Workshops
Unleash the power of Generative AI in your creative journey with Amy Selwyn & Jane Pirone and dive into the intersection of technology and art, exploring how AI can elevate and inspire your creative process.
There are no available registration dates at this time.
Note: This workshop will be held in a live, online format utilizing the Zoom platform.
Class meets for 5 Saturdays, Mar 16, 23, 30, Apr 6 & 13 from 11am-3pm ET.
It’s terrifying, it’s amazing, it’s AI.
And now, it’s also an online intensive that will allow you to look at AI and the opportunities, challenges, and questions it presents to your artistic practice…regardless of whether you ultimately choose to incorporate it. This course isn’t about whether AI is “good” or “bad,” or even whether it should or should not be used. We assume a world with AI expanding its capabilities and ask what that means to us as artists.
As technological advancements have surged forward, the possibilities for image manipulation have expanded exponentially. And now we have AI: machine learning (also known as deep learning, where the algorithm learns to learn!) whose algorithms analyze enormous numbers of photographic pixels and visual data to learn from patterns. These patterns, in turn, generate new images, driven by the trained algorithm.
Led by Jane Pirone and Amy Selwyn, this course will ask you to consider AI and what it could mean to your own creative process.
We’ll begin with a definition of AI, so we all have a practical understanding (and experience with) at least one if not more platforms, and an understanding of the role of the trained model, the algorithm, and the images themselves.
You will be introduced to the work of several contemporary artists who are using AI in their practices. We’ll do a deep dive into considering the implications (and possible ramifications) for the field of photography itself. We will consider challenges to photographic “truth”, the difference between fake and fabulation, authenticity, intellectual property, and what it means to be “original”.
Finally, you will have the opportunity to work with AI to create your own body of work and to evaluate the process (and the output) for yourselves. Critically, you will learn how to discuss the work.
Guest Speakers will include:
Artist Philip Toledano (Instagram @mrtoledano)
Artist Fran Forman (Instagram @franforman)
Trustee, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Warren James
Maine Media College Core Faculty Charlotte Dixon
Data Visualization and Presentation Specialist for The Washington Post, Yan Wu
Director of Photography, Agence France-Presse. Pierre Fernandez
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Instructor: Amy Selwyn
Amy Selwyn is an artist, writer, and storyteller based in the seacoast area of New Hampshire. She is a transplanted NY’er and vacillates between loving the quieter life and longing for Tribeca.
Amy is working toward her MFA in Media Arts from Maine Media College, Rockport, ME. She specializes in creating refracted portraits constructed from memory and myth, using photography, storytelling, performance, and alternative processes.
Amy’s photographic work has been featured in Lens Magazine (featured emerging artist), The Curated Fridge (Winter ’22, Spring ‘23, Summer ‘23, and Autumn ‘23), the Firehouse Arts Center (Newburyport, MA), the SE Center for Photography in Greenville, SC (“Botanicals”, “Strange, Weird and Unique” and “The Portrait” shows) and various exhibitions at The Griffin Museum, MA.
Instructor: Jane Pirone
Jane Pirone is an Associate Professor of Design Ecologies at Parsons School of Design. Their creative and transdisciplinary practice engages with living systems, new technologies, speculative fabulation, and participatory futures from critical, queer, and post-human perspectives. They are co-founder of Collective Effervescence, which co-designs and facilitates generative spaces as a mode of social practice fostering collaborative, creative, and critical capacities.
Jane is currently serving as the co-chair of the Biodesign Working Group of CUMULUS, has been an Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, a Creative in Residence at Robert College in Istanbul, Turkey, and a Fellow at the Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies in New York City. They served as Dean of the School of Design Strategies from 2015-2019 and as Director of the Communication Design program from 2006-2011.