Johann Diedrick

Johann Diedrick is an artist, engineer, and musician that makes installations, performances, and sculptures for encountering the world through our ears. He surfaces vibratory histories of past interactions inscribed in material and embedded in space, peeling back sonic layers to reveal hidden memories and untold stories. He shares his tools and techniques through listening tours, workshops, and open-source hardware/software. He is the founder of A Quiet Life, a sonic engineering and research studio that designs and builds audio-related software and hardware products for revealing new sonic possibilities off the grid. 

Artist Talk: Marisa Moran Jahn

An artist, filmmaker, and transmedia producer of Ecuadorian and Chinese descent, Marisa Morán Jahn’s work redistributes power, “exemplifying the possibilities of art as social practice” (ArtForum). Codesigned with youth, new immigrants, and working families, Jahn’s civic-scale projects have engaged millions both on the street and at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the United Nations, Tribeca Film Festival, and Obama’s White House. She has received grants and awards from National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital, Open Society, Tribeca Film Institute, Anonymous Was A Woman, and more.

Artist Talk: Moreshin Allahyari

Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: موره شین اللهیاری‎), is a NY based Iranian-Kurdish artist using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of MENA (Middle East and North Africa). 

Dr. Ayana Dozier

Ayanna Dozier (PhD) is a Brooklyn-based artist-writer. Her art practice centers film (both motion picture and still), performance, and installation work with a specific concentration on surrealist, conceptual, and feminist practices. She is the author of Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope (2020). Her films have been screened at the selected festivals; Open City Docs (2020), BlackStar (2021), Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (2021), Prismatic Ground (2022) and Aesthetic Film Festival where she was the recipient of Best Experimental in 2020 for her film Softer.

1st Annual FHS Open House

Lecture: Elizabeth Chodos

Elizabeth Chodos is the director of the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon. She joined the university in fall 2017 from Ox-Bow, school of art and artists’ residency (Saugatuck, Michigan), where she most recently served as executive and creative director. To date, Chodos has focused her career on promoting the work of contemporary artists through residencies, higher education, exhibitions and public programming, and she hopes to continue that at Miller ICA.

Artist Talk: Maria Hupfield

Maria Hupfield is an artist and transdisciplinary maker working with Industrial felt at the intersection of performance art, design and sculpture; an Assistant Professor in Indigenous Performance and Digital Arts, and Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts, Director / Lead Artist of the Indigenous Creation Studio, Department of Visual Studies / English and Drama, at the University of Toronto Mississauga.