Artificial Intelligence and possible futures for the Arts
Image by DALL-E
A special issue of
Tradition-Innovations
[in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education]
An online peer-reviewed open-access journal published in association with a2ru (Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities), hosted by a2ru member UNLV.
A platform for conversations about how innovations engage with arts, design, and media traditions, in higher education and beyond.
Timeline
Initial submission in: April 7, 2023
Submit a short summary—about 300 words—of a project or commentary, including a statement about the relevance of the contribution to ongoing discussions about AI. Relevant links to online projects, images, or audio files are encouraged, but not required. Omit any information that identifies the author(s) and institutional affiliation(s) in your summary. Peer reviewers will provide feedback by mid-May.
Completed project: July 7, 2023
We encourage creative responses that showcase challenges and opportunities of AI, and are open to the presentation medium. Succinct pieces—short articles (about 1,000 to 2,500 words), photo essays, interviews, audio and video contributions (up to about 5 minutes), etc.—are welcome, with longer contributions considered.
Publication: Fall 2023
Recognizing that this topic is quickly emerging and needs engaged participation by faculty, practitioners, and scholars in the arts, we have an accelerated publication schedule, with rapid peer review feedback and Fall 2023 as the anticipated publication date.
Call for Submissions
How are recent innovations in Artificial Intelligence (AI)—ones that change art processes and appear to produce creative works—transforming the creation of art and knowledge? The pace of these innovations and the discussions surrounding them challenge traditions in the arts, design and media fields and encourage (if not force) us to consider the possible futures of the arts.
The editorial board of Traditions-Innovations in the Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education invites artists, performers, designers, and media creators in higher education to become a central part of the discussion about AI’s effects on the arts. Final versions of accepted submissions will be published in the inaugural edition of the journal and set the stage for upcoming issues.
Responses that address the following challenges are particularly welcome:
How can artists, performers, designers, and media creators balance innovations and traditions in the Arts, Design, and Media higher education, and what can we learn from our fields’ reactions to AI?
As a practitioner, scholar, or mentor, what strategies are you using to address AI’s challenges to your work in the arts?
How is AI changing the relationship between educators/mentors and students?
What traditional—centuries-old—practices are beyond the reach of artificially generated work, and why? What does this tell us about human creativity, and creative processes in the face of AI?
How can we influence AI platforms in visionary and productive ways? What is important to consider beyond an immediate reactive stance?
How can we respond to unintended consequences of AI and participate in iterating positive advancements?
How can the arts empower contemporary society to identify longer-term opportunities–and challenges–of AI?
The editorial board encourages a broad range of responses including innovative and illustrative projects and teaching methods, as well as commentaries on the challenges—and opportunities—AI presents for arts, design, and media disciplines. We are also open to the presentation medium and encourage creative responses that showcase challenges and opportunities.
If you would like to see if your work would fit this special issue, please feel free to contact the editor of Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education] Yvonne Houy at Yvonne.Houy@unlv.edu or the guest editors of this special issue, Sarah O'Connell at sarah@eatmoreartvegas.com, Leah Howd at l.k.howd@hr.nl, Fen Kennedy at fkennedy@ua.edu, or Julian Kilker at Julian.Kilker@unlv.edu
About Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education ]
How can we build a future for teaching/mentoring creative work and research that honors core disciplinary traditions, supports interdisciplinary collaborations, and enhances transdisciplinary work? How can continually evolving digital technologies innovate the interwoven work of teaching-researching-creating, while supporting the best of traditional practices in the Arts, Design, and Media disciplines?
This new peer-reviewed open access eJournal—collaboratively brought to life by the international Alliance for the Arts Research Universities (a2ru) network, and a2ru member UNLV—provides a multimedia forum to address this and connected questions by exploring how creative work, teaching/mentoring, and knowledge creation/research are linked and in conversation with one another.
