Unintended Outcomes: AI in the Artist’s Studio

Presented by Gray Area

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In today’s cultural landscape, artificial intelligence has moved beyond buzzword status: machine learning-driven processes are thoroughly integrated—both visibly and invisibly—into the tools we use every day. Hailed as democratizing digital labor yet decried for diluting human creativity and agency, AI is clearly here to stay. As creators continue to experiment with AI, what has stuck? Beyond the hype, which tools and processes are making a real difference in artists’ studios, and how is that impacting a broader visual culture? How can artists reclaim agency over algorithmic processes, and take command of their own learning models? In this panel discussion presented by Gray Area, scholars of AI aesthetics and visual practitioners working with AI, will come together to map the current state of artificial intelligence and artistic creation. The panel includes Shane Denson (Professor, Stanford University Department of Communication), Halim Madi (Programmer, poet, and storyteller), Jill Miller (Visual artist and Professor, Department of Art Practice, UC Berkeley), and Asma Kazmi (Artist and Professor of Art Practice at UC Berkeley). The discussion will be moderated by Kate Hollenbach, Education Director, Gray Area. 

Kate Hollenbach is an artist, programmer, and educator. She is passionate about using open source tools and teaching in interdisciplinary environments where art and technology meet. Kate is also a contributor to p5.js and serves as President of the Board of Directors for the Processing Foundation. Before joining Gray Area, she was an Assistant Professor of Emergent Digital Practices at the University of Denver. In her creative practice, Kate creates video and interactive works examining critical issues in user interface and user experience design with a focus on user habits, data collection, and surveillance. Her work is informed by years of professional experience as an interface designer and product developer. She has presented, published, and exhibited work in venues such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SIGGRAPH, INST-INT, Piksel Festival, and Taper.

Shane Denson is a Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History and, by Courtesy, of German Studies in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and of Communication in Stanford’s Department of Communication. He is currently the Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought and Literature, as well as Director of Graduate Studies in Art History.

His research and teaching interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, comics, games, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Transcript-Verlag/Columbia University Press, 2014) and co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and the open-access book Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (REFRAME Books, 2016).

Halim Madi حليم ماضي (he / him / they / them) was born in Beirut, Lebanon. They live and work in San Francisco, Beirut and Paris.

A programmer, poet and present-day storyteller حكواتي, Halim embodies and studies migrant, queer and cyborg consciousnesses and their ability to weave new understandings from conflicting worldscapes. They collect and perform tales of border-crossing bodies, syncretic glitches, métis outsiders and sites of transformation who hold keys to a different futuring.

The recipient of the 2024 Robert Coover Award, given for the best work of electronic literature of any length or genre, and a 2024 artist in residence at Gray Area and Counterpulse, they create poetic web interfaces such as We Called Us Poetry, recently exhibited at Bergen University Center for Digital Narrative’s “More than Meets AI”. They perform these pieces and invite audiences to control both poetic web interfaces and their body as in Deserve It and Invasions.

Halim is an art writer and the author of 4 poetry books. Their work has been covered by TechCrunch, the San Francisco Standard and the San Franciscan. Halim’s a speaker and took the stage at TED, several TEDx events and Gray Area.

Halim holds a Liberal Arts degree from Sorbonne University (2010) and a Masters degree from University of Toronto (2014) with a major in Data Mining, Machine Learning and Quantitative Finance and a minor in Philosophy.

Jill Miller is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Practice where she serves as Area Head in Public Practice. She is an interdisciplinary artist with an expanded studio practice that includes experimental new media art, social practice projects, and large-scale community actions. Her work often embraces urgent social issues, using tactics such as humor and playfulness to draw audiences and participants into provocative situations and conversations. Her new media work focuses on the intersection of feminism and technology, exploring the ways that the feminine can disrupt or undermine patriarchal hegemonic structures. Professor Miller is the founding director of Platform Artspace, an experimental art laboratory at UC Berkeley that focuses on collaborative, participatory art projects that are grounded in community building. Her work has been exhibited internationally and collected in private and public institutions worldwide including CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, and the Woods Art Institute in Hamburg.

Asma Kazmi is an artist and Professor of Art Practice at UC Berkeley, whose research-based practice combines virtual and material objects to explore simultaneity—a tug of more than one time and place. Her work involves long term engagement with cities, architecture, plants, animals, stones, and other matter to locate vestiges of relations forged by the legacies of colonialism and post-colonial contexts.

Combining visual and textual detritus from western and non-western historical manuscripts, photographs, archival material, fragments of locations, and mixing them with her own fabulations, Kazmi tells intertwining stories about Islam, Muslim culture, complex trade routes, global flows of people and commodities, labor, colonial and indigenous knowledge systems, and interspecies entanglements.

Kazmi was born in Quetta, a city in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. She works between the US, India, Pakistan, China, Europe, and the Middle East to create installations that are legible in various cultural contexts.

Kazmi’s selected exhibitions include: Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, Shenzhen, China; San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, San Francisco; the Espacio Laraña, University of Seville, Spain; the Commons Gallery, University of Hawaii in Honolulu; Faraar Gallery, Karachi, Pakistan; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit; Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City; Queens Museum of Art, NY; H&R Block Space, Kansas City; The Guild Gallery, New York; and Galerie Sans Titre, Brussels, Belgium; LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Gallery 210, University of Missouri St Louis; MassArt Film Society, Boston; Hunt Gallery, Webster University, St Louis; and Gallery 400, University of Illinois in Chicago.