Talk Summary

In this talk, Catherine discussed how she employs creative machine learning and generative artificial intelligence in her digital photographic practice and teaching. Amongst the projects she discussed was her 2021 work 'Light Leaks', which uses a series of abstract blurs resembling light leaks from a damaged camera as input for an image recognition system, in an effort to draw critical attention to the limitations and biases of contemporary machine learning systems. She also introduced her current project 'Frankenstein’s Camera', a series of landscapes created by blending her own photographs with AI-generated imagery using text prompts based on the writing of 'Frankenstein' author Mary Shelley. In addition to demonstrating how she goes about creating these images using Runway ML, Catherine reflected on some of the conceptual, theoretical, and ethical challenges working with generative AI has posed for her as a photographic practitioner.

Workshop Summary

This workshop gave attendees the opportunity to train their own AI image recognition system and create a simple interactive web app using Google Teachable Machine and P5.js.