In the challenging crucible of the pandemic, educators forged new techniques and innovative practices. Faculty in disciplines underserved by typical digital learning tools—such as in the arts, design, and media disciplines—explored and developed creative solutions as they shifted from in-person to remote teaching, researching, and creating. They adapted centuries-old teaching traditions to new digital technologies and in new contexts that were themselves changing rapidly.
Art, design, and media creatives and faculty continue to expand “tradition-innovations” - often, but not always through digital technologies - as higher education transforms in response to evolving challenges.
Aims & Scope
The mission of Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design and Media Higher Education] is to
Provide interdisciplinary collaboration and peer-reviewed presentation/publication opportunities, including new forms of digital scholarship, for faculty in fine and performing arts, design and media, and related disciplines.
Create a regular dialog exploring the interplay between tradition and innovation in a rapidly changing technology environment.
Raise awareness about innovations in research, creative work, and teaching mentorship in the arts, design and media disciplines with potential to transform higher education.
Generate ideas for engaging online, remote, and hybrid teaching in our disciplines.
Publications and live-streamed panels will present innovations in research, teaching and creative work evolving rapidly in the current environment of cultural and technological change, accelerated by the pandemic.
The editorial board invites engaging contributions that provides possible answers to core questions at the heart of tradition-innovations in art, design and media:
How can we build a future for teaching/mentoring creative work and research that honors and enhances core disciplinary traditions, interdisciplinary collaboration, and transdisciplinary creation?
How do continually evolving digital technologies innovate the interwoven work of teaching-researching-creating?
How are creative practitioners/mentors evolving their practice in relation to digital media?
What are the links between traditional co-located spaces for creative work and teaching/mentoring - makerspaces, performance spaces, design spaces, museums/galleries - and digital media?
How can new technologies support the best of traditional practices in the arts, design, and media disciplines?
How do emerging innovations support – or supplant – teaching, research, and creative practice traditions in productive ways?
How can we nurture exploratory digital scholarship and interactive media at the intersection of teaching and creative knowledge creation?
This journal honors the diverse discourses of the arts, design, and media disciplines, and we welcome a wide variety of contributions that show how creative work, teaching/mentoring and knowledge creation/research are linked and in conversation with one another.
Submissions can include but are not limited to, compelling visual or digital pieces/portfolios that include succinct descriptions, reports of initiatives or projects, or longer academic essays with more extensive research citations.
Editorial Board
Guest Editors: Leah Howd, Fen Kennedy, Julian Kilker, and Sarah O’Connell
Sarah O'Connell, MDra
Sarah O'Connell (MDra, Directing, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) is an international theatre producer and cultural strategist who advises public and private stakeholders on matters related to the Creative Economy. She is the Artistic Director of The Asylum Theatre in Las Vegas, and co-owner of Axislights Inc, a commercial lighting company that serves the live event industry.
Julian Kilker, Ph.D.
Julian Kilker’s work focuses on the intersection of visual media, social issues and innovation. He has published research in academic journals (including Visual Communication Quarterly, Social Identities, Convergence, IEEE journals, and The Public Historian) and has exhibited solo photography exhibits in Switzerland, California, and Nevada, while also receiving awards from the Broadcast Education Association, Management Communication Quarterly, the Association for Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication, the Nevada Press Association, and KNPR’s Desert Companion.
Leah Howd, M.S. Library Science
After years of working in public libraries, Leah Howd made the jump to higher education where she focuses on instruction of creative technologies such as streaming and podcasting. Leah draws on her background in librarianship to incorporate information literacy into technical instruction. She supports instructors in producing and using hybrid learning at Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam.
Fen Kennedy, Ph.D., Advanced Labanotator
Dr. Fen Kennedy is a dancer/scholar holding a PhD in Dance Studies from the Ohio State University and based at the University of Alabama. Their research investigates how dance articulates the values and norms of society, and how those norms can be challenged and changed. Their research can be read in Dance Chronicle, The Journal of Dance Education and is forthcoming in various anthologies. Their choreographic work includes Finches for the Gasden Museum of Art, and Walk As If You Could Break the Earth for the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative at UA.
