Join us for a panel discussion featuring artists, activists, and academics engaged with the possibilities and challenges of generative AI in civic imagination. Our panelists will explore how tools like MidJourney shape and disrupt our ability to visualize sustainable futures, highlighting both the creative potential and ethical concerns around automation, creativity, and intellectual property. Attendees are invited to participate in a brief interactive activity, designed to spark conversation around the debates on whether AI democratizes creativity or undermines artistic integrity, and how it shapes the collective imagination of our shared future. Read about the panelists below: 

Lia Coleman (they/them) is a Chinese-American artist making art for their ancestors. Coleman’s artwork often straddles the line between the handmade and the digital. 

Through handmade embroidery and gestural drawing, Coleman uses repetitive movement as a means of ritual. Like a séance, their creative process attempts to connect with ancestral knowledge held within the body.

In a similar manner, Coleman repurposes digital technologies like ML and neural networks to serve their personal creative process. They find a strange comfort in the manual labor of assembling and cleaning digital datasets of thousands of images. In this process of collecting and cleaning data, Coleman attempts to record and archive the past – a process which is inherently never complete. They embrace the unpredictability of neural networks as a reflection of their own experience grappling with the elusive nature of ancestry and the past.

Currently, Coleman works at Modyfi and co-organizes the NeurIPS Creative AI Track (formerly the NeurIPS Workshop on Machine Learning in Creativity and Design). In the recent past, Coleman has researched creative AI at Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) Robotics Institute, taught MFA-level courses in ML art at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and worked for organizations such as RunwayML, the Partnership on AI, Meta, and Tesla. Coleman is an alum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, BSc Computer Science) and the School For Poetic Computation.

Their artwork has been shown internationally in Dubai (Foundry Downtown), Germany (Gallery Obrist Essen), Malta (Spazju Kreattiv), Saudi Arabia (Islamic Arts Biennale), Canada (NeurIPS AI Art Gallery), and the United States (Feral File, Science Gallery Detroit). Their work has been featured by Vox, Wired, Tribeca Film Festival, Mozilla Festival, New York University, the NeurIPS Conference, and Gray Area. Their writing on AI art has been published by Princeton Architectural Press, the journal DISEÑA, and Neocha Magazine. 

Danny Ducker has worked as a storyboard artist, writer, and supervisor in the Los Angeles animation industry for the past 10 years at various studios, including Cartoon Network, Disney Television Animation, and Sony Pictures Animation. She is also a member of IATSE Local 839, the Animation Guild.

Ella Rosenblatt is an artist, designer, writer, and educator. She is currently the Post-MFA Fellow in Art and Digital Media at Rice University, where she teaches interdisciplinary courses in the art department. She holds an MFA in Graphic Design and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts, and before that she studied Art History and Science, Technology, & Society (focusing on linguistics and art/writing practice) at Brown University. 

This event is organized through a partnership between the School of Communication and the Civic Paths/Civic Imagination Project with partial support from the Spark Award.