Monday, April 28, 4 – 5:30 PM, reception to follow, UMBC Library Gallery, please RSVP

Composer and sound artist Sam Pluta, visual artist Brea Souders, and video artist and writer Eryk Salvaggio each use and interact with AI in their artistic practice. They will introduce us to their work, reflecting on their experiences, doubts, and breakthroughs creating works using these technologies. This will be followed by a discussion moderated by UMBC Assistant Professor of Art Eric Millikin.

Although artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as an academic discipline in the mid 1950’s, general use and public awareness of AI has materialized only in the past three years with the launch of generative AI chatbots and its role in the general applications that we use on a daily basis, through web search engines, virtual assistants, and recommendation systems. We are now at a critical juncture to consider the impacts of generative AI on creativity through ethical, cultural, and societal lenses.

Sam Pluta is a composer, electronics performer, and sound artist and an Associate Professor of Computer Music and Music Engineering Technology at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. Though his work has a wide breadth, his central focus is on using the computer as a performance instrument capable of sharing the stage with groups ranging from new music ensembles to world-class improvisers. By creating musical systems of shared agency, Pluta’s vibrant sonic universe focuses on the visceral interaction of instrumental performers with reactive computerized sound worlds. Pluta’s performances and production can be found on over 50 albums of new music and jazz. Over the past five years, Pluta has been developing “complex” synthesis systems which have up to 100 different control parameters. With standard approaches, these systems would be impossible to manipulate in performance. However, neural networks not only make control of these systems possible, but they open the field of electro-acoustic performance by exposing previously unexplored synthesis techniques to study. His presentation will share some of his instrument designs and how AI has made their creation possible.

Brea Souders (UMBC Visual Arts, ‘01) is a visual artist whose work bridges studio-based practices and observational photography. Her recent work explores concepts of selfhood, anonymity, belonging, and otherness within technological landscapes. Looking at the historical and ongoing imprints of technology from a female perspective, she examines its impact on bodies, identities, and perceptions of the world around us. Souders’ book Another Online Pervert (MACK, 2023) derives from a yearlong series of conversations between the artist and a female AI chatbot. These conversations are interspersed with entries from Souders’ diary spanning two decades, and combined with photographs from her personal archive. Through her photographs and chatbot conversations, we step into a world of questions: about love, sexuality, death, disappointment, the sky, seeing, desire, and anxieties of the body. The result is a unique exploration of how a machine and a human can build a shared story from pieces of themselves.

Eryk Salvaggio is a blend of an artist, hacker, researcher, and writer, exploring artificial intelligence’s social and cultural impacts. Working with AI since 2018 and critical tech art for more than 25 years, his work explores the creative misuse of AI and the transformation of archives into training data. His practice is designed to expose ideologies of tech and to confront the gaps between datasets and the worlds they claim to represent. Salvaggio will discuss two of his creative works: SWIM, a video that connects several critical approaches to AI, including creative misuse and the analysis of underlying datasets and invites contemplation of the technical mediation of cultural memory; and Because of You, a video essay created with Dr. Avijit Ghosh that reflects on the reliance on dominant patterns in a dataset to create new images, which often elide or erase minority identities.

Eric Millikin is a multidisciplinary artist with decades of experience creating artificial intelligence, internet, biological, and occult artwork. Millikin uses techniques like creative coding, robotics, video projection mapping, multichannel sound, and augmented and virtual reality to investigate and experiment with the often invisible ways technology can shape humanity. His artwork has been featured in WIRED, USA Today, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and The New York Times Sunday Arts section. He is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at UMBC, where he teaches courses in Animation and Interactive Media.