Editor of Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design and Media Higher Education]
Yvonne Houy, Ph.D.
Yvonne Houy supports arts/research integration as UNLV College of Fine Arts Learning Technologist serving faculty in Architecture, Art, Dance, Film, Entertainment Engineering Design, Music and Theatre, and as a2ru Executive Committee member. A graduate of Cornell University (M.A. & Ph.D.) and the University of California, Berkeley (B.A.), and former Visiting Assistant Professor at the highly selective, liberal arts-focused Pomona College, Dr. Houy understands the needs and challenges of higher education institutions that value research, teaching, and diversity. Her publications include peer-reviewed articles, presentation posters, and digital scholarship on teaching innovation research, and book chapters on social control through emerging media technologies, resistance techniques to such social control mechanisms, and the intersection of sustainability and technology.
Editorial Board of Tradition-Innovations [in Arts, Design and Media Higher Education]
Angela M. Brommel, MFA Creative Writing, MA Theatre
Angela M. Brommel is Senior Advisor & Executive Director for the Arts at Nevada State College where she is Chief Curator of Collections & Galleries, and affiliate faculty. She has the esteemed honor of being Clark County Poet Laureate for the 2022-2024 term. Angela received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, and an MA in Theatre from the University of Northern Iowa. The author of two books, Mojave in July (Tolsun Books) and Plutonium & Platinum Blonde (Serving House Books), her poetry has been published in the North American Review, The Best American Poetry blog, and many other journals and anthologies. In 2018 she was a Red Rock Canyon Artist-in-Residence, serving as the inaugural poet of the program. She also serves as Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor for The Citron Review. An interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose creative scholarship crosses Art, Creative Writing, and Theatre, some of her areas of creative work include art and literary history, curation, feminist criticism and theory, defamiliarization as feminist praxis in the work of women writers and painters, the arts as a healing modality, and the role of creatives in economic development and tourism.
Leah Howd, M.S. Library Science
After years of working in public libraries, Leah Howd made the jump to higher education where she focuses on instruction of creative technologies such as streaming and podcasting. Leah draws on her background in librarianship to incorporate information literacy into technical instruction. She also supports instructors in producing and using hybrid learning.
Felice Amato, Ph.D., MFA
Felice Amato is an assistant professor at Boston University, where her interdisciplinary practice and teaching focus on puppets and masks. She fell in love with puppets, so to speak, while completing her MFA and subsequent arts-led PhD in the art department at UW-Madison. As part of the larger category of material performance, they have become the unifying core of her work and have opened pathways to a broad yet coherent interdisciplinary practice. As an arts-based researcher, Amato creates a variety of work, exploring in-depth the phenomena of performing objects. She is engaged in scholarly writing and research and uses the genre for pedagogical innovations and to cultivate community. Collaboration and leadership within the field are important aspects of her life and research; she developed a yearlong global arts research conference on the theme of women and masks in 2021-22. Amato serves on the board of UNIMA–USA, the American chapter of the Union Internationale de la Marionnette, a UNESCO, where she chairs the Academic Committee. She has received awards for her artistic work and has published and presented in the fields of education, puppetry and the arts. Amato has designed and taught innovative courses at Boston University that cross colleges and disciplines. She has initiated several university-wide residencies and was named the Provost’s Art Fellow in 2019. Amato is currently writing on female embodiment and the representation of trauma through material performance. Having worked extensively with an Italian mask family, she is engaged in using the mask as a tool of research. She is a founding member of an international feminist mask collective, that has, as one of the principal goals, the creation of a mask lending library that would expand access, involvement, and insights.
