Series, Webinar: Advantages, Questions, and Fears Around AI Uses in Creative Practice

In our Chat GPT Teaching Talks Series, faculty members discuss their strategies while teaching in this new educational landscape of Chat GPT or generative artificial intelligence that uses machine learning to generate human-like text in response to users’ prompts.  Johnny DiBlasi and Olmo Amato, both with the College of Design, will present our fourth talk in this series:

Over the last few years, and now with the explosion of AI tools as seen with the release of ChatGPT, AI is inching closer and closer to becoming more embedded in our daily lives. How will these technologies affect our lives, industries, economies, health, etc? These big questions are coming up, and in a lot of ways, the development of these technologies is happening in big part as a vehicle to start considering these issues as a society. Some of the initial designed uses of these technologies such as ChatGPT and Dall-E 2 are to be creative for us – to generate novel text and images. These generative AI models have sweeping implications for creative practitioners in the arenas of image making and wordsmithing. Assistant Professor in Art and Visual Culture, Johnny DiBlasi and Olmo Amato, Instructor of Photography at the ISU Rome Program will present their research and creative practice which employ generative AI in their art making processes in different ways.

Learn about the history, ethics, and contemporary practices surrounding the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence by visual artists as well as ways to leverage AI in your own creative projects.

Note:  This Webinar Will Be Recorded

Johnny DiBlasi is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice sits at the intersection of art, science, and technology and explores various processes and forms. He works with computational media, data, networks, and artificial intelligence to create interactive installations or computational works that fuse site-specific data structures into a physical architecture. Through various works, he explores the aesthetic possibilities of data gathered in real time and how these aesthetic experiences can connect an audience to the pulse of the landscape in which they coexist. DiBlasi exhibits his works and installations nationally and internationally, and in 2021 he was awarded a Fulbright US Scholar Award for his research and creative project conducted in Vienna. DiBlasi is Assistant Professor of Scientific Visualization and Digital Media in the Department of Art and Visual Culture at Iowa State University. He earned an MFA from the Photographic and Electronic Media program at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. DiBlasi teaches studio courses in video, 3D modeling, web design, creative coding and interactive media. Recently, he co-founded a new arts collaboration named [phylum] which brings together other artists and researchers working at the intersection of science and technology. Prior to teaching, DiBlasi worked as a photographer and web designer.

Olmo Amato earned an M.Sc. in Neurobiology from Sapienza University of Rome. In addition to his studies, he dedicated himself to photography and experimentation with digital manipulation techniques. As a photographer and filmmaker, he has worked with fine art printing and post-production. He teaches basic and advanced photography at ISU Rome, the Pantheon Institute and the Adams Center for Experimental Photography. Since 2019 he has held seminars and workshops on the relationship between photography, visual perception and neuroscience.

He utilizes analog and digital photography techniques in his works, combining archival photos, original shots and artificially generated images through photomontage. In 2018 he won the Setup Prize as Best Artist under 35, the MalamegiLab Prize and Tiziano Campolmi Prize in 2019, and his works were presented at various international and Italian festivals, galleries and contemporary art fairs.

Together with Samuele Sestieri, he wrote and directed the film “The Bear Tales” which was selected for the 33rd Turin Film Festival at the 2016 Rotterdam International Film Festival and numerous other international film festivals.