The proliferation of generative AI tools has raised important questions around how we (especially artists) create. Using AI tools in the creative process can blur the lines between creativity and curation and change how we navigate our relationship with labor and craft. It can feel as if we do less to do more, synthesizing previous or external inputs into new material with the help of generative AI systems. What does this do to our relationship with our creative labor, with other human beings, and to our aesthetic leanings? In this module, we explore the possibilities of human-centered, humanistic approaches to instrument building, tool design, and audiovisual performance, prioritizing human interaction and sensible curation in the creative process with AI. Our approach seeks to foreground the value of the human artistic process over any lens that views tools, products, or technical novelty as ends in themselves.

In a broader sense, one might ask if audiovisual performance is a “problem” that needs to be “solved”? In this course, we resist the notion that AI tools will “solve” anything about the creative process, but rather that they may provide new possibilities for the artist to synthesize their work via radical new combinations of (multi)-media.