Post-human Creators and the People who Love Them

Have arrived at Stony Brook University for the Collective Creativity workshop at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. The event is organized by Mason Youngblood (IACS), Katie Mudd (IACS), Margaret Schedel (Music), Owen Rambow (Linguistics), Jordan Kodner (Linguistics), and Brooke Belisle (Art) at Stony Brook University from 23-25 April 2025. This workshop will bring together “experts from cognitive science, cultural evolution, and related fields, alongside practicing artists and humanities scholars, to explore the mechanisms driving creativity in language, music, and other domains.”

I’m here giving a keynote to provoke conversation around the role of “post human” creators, or what we are seeing in contemporary practice where artists are using agentic AI as a kind of medium. More to follow but the projects I’m addressing are Botto (A decentralized AI artist that generates and evolves visual art based on community voting), KEKE (A self-curating AI entity that reflects on its own creative process through a terminal interface, performing aesthetic judgment and autonomous image-making), Technelegy (A poetic AI alter ego trained on Sasha Stiles’ writing, co-authoring verse that explores digital consciousness, language, and human-machine collaboration), and Flynn (An AI enrolled as an art student in Vienna, producing work and reflections through generative tools while participating in academic discourse and pedagogy). It’s been fabulous to dig into these works by some of my favourite artists and to be following the commentary on these projects from next-level curators/theorists like Anika Meier and Brian Droitcoeur. More soon!