Amelia Winger Bearskin
Why does so much AI imagery look like comic books?
Course Detail
DescriptionThe hype of AI art has been around for a while and after experimenting with AI images for some of our articles our team wondered - why does so much AI art look like comic books? We turned to an expert to ask why certain aesthetics proliferate in AI libraries - in this interview Amelia Winger-Bearskin answers our questions and offers a deep-dive into other cutting-edge issues in the development of AI image-making technologies. What new possibilities does this medium create for artists and what are its setbacks? Meet the PresenterAmelia Winger BearskinAmelia Winger-Bearskin is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She is also the founder of the AI Climate Justice Lab, the Talk To Me About Water Collective, and the Stupid Hackathon. In 2022 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Award as part of the Sundance AOP Fellowship cohort for her project CLOUD WORLD / SKYWORLD which was part of The Whitney’s Sunrise/Sunset series. In 2021 she was a fellow at Stanford University as their artist and technologist in residence, made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF). In 2020 she founded Wampum Codes, an award-winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation, while a Mozilla Fellow at the MIT Co-Creation Studio.
In 2019 she was a delegate at the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion for His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama, at his World Headquarters in Dharmsala, India. In 2018 she was awarded the 100k Alternative Realities Prize for her Virtual Reality Project: Your Hands Are Feet from Engadget and Verizon Media. This was also the year that nonprofit IDEA New Rochelle won the $1 Million Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge for their VR/AR Citizen toolkit to help the community co-design their city.
Amelia is an enrolled member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan on her mother’s side; her late father was Jewish/Baha’i.