2021–22 Grantees
Birthing a New Vision: Artist as Ethnographer and Applied Anthropology as Creative Practice
Stories of the maternal and child health crisis in the American South sit at the intersection of racial equity, economic justice, and public health, becoming a responsibility for us all. This collaboration led by Kyrin Hobson (MFA Candidate, Department of Visual Art) and Tanzima Chowdhury (MA student, Computational Social Science) seeks to explore the compound nature of birthing and healing, trace midwifery spatially and temporally, gather narratives of embodied lived experiences, and conceptualize analog and digital data as it enquires: How can traditional data points like infant-mother deaths, maternal morbidity, and reproductive access be augmented meaningfully? In what ways can individual and collective memory be valued and represented as data? How can data be captured across varied forms to create open-ended, thought-provoking personal explorations to positively impact the sociocultural landscape? Can activating senses beyond the visual lead to a more robust individual and by extension, systemic relationship to data and what it may divulge? The intended outcome of the project is an immersive, multi-sensory contemplation space that draws from the realms of technology, social sciences, art, and embodied experiences, welcoming participants to be curious and to care.
Faculty advisors: Jessica Stockholder (Professor, Department of Visual Arts); Jon Clindaniel (Assistant Instructional Professor, Computational Social Science)
The Egg
The Egg is an investigation into interpretation and intention underlying artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) as tools for creation and exploration. Abby Poteshman (PhD student, Computational and Applied Mathematics) and Miles MacClure (MFA candidate, Department of Visual Arts) will use AI and ML methods to create a self-help guru in a video art piece to explore the driving questions: To what extent do the creators’ intentions matter in curating input data versus designing the underlying network architecture when using AI and ML? Does ML-generated content in a visual art context necessitate new terminology to discuss formal aesthetic concerns? How ‘relatable’ (in terms of human-to-human relations) is AI-generated content within the contemporary art context? The self-help guru is the character under review to draw parallels between themes of optimization and efficiency that radiate from self-help sections of bookstores and visually interrogate them in tandem with the desired optimization and efficiency that motivate the creation of ML algorithms. This project aims to contribute to an ongoing discussion regarding the usage of ML and AI in contemporary art practices, particularly with respect to authorship (or lack thereof) and ML-generated content as an art medium.
Faculty advisors: Jason Salavon (Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts); Giulia Galli (Professor, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering)
The Imperial Nation
The Imperial Nation focuses on the participation of the Ottoman Empire in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition that was held in Chicago. Firat Ciftci (MA candidate, Middle Eastern Studies) and Ceyhun Firat (MFA candidate, Department of Visual Arts) will examine how the physical materials utilized by the Ottoman delegation were connected to the notion of nation-building and culture creation for a multicultural realm that was steadily losing its previously held power and prestige and rapidly moving toward a world of nation-states. This multimedia project incorporates artworks that both recreate the space constructed by the Ottoman delegation, as well as ones that parody it, in a manner of “what if?”, while exploring how an Ottoman Empire that had been more aware, appreciative, and proud of its multicultural reality might have been more successful. The Imperial Nation also analyzes the usage of space and objects at the World’s Fair; for example, a silent park in today’s Hyde Park was, in 1893, a booming bazaar, full of Turkish coffee shops, a den of belly dancers, hookah shops, and a mosque. The project contrasts the reality of the Ottoman site with the capital city of Constantinople of the time, inspecting what was amplified by the officials and what was left out from their displays. We question the way real realms of public conscience were caricaturized, simplified, nationalized, and internationalized for a grand audience.
Faculty advisors: Hakan Karateke (Professor of Ottoman and Turkish Culture, Language and Literature, NELC); Heather Smith (Teaching Fellow, Department of Visual Arts)
Life, quantized…
Life, quantized… is a collaboration between Soumik Ghosh (PhD student, Department of Computer Science) and Tina Wang (MFA candidate, Department of Visual Arts). The live performance visualizes the cadence of life through movement and spoken text — inspired by the quantum world. As the audience follows the performers through the set, they will get a feel of the various stages of life in real-time, and they will see how the ebb and flow of their lives intricately mimic concepts from quantum physics. The performers will dynamically interact with each other, the audience, and also with the objects used in scenic design.
Faculty advisors: Bill Fefferman (Assistant Professor, Computer Science); Julia Rhoads (Director of the Dance Program; Assistant Senior Instructional Professor, Theater and Performing Arts)
Path to the Feast
Path to the Feast is a transdisciplinary research project by Iona Liu (MFA candidate, Department of Visual Arts) and Jacky Dai (MA student, Department of Computer Science). It uses human-computer interaction to interpret prehistoric Chinese fertility and reproductive symbols using the visual language of gender archaeology. The project comprises hand-drawn and AI-generated animations, dance, sound, creative coding, 3-D projection, and electronics. The audience will interact by making hand gestures that correspond to traditional Chinese finger divination. The interactive feedback will be a combination of 6 videos of animation and dance that are narratively parallel and linear. Inspired by Chinese Northeastern shamanic dream rituals, the videos represent both six separate visions (three good luck visions, three bad luck visions) and six events that a person experiences throughout their life. Three good luck events include fall of love, harvest, and sacred rituals. Three bad luck events include loss of love, loss of children, and drunkenness.
Faculty advisors: Jason Salavon (Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts); HaoChen Tan (Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science)