Keli DiRisio, MFA in Visual Communication Design, MS in Print Media
Keli DiRisio has a Master of Science and a Master of Fine Arts, both from RIT, in addition to having owned a design studio and video production company and working in the design industry for over 20 years. For the past five years, Keli has been a professor of Graphic Design at Rochester Institute of Technology, with her teachings focused not only the foundations of graphic design, but also on user motivations and how our design decisions can affect and infuence emotions. She is currently working on a mobile application solution with a clinical researcher and social worker to help college students understand and regulate their emotions and coping mechanisms as they apply to everyday stress and their mental health. Keli is also one of the founders and is the Creative Director of Command+g Design Lab, a student design studio at RIT.
Perrin Teal Sullivan, MFA, Resilience and Adaptation Fellow
Perrin Teal Sullivan is an artist, designer, and educator driven by a belief that the arts cultivate forms of knowledge that are essential to our agency and wellbeing – as individuals, communities, and ecosystems – in the face of complex challenges. Her work in STEAM education focuses on integrating art and science practices to help learners of all ages develop new perspectives and enhanced capacity for understanding and creating the world around them. She collaborates with diverse learning institutions including libraries, museums, science centers, and schools to design and develop integrated STEAM programs specific to their learning contexts.
Fen Kennedy, Ph.D., Advanced Labanotator
Dr. Fen Kennedy is a dancer/scholar holding a PhD in Dance Studies from the Ohio State University and based at the University of Alabama. Their research investigates how dance articulates the values and norms of society, and how those norms can be challenged and changed. Their research can be read in Dance Chronicle, The Journal of Dance Education and is forthcoming in various anthologies. Their choreographic work includes Finches for the Gasden Museum of Art, and Walk As If You Could Break the Earth for the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative at UA.
Nils Gore, M.Arch, Registered Architect; NCARB
Nils Gore is a licensed architect and a Professor in the Architecture Department at the University of Kansas, where he focuses on community engaged scholarship through completion of student design/build projects in the public realm. These projects include work in Mississippi, Lawrence, New Orleans and, most lately, Wyandotte County Kansas, where the work is focused on projects that promote public health through healthy eating and active living. In all of these projects, he works with students to develop innovative material and tectonic design solutions that enhance and support an enriched community life. The work has won numerous design awards, has been published in scholarly journals and book chapters, and has been presented in public lectures and scholarly presentations. He is a graduate of Kansas State University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and has taught at the Boston Architectural Center, Mississippi State University and the University of Kansas.
J.R. Campbell, MFA - Textile Art and Costume Design; PgCert - Phd Supervision in Art and Design
J.R. Campbell is helping to cultivate the Design Innovation Initiative at Kent State University to support design thinking, project-based learning, technology-infused maker communities and the curation of cross-disciplinary collaborative teams to tackle "wicked" problems. Campbell's research/creative work is grounded in textile design and technology applications in practice. Campbell has been researching, designing and creating artwork with digital textile/imaging technologies for more than 25 years. His work pushes the limits of imaging technologies as they relate to clothing, our environment and the human form.
Sarah O'Connell, MDra, Directing
Sarah O'Connell (MDra, Directing, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) is an international theatre producer and cultural strategist who advises public and private stakeholders on matters related to the Creative Economy. She is the Artistic Director of The Asylum Theatre in Las Vegas, and co-owner of Axislights Inc, a commercial lighting company that serves the live event industry. In 2015, she founded Eat More Art Vegas, an online platform dedicated to the advancement of southern Nevada's local arts, culture, and creative community.
A special thanks goes to the editorial board members of Traditions-Innovations in the Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education that are actively engaged in this special edition.
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Who Can Submit?
Anyone may submit an original article to be considered for publication in Tradition Innovations [in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education] provided he or she owns the copyright to the work being submitted or is authorized by the copyright owner or owners to submit the article. Authors are the initial owners of the copyrights to their works (an exception in the non-academic world to this might exist if the authors have, as a condition of employment, agreed to transfer copyright to their employer).
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