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 (MFA, Music)
- Fateme Mohammadi Maklavani (MFA, Design)
- Katherine Roos (PhD, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies)
- Jiara Sha (MFA, Dance)
- Ahwar Sultan (PhD, History of Art)
- Ying-Shan Wu (PhD, East Asian Languages and Literatures)
MENTOR
(Forthcoming)
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)
MENTOR
(Forthcoming)
Visiting Artists
Katherine Behar
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 is a new media and performance artist, writer, and theorist; her work focuses on contemporary art practices and digital culture; embodiment and representation in data; automation and labor politics; and interface ethics. She is the author/editor/curator of numerous books and exhibition. Her project this year, Inside Outsourcing combines robots and fiber art, and consists of robot-made/human-mended basketry sculptures, a video installation, and motion capture kinetics.
Simone Browne
Simone 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. Simone is currently writing her second book, Art on Surveillance, which examines the interventions made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of Black life. She is an EPIC Advisory Board Member, and A People's Guide to Tech Advisory Board Member.
Programming
OCTOBER 10, 2025 | Simone Brown Keynote
(Title forthcoming)
(Description forthcoming) Brown is a 2025-26 Global Arts + Humanities Society of Fellows Visiting Artist and associate professor in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also Research Director of Critical Surveillance Inquiry (CSI) with Good Systems, a research collaborative at the University of Texas at Austin. CSI works with scholars, organizations and communities to curate conversations, exhibitions and research that examine the implications of surveillance technologies. Brown’s current project, Like the Mixture of Charcoal and Darkness, examines the interventions made by artists whose works grapple with the surveillance of Black life, from policing, privacy, smart dust and the FBI’s COINTELPRO to encryption, electronic waste and artificial intelligence.
NOVEMBER 14, 2025 | Katherine Behar
(Event title forthcoming)
Behar is a 2025-26 Global Arts + Humanities Society of Fellows Visiting Artist and professor at Baruch College, City University of New York, where she heads the New Media Arts program and runs New Media Artspace. She is a new media and performance artist, writer and theorist; her work focuses on contemporary art practices and digital culture; embodiment and representation in data; automation and labor politics; and interface ethics. She is the author/editor/curator of numerous books and exhibition. Her project this year, Inside Outsourcing combines robots and fiber art, and consists of robot-made/human-mended basketry sculptures, a video installation and motion capture kinetics.