Community Portrait: Reprint Revolution Symposium

Guest speakers include AI Artists Fergus Laidlaw and Arnab Chakravarty, who co-created our AI exhibit J.E.S.S., as well as multi-award winning Digital Participation Artist John Whall and AI portrait paint artist Andee Collard.

Fergus Laidlaw is an artist and creative technologist who seeks to explore the natural world through technological means. For the last few years he’s been preoccupied with using generative AI as a reflective lens through which to view the world humans have built. He trained as an architect at Cambridge, as a designer at the Royal College of Art and as a technologist at Imperial. His practice centres around the design of interactions, artefacts, and objects that optimistically explore the value that emergent technologies can add to the human experience, as well as the future implications these technologies may have on society.

Arnab Chakravarty is an interdisciplinary artist working with physical and digital affordances of technology that we take for granted to create new reconfigurations between humans, machines and the latent space in between. Over the past decade, his work has involved designing software apps, systems, and services to programming interactive installations, objects, and immersive theatrical productions. Currently honoured as the recipient of the Creative Media Award from the Mozilla Foundation, Arnab is engaged in crafting a game that delves into the human toll of AI, delving into the profound notion that machines may forever remain distant from the nuanced essence of what we consider intrinsically human. Previously, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at ITP and is currently an artist-in-residence at CMU working on a game about the 7th Amendment that will be displayed at Federal Hall in July.

Guest speaker John Whall is a multi-award winning Digital Participation Artist, Curator and Producer and the Participation and Outreach Lead at immersive storytelling arts organisation MBD. John uses digital tools and materials to creatively engage audiences with arts and contemporary culture. His work is a fusion of digital and participatory practice, through collaborative and co-creative processes, with a focus on creating together. His practice involves the development of processes that translate complex digital processes into accessible creative activities, which inspire and empower audiences in the creation of digital and immersive experiences.

Guest speaker Andee Collard is a UK-based artist whose innovative practice merges traditional painting with experimental machine painting techniques. His work investigates the evolving relationship between technology and art, drawing from Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” of artwork and questioning the roles of both artist and machine in the creative process. Collard’s paintings celebrate the interplay between mechanical precision and the physical imperfections of his materials, presenting glitches and artefacts—like banding, quantisation, and dithering—as central elements of his visual language. He will be presenting his AI portrait painting machine at the symposium.