3:00 pM
Panel Discussion: Artificial Intelligence & Art

Topic: Art & Artificial Intelligence
Panelists: Magdalena Bermudez, Karl Erickson & Eric Millikin
Moderator: Gerald Habarth

Description:
In recent months AI has been the topic of widespread discussion and debate across many academic disciplines and social contexts. This panel discussion brings together a diverse group of artists and film makers who are using AI in novel and creative ways to explore new aesthetics and reflect on important issues in culture, while interrogating its uses to help shape how we understand our relationship to these powerful technologies. This panel discussion will address topics of aesthetics, authorship, creativity, truth and fiction, cultural homogenization and other issues as they relate to the impact of artificial intelligence on artists, art making and on society as a whole. As artists we could not be asking more important questions at this time.

Biographies:

Karl Erickson
Karl Erickson is an animator and audio/visual performance artist. He makes videos and audio/visual-performances about language, transformative experiences, self-betterment and environmentalism. His screen-based work takes place in galleries, museums, film festivals and music venues. He is particularly interested in how communication and kinship can be made across different entities, plants to humans, machines to animals. Recent exhibitions include “Language as Shapes” (with Andrew Falkowski) at The Suburban, Milwaukee, WI, “Learn Sing Plants Counting Monsters Colors Alphabets” at Clough-Hanson Gallery, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN, “Another Dimension: Digital Art in Memphis” at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN, and “Are You Connect?” at the Electronic Arts Gallery of Colorado State University. He received his BFA from Wayne State University and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.

Magdalena Burmudez
Magdalena Burmudez is a filmmaker and educator whose practice examines the entangled relations between people and technologies, prodding at the slippery boundaries between human and informational bodies through essayistic film and video works. Her work has screened internationally at various film festivals, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], Athens International Film + Video Festival, BIDEODROMO International Experimental Film and Video Festival, Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival, Tranås at the Fringe, and The Festival of (In)appropriation. She received her B.A. from Hampshire College and her M.F.A. in cinematic arts from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Film and Video at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.

Eric Millikin
Eric Millikin is an American artist based in Baltimore, Maryland, (previously in Detroit, Michigan, and Richmond, Virginia) with over 30 years of experience creating computer, internet, video, biological, and artificial intelligence artwork. Millikin comes from a working-class family, growing up in a mobile home in the woods of rural Michigan. He is a first-generation college student and National Merit Scholar who earned his BFA from Michigan State University where he created interactive video installation art and AI-generated postmodern poetry, and his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University where he created live-AI-generated computer art installation and political protest art. His artwork has been featured by WIRED, USA Today, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, and The New York Times Sunday Arts section. His work has been included in recent exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, Charles University in Prague, and the Festival and Congress Centre in Varna, Bulgaria. He is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts, Animation and Interactive Media at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Gerald Habarth
Gerald Habarth is an artist and animator currently serving as Associate Professor of Art at West Virginia University where he heads the Electronic Media program in the School of Art and Design. He holds an MFA degree from the University of South Florida and a BFA degree from Parsons School of Design. His works have screened at numerous national and international venues and festivals including the Tampa Museum of Art, the Huntington Museum of Art, the Festival Les Instants Vidéo and the Stuttgarter Filmwinter - Festival for Expanded Media. In 2010 he founded the West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival.