Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Summer Scholars Session II
The boom of generative AI and machine learning in the creative industries continues to raise complex questions about aesthetics and representation. Is AI a surprising tool for artists and designers to incorporate into their workflow, or a reductive automation of both the creative process and of the learning process? Does AI normalize extractive and exploitative approaches to creators and their work? Does it amplify biases? Does it exacerbate already-urgent educational and national security concerns around misinformation, plagiarism, copyright, privacy, creator compensation, and more? What is a designer when not only production but ideation might be outsourced to a machine?
This project-based course will allow students to explore these existential and ethical questions at the intersection of creativity and artificial intelligence. Students will learn how to integrate text-to-image software, large language models, and other deep-learning software into a creative practice. The assignments in this course focus on using these technologies to cultivate artistic visions in tandem with material approaches such as typography, photography, image editing, painting, projection, and fabrication. Through studio and design projects, the course explores the far-reaching impact of these advanced technologies on art and design, focusing attention on topics ranging from the possibilities of democratizing artistic practice and exponentially expanding the speed and volume of human creative output, to concerns over copyright infringement, environmental impact, human vs machine creativity, and bias within datasets.
In addition to hands-on creative projects, students will engage with a variety of texts and scholars that consider the topic of artificial intelligence from multiple perspectives (Jean Baudrillard, Joanna Zylinska, Byung-Chul Han, Michele Elam, Ruha Benjamin, etc.). Class time will include a mix of lectures, discussion, creative activities, and media analysis. Guest lecturers and field trips will augment the studio environment with histories and philosophies of representation, authorship, spectacle, and truth.
Academic Director
Sarah Edmands Martin
Sarah Edmands Martin is an Assistant Professor in Visual Communication Design whose work reimagines the ways social and civic systems distribute and exercise power within contemporary, mediated spaces. A constellation of critical theories inform her practice, including phenomenology, media theory, narratology, and speculative fabulation. She has degrees in painting, English literature, and her MFA in design. She is a 2024 U.S. Fulbright Scholar, a 2023 Design Writing Fellow at Chicago's Writing Space, a 2021–22 Research Fellow at the Institute for Digital Arts + Humanities, a 2020 Design Incubation Fellow, and a 2019–21 Faculty Affiliate with the Center for Rural Engagement. She is the author of two chapters in Ethics in Design and Communication: New Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury 2020) as well as a forthcoming chapter in Digital Transformation in Design: Processes and Practices: Essays, Case Studies, and Interviews. Her design work has been recognized and published by PRINT, Graphis, the Paris Design Awards, London International Creative, and the Creative Communication Awards.