2024-25
About Creativity | Intelligence | Automation
The Society of Fellows 2025-26 theme, Creativity | Intelligence | Automation, foregrounds the challenges and opportunities of automation and alerts us to the ethical obligations arising from the simulation of human intelligence. For example: How might the history of automation inform how we reckon with this new age? How does this moment push us to reimagine the nature of intelligence? How might we hold to account the automation of biases and erasures? Are there intelligences that should not be automated? What happens to artistic life when creative labor is automated? What other intelligences might we turn to beyond doctrines of human uniqueness?
Fellows will engage projects that compel new understandings of techno-human interdependencies and histories; automation and the politics of labor; theories of personhood; and forms of performativity, communication, learning and cultural expression. The theme focuses on how creativity, intelligence and automation operate across different scales in global contexts and within wider assemblages of biomedical, communicative, cultural, educational, environmental, geopolitical, socioeconomic, carceral and technoscientific forces and relations.
Faculty Fellows
- YuHao Chen (external fellow)
- Jennifer Eaglin (History)
- Merrill Kaplan (English + Germanic Languages and Literatures)
- Jamison Kantor (English)
- Eden Lin (Philosophy)
FACILITATOR
Kris Paulsen (History of Art)
Graduate Team Fellows
- Xiao Liu (DMA, Music)
- Fateme Mohammadi Maklavani (MFA, Design)
- Katherine Roos (PhD, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies)
- Jiara Sha (MFA, Dance)
- Ahura Sultan (PhD, History of Art)
- Ying-Shan Wu (PhD, East Asian Languages and Literatures)
MENTOR
Tina Tallon (School of Music)
Undergraduate Apprentices
- Surekha Garapati (Biology + Studio Art)
- Bhada Han (Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies)
- Zydeco Lamaze (English)
- Rylee McKenzie (Art)
- Ryan Sivakumar (Neuroscience)
- Zoey Wurgess (Geography)
MENTORS
Mara Frazier (University Libraries)
Jen Schnabel (University Libraries)
EVENT SERIES | Artificial Intelligence: Propositions from the Arts + Humanities
OCTOBER 10, 2025
"Title TBD" with Simone Browne
Noon to 1:30 p.m. (WOSU Ross Community Studio)
Browne is an associate professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the social and ethical implications of surveillance, both AI-enabled and not. She is the author of the award-winning book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.
Moderator: Sampada Aranke, Associate Professor of History of Art and Comparative Studies
NOVEMBER 13, 2025
"Artisanal Intelligences" with Katherine Behar
4-5:30 p.m. (Location TBD)
Behar is a professor at Baruch College, City University of New York, where she heads the New Media Arts program and runs New Media Artspace. She will present excerpts from Inside Outsourcing, a multimodal project that takes the impossibility of robots making baskets as an opportunity to cultivate human/nonhuman cooperation. Behar suggests that basketry’s unique resistance to automation involves its tactile and taciturn refusal to speak — that is, to explain itself, to reduce itself by becoming simply an instruction set. Artisanal Intelligences accounts for how basketry departs from the mutual histories of fiber arts, computation and labor struggles over the automation of work.
Moderator: Kris Paulsen, Associate Professor of History of Art
DECEMBER 2, 2025
"Manufacturing Intelligence" with Dennis Yi Tenen
Noon to 1:30 p.m. (Denney Hall 311)
Tenen is an associate professor of English at Columbia University, where he co-directs the Narrative Intelligence Lab. Recent publications include Literary Theory for Robots (W.W. Norton, 2024) and Author Function (forthcoming, Chicago UP). A long-time affiliate of Columbia’s Data Science Institute and former Microsoft engineer and fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Tenen’s code runs on personal computers worldwide. Tenen’s presentation will focus on the changing nature of intellectual production with AI.
Moderator: Wendy S. Hesford, Director of the Global Arts + Humanities and Professor of English
APRIL 2, 2026
"Becoming Auto" with Lauren Lee McCarthy
4-5:30 p.m. (Location TBD)
McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of automation, surveillance and algorithmic living, and she is a professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. McCarthy critiques the technological and social systems we’re building around ourselves. She explores reciprocal risk taking and vulnerability, as performer and audience are challenged to ask: Who builds these artificial systems? What values do they embody? Who is prioritized and who is targeted as race, gender, disability and class are programmatically encoded? Where are the boundaries around our intimate spaces? In the midst of ‘always on’ networked interfaces, what does it mean to be truly present?
Moderator: Kris Paulsen, Associate Professor of History of Art