Creative Interventions

What are the rhetorics of Indigeneity, Indigenous practices, and Indigenous activism in the digital sphere? What relationships can be found between under comprehension of Indigeneity, and our understanding of technological and media systems? What is Cherokee syllabary, and how did it come to be integrated successfully into our digital platforms?

Joseph Erb will discuss his widely varied work toward just representation and inclusion of Cherokee written syllabary and language in digital contexts, including his own activism and scholarship, with Joanna Hearne, Mark Palmer with Durbin Feeling (see “Origin Stories in the Genealogy of Cherokee Language Technology”).

Humanity’s ability to create and circulate commonly held narratives and collectively exist in the symbolic world, as well as the material world, has brought us to fascinating, dizzying, and dangerous heights over the course of our existence. We find ourselves in a period when the stories and institutions from which we derive meaning appear to be demonstrating a concerning degree of fragility and producing dismal side effects. Exemplified in trends like the Americans movement from organized religion and the erosion of trust in liberal, democratic institutions, the time for designing new, more resilient systems of meaning is now. With the tools of emerging digital technology at our disposal, how are people collectively engaging to respond to the specific needs of the meaning crisis? From proliferation of personal development content on YouTube and TikTok, to the embrace of video conferencing platforms like Zoom for meditation and men’s groups, we will learn how different groups are feeding their need for meaning and community.

Ever Bussey is a social researcher and creative media maker. The nature of their practice brings the intricacies of human social relationships into focus through storytelling and collective world-building. Ever was introduced to digital media making through Allied Media Projects, where they learned to apply a social justice lens to their creative practice. He collaborates in the Just Tech program, which foregrounds questions of power, justice, and the public impact of new technologies, investigating evidence of bias and harms while imagining and creating more just technological futures. 

Creating a Culture of Consent for Our Digital Future: A Conversation with Tawana Petty (2024)

In this talk, I will discuss design ontologies—how tools are made and to what end. I’m particularly interested in GenAI tools and the ways they might be broken or bent toward purposes beyond traditional design frameworks. I think with and against the work of writer Octavia Butler, particularly her work on xenogenesis – becoming alien – to work through some of my recent art and critical works. I am particularly interested in what you, as student thinkers and creators, are working, thus plan for a dialogic engagement.

This talk is presented in collaboration with the UCSC Center for Racial Justice.

In this talk, Wang will unpack the environmental impacts of AI in a time of climate crisis, alongside the joys and pleasures of permacomputing and degrowth. Wang will discuss their work, An Archive of Witch Fever, and connections between computing, radio and early semiconductors, reframing computation as a transformation or alchemy of materials, and computation as a racialized and gendered practice. 

while computational and electronic technologies have dominated the conversation about creative technology, the arts can expand upon the original meaning of technology, the application of disciplinary knowledge, which is similar to the critical making and action stance of praxis. we will go through my own explorations on play and its transformative qualities, and what it means to identify as a creative technologist in this context

In this talk, Feileacan McCormick and Sofia Crespo will share the journey that led them to create their combined studio practice Entangled Others, as well as the questions that guided their artistic research throughout the past 7 years since they began working with AI.

What can criticism offer us in a world of unruly generative images and synthetic media? What precise language might we use for machine learning’s impact, or the wake of an algorithm? How must our practices of discernment and the critical impulse evolve in response to computational developments, to perhaps be more resilient and responsive?

This talk invites one to consider how our language might move with ‘intelligent’ systems and beings that simulate liveness and likeness. To navigate a present and future dominated by synthetic media, and created by predictive systems, we take up a practice of seeing through systems. This talk first explores the craft of developing a hybrid, strategic, collective and dissident criticism of technology. It second reviews cases of baffling, seemingly inarticulable experiences from early software experiments and artists’ interventions, into AI/ML. Third, it explores the evolution of language in response to material and symbolic systems that dramatically shape our creative approaches and cognition. Throughout, the talk explores evolving critical methods that help us better situate ourselves to identify a vast range of hidden fictions and beliefs about what technology is meant to do and be.

Since the shift to predominantly digital audio recording, manufacturers of software tools have stepped in claiming to make production work faster and easier while unlocking the artist/producer’s creative potential. In 2016, artist Justin Bieber explained to the New York Times Magazine that the way producers Diplo and Skrillex were able to manipulate Ableton on his hit “Where Are Ü Now” resulted in what he affirmatively coined as “expensive-sounding sounds.” More recent messaging around sounds that “stand out” is surging as most major music software outfits roll out new AI tools meant to do everything from automate the engineer’s vocal chain to help the artist quickly find and tailor samples. This talk is an interactive listening exercise that brings together conceptions of creative musical production and interrogates the ways software designers lay claim to and promise creativity. Refusing to take these claims at face value, we will consider several songs, advertisements, and demonstration videos from the last 25 years and ask, what makes a technology “creative” in practice? And under what conditions? Participants are encouraged to assemble examples from their own listening and creative lives and present them for group discussion. 

Khan explores our personal relationships with computational systems through moments spanning from childhood gaming experiences to contemporary AI. The central metaphor of the “asymptote”—a curve endlessly approaching but never reaching a line—describes both humanity’s pursuit of technological mastery, and the incomputable aspects of experience that resist capture by algorithms and surveillance. Through encounters with drones, machine learning systems, and glitched game worlds, this talk argues for maintaining space for the mystical, ineffable, and offscreen in an era of relentless quantification and prediction. The talk ultimately calls for preserving doubt, acknowledging what cannot be computed, and remembering the personal “why” that precedes professional identity in navigating our algorithmic present.