What I’ve Made

This week I focused on creating my submission for the AI poster competition at Iowa State. The poster I made is titled "The Emergent Garden", and speculates on a garden the shows the real-time evolution of fauna, and is inspired by some of the readings I've done that draw parallels to AI and biological evolution. I think this was valuable for my thesis in order to actually document an AI workflow process that involves creativity and play, as the submission required for a "diagrammatic" process explanation with charts, flows, etc. Additionally, in crafting the artist statement, it got me thinking about additional ideas my thesis could go inside the real of play, creativity, and AI, specifically as it regards to human connection, with each other, with technology, and with our shared ecosystem as a whole. The poster and artist statement are below.

Artist Statement:

The Emergent Garden is an AI data-driven poster that imagines creativity as a living, evolving ecosystem. Inspired by parallels between artificial intelligence and biological evolution, it explores how new forms can emerge without conscious intent yet still hold deep meaning for us as humans.

Creativity is often seen as uniquely human, tied to intentionality, consciousness, or free will. Yet one of the most creative processes in nature, biological evolution, has none of these traits. Natural selection shows that beauty and novelty can arise without intention. Similarly, AI generates infinite variations, not to “survive,” but to spark reflection in those who encounter its outputs.

The Emergent Garden speculates a space of care and curiosity. AI’s constant retooling and reprompting reveal an evolution of images in real time. The poster envisions a garden that algorithmically grows unique fauna, never quite the same, offering a shared experience that reminds us of our role as co-creators and caretakers of technologies, ecosystems, and each other.

By blending organic and artificial, the garden suggests creativity is not only invention but also tending to connections: between human and nonhuman, natural and digital, self and community.

At the time of writing this post I haven't quite finished charting out the process, but it involved using edge detection data of the AI generated flowers to blob track and connect points across the canvas, and followed a similar path to the process chart I demonstrated way back in the initial presentation, using pre-processing primitives to "draw" the shape of the flowers before the AI enhanced them, weighting it accordingly to get the desired look, feel, and "vibe" that I wanted, then post-processing in Photoshop to add the more static text elements, such as overlaying the blob tracking script, which touches on the transparency and tech literacy I am looking towards in my overall thesis.

What I’ve Read

Reading took a little bit of a backseat this week, but a book I've discovered called "Transcending Imagination" is very interesting, and touches on how creativity has and will change in the AI era. The author argues that all art is inherently artificial, shaped by human intention, and that AI complicates traditional boundaries between the “natural” and “artificial.” AI, he suggests, should not be feared but embraced as a collaborator that expands human imagination rather than diminishes it. Creativity is reframed through the cycle of intention, articulation, and manifestation, with AI extending human intent into forms that often exceed what creators can imagine. By moving beyond reliance on archetypes, such as familiar design patterns like chairs or cars, AI allows artists and designers to explore radically new possibilities. Rather than threatening creativity, it introduces unpredictability and beauty that challenges our perception and deepens our understanding of art’s purpose.

This can be related to play as a means of expanding our horizons with AI and creativity. With play, I feel like breaking away from structured "reality" and archetypes allows for more imaginative creations, which can then be reintroduced to these archetypes, opening the door to more unseen possibilities than without play, or the play with AI. This is only from the first chapter, and I'm excited to read more on it.

Where the Next Steps are Heading

Aside from the immediate next steps, like continuing to read "Transcending Imagination" and finalizing the process diagrams for the poster submission, my main next steps are more formalizing the workshop and interview processes. I submitted my IRB earlier this week, so pending that I can continue in defining how those look and how they fit into my thesis, such as honing in on an audience like we talked about in class on Wednesday. Additionally, we have the video project coming up, which I think will take the form of an explainer-video essay style video consisting of motion graphics to break down some of the bigger AI concepts into digestible information (on the topic of transparency and AI literacy). I think there is a way to tie in the Emergent Garden piece into it as well, since being made in Touch Designer, it allows for a motion aspect to be further explored as opposed to a static poster, which can highlight the real-time evolution that the poster speculates on.

Bibliography

Manu, A. (2024). Transcending imagination: Artificial intelligence and the future of creativity. CRC Press.