The UVM Art + Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Group is engaged in an ethnographic study of artificial intelligence; we interrogate its tools. We consider machine learning a domain of artistic and artificial production and our studio work occupies its social and computational space.
Concerned with the histories and futures of human-machine relationships, our research seeks to unearth aesthetic, social, material, ethical and cultural constitutions deep within machine learning’s black box. Tracing crescents that flow from creation to collapse and rooted in evolutions of rational and irrational computations, the artworks we produce are corporeal artifacts extracted from a dense lattice of super-computer flesh.
Exhibition: Liquid Architectures
Recent press and recorded events
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) dataset

People:
Leadership
Jenn Karson, Art + AI Research Group Director; Faculty, UVM School of the Arts
Advisors
Alice Boone, Curator of Education, Fleming Museum of Art
Lapo Frati, PhD Student in Complex Systems and Data Science
Chris Thompson, Independent Curator
Kerime Toksu, Research Computing Engineer, Vermont Advanced Computing Core (VACC)
Students
Dani Agin, UVM ’23
Syd Culbert, B.S. Computer Science and Studio Art ’23
Jess Vos, UVM ‘ 22
Research Group Emeritus
Cameron Bremner, B.S. Math and Computer Science ’21
Ethan Davis, M.S. Data Science ‘21
Emma Garvey, B.S. Mechanical Engineering ’19
Oliver Hamburger, B.S. Computer Science ’22
Anna Hulse, B.S. Natural Resources, Political Science ’21
Giovana Lowry, Public Communications, ’21
Sarah Pell, M.S. Computer Science ‘20
Veronika Potter, B.S. Mathematics, B.A. Computer Science ’21
Fred Sanford, B.S. Mechanical Engineering ‘20
Chauzhen Wu, Studio Art and Business ’21
Clem Fisher, B.A. Sustainable Design ’23
Halina Vercessi-Clarke, Computer Science and Mathematics, Russian ’22
Yifeng Wei, B.A. Studio Art ’19, M.F.A Parsons School of Design ’21
Funding and Support
Department of Art and Art History, UVM
College of Arts and Sciences, UVM
Vermont Advanced Computing Core (VACC), UVM
Coor Collaborative Fellowship, Humanities Center, UVM
CatCoders funding from Department of Computer Science, UVM Spring 2020 and Fall 2021
Northeast Cyberteam/NSF funding, Summer 2020 and 2021
This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award No. OAC-1659377.
Computations were performed on the Vermont Advanced Computing Core supported in part by National Science Foundation (NSF) award No. OAC-1827314.
Protecting human beings from the domination of machines and technocrats is a laudable enterprise, but if the machines are full of human beings who find their salvation there, such a protection is merely absurd (Ellul, 1967)
Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern