Creative Practice Showcases
Sapience : Data Driven Cultural Commons
Creative Practice Showcase Emma Quintana, Richard Hanberry
The ongoing collaborative artwork "Sapience" is an interactive mirror that utilizes artificial intelligence to create an immersive experience, examining the intersection of technology and human identity. The AI within Sapience displays text on a viewer's face, derived from personal details and emotional information it interprets. By using AI language models and emotional and persona translators, Sapience exposes inherent biases, such as racism, sexism, ageism, and social status, which are prevalent in AI systems—mirroring but also exacerbating these social biases. This collaborative team interfaces as facilitators/artists and acts as intermediaries between the participants and the Sapience experience. They help participants understand the AI's deductions and the implications of using AI in shaping our shared future.
Community Branding and Sub-cultural Identity: Branding and Design-Thinking within Pennsylvania Library Systems
Creative Practice Showcase Donald "Kent" Kerr, Barb Mitchell, Naomi Cross
Public libraries provide their community with a convenient and accessible source of media, literature, and professional services. Regular patrons see their local library as a communal hub, providing a safe, accessible, and welcoming environment to meet, seek enrichment, and engage with their community. The result is a local community wholly unique in patronage, organization, location, hospitality, and, most evidently, identity. This paper discusses identity-making, branding, and placemaking within Western Pennsylvania Public Libraries and insights and experiences from ranking members in attendance. With the cooperation and collaboration of ranking library members, community leaders, and community patrons, it will detail the plan, process, and design strategies for realizing and developing identity systems for the Cambria County and Westmoreland County Library systems and the more than thirty libraries under their jurisdiction. It explores the combination of community-driven research methods used in developing each unique community identity, including on-site meetings, focus groups, surveys, participatory research sessions, design-thinking charrettes, and heuristic evaluation, to name a few, resulting in systems and solutions reflective of each community and wholly unique in sensibility and implementation. Lastly, it considers the effectiveness of the process, learned best practices, experienced failures, scalability, and repeatability.
Becoming You, A Book about Gestation and Genetic Testing: An Artist's Work with a Geneticist
Creative Practice Showcase Geraldine Ondrizek
Becoming You is a book for parents and children showing the process of human egg fertilization, gestation and genetic testing. Written by Shizuko Takahashi M.D. and PhD at The University of Tokyo, Department of Biomedical Ethics and Gynecology is a working genetic counselor/reproductive endocrinologist. Images were made by research based artist Geraldine Ondrizek, Professor of Art at Reed College. As a genetic counselor, Takahashi has seen numerous prospectively pregnant and pregnant patients trying to make a decision based on false assumptions of genetics. With genetic testing becoming more and more extensive and gene editing on the horizon, the Takahashi has felt strongly that children need to be more educated on genetics in order to view genetics in a positive and beautiful way so that they could make a more autonomous choice when the time comes to do so themselves. Ondrizek worked in collaboration with developmental laboratories in Tokyo to show images of the latest scientific research being conducted, including epigenetics to create the poetic and realistic images in the book. The book aims to illuminate each stage of human development and give both parents and children a visual understanding of how the reader, as a child and parent, came to be him or herself in relation to their own genetics. The panels are both images to illuminate the text and works of art. Part of the work was shown at the European Cultural Center in the Venice Biennale in 2022. Fusosha, Tokyo will publish Becoming You in 2025.
