Kio Zhu joined the Department of Design at Ohio State as a visiting post-MFA scholar in 2022, pursuing his interests in exploring technology's roles in society. After a departmental faculty meeting in the Autumn of 2022, Kio met Will Nickley, an Assistant Professor in Design, where they discovered a shared critical interest in emerging and recently popularized "artificial intelligence" models. They began meeting regularly to discuss their use and exploration in art and design.
In early 2023, a special call for proposals in "Artificial Intelligence in the Arts, Humanities, and Engineering: Interdisciplinary Collaborations," reviewed deans from the Colleges of Engineering and Arts & Sciences at The Ohio State University, provided an opportunity to formalize Kio and Will's shared interests. Their winning proposal, "AI + Object Making & Creative Content," set the stage for nearly 2 years of collaboration that would follow.
Large-language models (LLMs), AI systems centered in Kio and Will's work, require a "seed," often a bit of text, to generate an output. But what seed should be explored? Stemming from a shared interest in music and a particular scene in a recent film Poser, how musicians describe their sound and musical genre proved to be a fruitful type seed for a complex human/machine hybrid process to produce interactive 2D, 3D, and time-based outputs.
After refining a process to transform descriptive musical seeds into digital 3D objects, Kio and Will interviewed two Columbus-area bands: abel and The Catchwords. Transcripts from these interviews served as seeds for what would ultimately become original 3D sonic objects (i.e., instruments) featured in Kio and Will's Cabinet (2024).