Evolving Roles
Creative Compatriots? AI-de-Camp in a Capstone Interior Design Studio
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jim Dawkins
Interior design education prioritizes fostering original and authentic design competencies that showcase students' unique creativity and human ingenuity. Historically, educators have assessed these attributes through tools like hand sketching and advanced software such as AutoCAD, Revit, and Lumion. These tools allow educators to maintain control over the design process and validate students’ work. However, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly text-to-image applications, challenges this paradigm, raising questions about authorship, ownership, and originality in design. This study explores AI’s potential as a co-creative partner in a senior interior design capstone studio that focuses on hospitality design. Students are tasked with using text-to-image AI tools to recreate their concept design statements and inspirational imagery, alongside their human-generated work. This comparative exercise intends to spark rich discussions about the intersection of human creativity and machine learning, including the ethical and moral implications of using AI in design. The exercise also aims to prompt critical reflections on the evolving role of interior designers and the authenticity of AI-assisted outputs. While the primary aim will be to evaluate AI’s effectiveness in conveying design intent, this research project hopes to reveal deeper insights into AI's capacity to disrupt (positively and negatively) traditional design processes. This study explores embracing AI as a conceptual collaborator that could enhance students’ ability to think originally and push the boundaries of design thinking. However, it also underscores the need for ongoing debate about the ethical integration of AI in creative fields, especially in education.
Acts of Hospitality - Relations between 'Guest' and 'Host' as Arts Practice : Conversations and Encounters in a Rural Irish Town
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Greer Mac keogh
My PhD research centres on my experiences as an artist, a ‘guest’ and ‘host’ in rural communities in Ireland, where building relationships at a local level, has revealed wider notions of hospitality towards ‘outsiders’ on a national and international scale. Over time, it’s become clear that the act of being a guest, or host, is deeply personal, shaped by an entanglement of influences and experiences, built up over time that make up who you are. I have identified the hotel as an ideal site to explore how the role of guest and host plays out and is expressed. How these roles were enacted and are remembered, opens a philosophical and ethical discussion around patterns of difference. Under the title The Hotel, my enquiry consists of a body of practical, site-based, and archival research, interwoven with contextual and conceptual research, from which the perspective of guest and host are disrupted and expanded. As much as possible, I have tried not to abstract the stories shared with me, but rather to contextualise them. Through contextualising them, the stories have generated further research, narratives, and dialogue, that I pass on and share with others. I strive throughout this act of storytelling to account for the complexity of hospitality – through issues of power, politics, culture, and identity, born out of conversations and encounters in a rural Irish town, that set me on a trajectory of making sense of the historical and cultural conditions that lie beneath or behind my Irish identity.
Conceptualizing a Scholarly Field: Sustainability and the Arts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Emma Bugg
Climate change threatens human and planetary health. While science has diagnosed the problem and suggested solutions, progress is often impeded by social and political realities. There is a growing recognition that the arts can play a critical role in creating the cultural change that is needed to enact sustainable solutions. Environmental scholars and artists are often isolated from each other because of limited opportunities for knowledge exchange and a lack of common methods for codification and knowledge translation, but this is beginning to change, revealing an emerging scholarly field of sustainability and the arts (SATA). My dissertation research contributes to the burgeoning field of SATA by: conducting the first critical analysis of SATA research to date; examining the challenges and barriers to SATA research and practice; supporting new approaches to SATA by conducting a Delphi study to develop a comprehensive research strategy; and cultivating collaborative partnerships and intellectual exchange among artists and scholars engaged in SATA. By gathering knowledge from researchers and artists who bring together themes, methods, and questions related to both the arts and environmental issues, I also aim to identify barriers to conducting SATA scholarship. The research presented in this study explores literature which lends to conceptualizing the core concepts of sustainability, the arts, and scholarship, and seeks to examine the spaces where these concepts intersect. Understanding this scholarly landscape will be critical to identifying priorities for making impactful and significant scholarly contributions in an emerging field.
Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive Artist Residencies as Spaces for Belonging and Reciprocity
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Natasha S. Reid, Natalie Le Blanc, Michelle Wiebe
In the current divisive social climate, there has been increased oppression and violence toward individuals from equity-deserving groups. Art and art education can offer powerful pathways and platforms for stimulating empathic, critically conscious, radically imaginative, and felt engagement. The project at the centre of this presentation explores how the practices of contemporary artists working with anti-oppressive and anti-racist participatory methods can contribute to the development of art education approaches that promote shifts in cultural and social attitudes and behaviours. Three racialized contemporary artists working with anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and participatory approaches were invited to engage in residencies in a university art gallery. With each residency, the artists welcomed visitors into the gallery space, inviting them to engage in dialogues and hands-on artistic practices centred on anti-racism and anti-oppression. Through the artists’ hospitality, they created intimate spaces for belonging. Using diverse methods, each artist developed environments to hold space for expressing, learning, feeling, and connecting. This included deep listening, sharing, presenting provocations, stimulating exchanges, and honouring voices. Through such practices, they invited reciprocity, sharing their experiences and practices and opening space for visitors to engage in similar gestures. This required shifts in expectations for visitors’ roles, moving from passive art gallery consumers toward active artistic contributors to anti-racist work. Each artist employed unique approaches to support visitors in these journeys, often incorporating care ethics. Artistic and art education practices that can support transitions in roles, spaces, and orientations required to create artistic environments for belonging, reciprocity, and transformative action is explored.
Expelling Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe - the Gaze, Objectification, and the Illusion of Agency: How the Direct Gaze in Manet's Work Reinforces, Rather Than Subverts, Female Objectification View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kendra Duke
Edouard Manet's Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe has been debated for over a century, often framed as a challenge to artistic tradition. At its centre is a nude woman, her clothes discarded, seated among fully clothed men while staring directly at the viewer. Some scholars argue that her gaze grants her agency, subverting passive objectification. This paper challenges that claim, arguing instead that a nude woman meeting the viewer's eyes does not empower her, but rather deepens her objectification. Drawing on Kantian ethics and feminist theory, this paper explores how Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe exemplifies a troubling phenomenon: the illusion of female agency within an inherently objectifying framework. Unlike traditional nudes, where the woman is unaware of being watched, Manet's figure appears complicit in her own display, making her objectification more palatable to the audience. This complicity is deceptive - her nudity is not her choice, but the artist's. Comparisons with Gerome's and Pilny's Slave Market paintings further illustrate how a woman's direct gaze can normalize and even eroticize her own subjugation. Whether passive or confrontational, the gaze does not undo objectification; it only masks it beneath the illusion of consent. As images like Le De'jeuner sur l'Herbe proliferate, they shape cultural attitudes toward real women, reinforcing the expectation that women must not only be seen but must accept and participate in their own objectification. This paper argues that true artistic resistance requires more then a provocative gaze; it demands a dismantling of the structures that enable objectification itself.
