"Artificial Intelligence: Propositions from the Arts + Humanities" is a series of lectures by artists and scholars whose work foregrounds the ethical obligations arising from the simulation of human intelligence and increased surveillance. These events engage the Society of Fellows 2025-26 annual theme, AI: Creativity + Intelligence + Automation. 

LECTURE | "And Bells On: Sound and Surveillance" by Simone Brown

October 10, 2025, noon to 1:30 p.m. (WOSU Ross Community Studio)
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. This talk explores doorbell cameras, the apps that accompany home monitoring systems and the analytical work and interventions made by artists who creatively explore and also undo the surveillance of Black life. Moderator: Sampada Aranke, Associate Professor of History of Art and Comparative Studies

LECTURE | "Artisanal Intelligences," with Katherine Behar

November 13, 2025, 4-5:30 p.m. (WOSU Ross Community Studio)
Katherine 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

LECTURE | "Manufacturing Intelligence," with Dennis Yi Tenen

December 2, 2025, noon to 1:30 p.m. (Denney Hall 311)
Dennis Yi 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

LECTURE | "Becoming Auto" with Lauren Lee McCarthy

April 2, 2026, 4-5:30 p.m. (WOSU Ross Community Studio)
Lauren Lee 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