Media Arts and Technology

Week 8: AI the Misnomer Alan Turin, pioneer of the computer, said in regards to the question: can machines think: “it is too meaningless to deserve discussion.” Using Harold Cohen’s AARON and discussing the MIT paper “A Survey of Recent Practice of Artificial Life in Visual Art,” I will discuss how ...

Mert Toka https://www.merttoka.com/page.html?slug=dynamovis Passive Multi-touch Surface https://www.merttoka.com/page.html?slug=passive-multi-touch-surface Screenshot 2025-12-07 at 6.57.40 PM.png Mert Toka’s (UCSB MAT Alumn) work of data visualizations is very interesting to me. Making touch as the ...

Screenshot 2025-12-02 at 12.18.28 PM.png Cybernetics is fundamentally about human relationships to machines and computation. Though it was founded on the command and control systems of the US military, there have been moments of rebellion, where different approaches to the development of computatio...

Casey Reas piece is a very brilliant but simple idea which is “seven years of following a line.” Through these years, Reas takes something very rudimentary and then programs increasing complex behaviors into objects. With each programmed behavior, he generates a series of artistic works, revealing h...

Farid: Detecting Deepfakes I know a bit about Farid. I selected him as an advisor when I applied to Berkeley’s School of Information. I have read several papers on the forensic identification of generative images. Farid's concern is about the use of generative systems (Deepfakes, Voice Cloning) for...

What is Generative Art: A Review of Phillip Galanter’s Essay The question of what is generative is a loaded question but by looking at the art piece “A Becoming Resemblance” we can provide a clear definition of Galanter’s definition Glanter argues that “the defining aspect of generative art seems t...

George Legrady’s Equivalents II is one the earliest examples of users inputting text and natural language to create imagery. Traveling from New York to Europe , this 1992 piece uses algorithmic processes such as fractal mid-point synthesis and Brownian motion to express how text and images can form ...

Measuring the Grey - Lev Manovich Manovic is author, artist, theorist and professor who popularized the term Cultural Analytics and founded the Cultural Analytics Lab. Manovich argues for using computational, visualization, and big data methods to explore contemporary and historical cultures. His bo...

Seek by the Architecture Machine group, housed gerbils surrounded by metal blocks. The gerbils move the blocks and a robotic arm reacts and stacked the blocks in a grid-like fashion. In theory, the gerbils design and the robot Seek helps tidy up. The robot is trying to anticipate (predict) the next ...