ART 197 - Media Practice After Machine Learning

Introduces students to creative uses of machine learning for generating and transforming text, images, sound, and video. In a rapidly changing media landscape, the course takes the position that machine learning has fundamentally reshaped digital culture and digital production, with effects extending well beyond the arts. The course approaches these tools as both unavoidable and contested, and asks students to explore their possibilities alongside their limitations and risks. We will use machine learning both as a creative medium for studio practice and as an object of study, combining hands-on making with close analysis of how models, datasets, and interfaces shape media production, circulation, and reception. The course treats the study of technology as inseparable from social and political life. The course combines hands-on practice with lectures, readings, and discussion. Students will develop a working understanding of core concepts that underlie contemporary ML systems, including datasets and labeling, training and inference, tokenization and next-word prediction, embeddings and vector space, large language models, and diffusion-based image generation. These technical ideas will be approached in service of creative practice, making, and thinking, preparing students to navigate real-world contexts increasingly entangled with machine learning.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Studio
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts).