Proposals

Abstract

In recent years, the DXARTS department has significantly invested in the emerging field of Data-Driven Arts. Exploring the intersections of Data Science and Digital Art, these studies look creatively at advanced techniques involving Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and other forms of generative media. To support the rapidly growing community of UW students working with these tools, DXARTS has successfully hired new faculty and researchers, developed curricula, and expanded interdisciplinary networks across the arts and sciences. In particular, much of the DXARTS Data-Driven Arts curriculum was designed in collaboration with the eScience Institute as part of their new Minor in Data Science for non-STEM students. Through these courses, and indeed all DXARTS studio course sequences, we aim to make emerging technologies more accessible to broader creative communities on campus. With this goal in mind, we propose establishing a new Creative A.I. Toolkit capable of supporting our students in all phases of their Data-Driven Arts research: from data collection, to training, to implementing new machine learning models in fully realized artistic projects. Recognizing these many steps that our students must consider in their creative process, we imagine the lab as a modular arrangement of hardware and software systems that can be utilized in lab, studio, and even gallery environments. This modularity will also make the lab accessible to groups beyond DXARTS students, such as those working in the McMahon 8 Community Center. Jointly run by Housing and Food Services (HFS), College of Engineering (CoE), and DXARTS, McMahon 8 is a multi-use workspace with many diverse zones of activity, such as the DXARTS gallery and graduate studios, CoE Registered Student Organization (RSO) labs, the XRA Virtual Reality lab, and a host of digital fabrication studios. Each of these facilities, in their own way, may be extended by the advanced research and spirit of collaboration that will be fostered in this new Creative A.I. Toolkit.