Please note that adding a workshop to your Sched itinerary does NOT mean you have registered for the workshop. You must register via conference registration.
How do you see AI? What metaphors, images, and associations come to mind when you think about its impact on society and visual culture? For the past year, we have been exploring these questions through a series of public workshops that use collage inquiry—an arts-based research method that invites participants to construct meaning through layering and juxtaposition of images. Each workshop has featured a talk by an artist or scholar whose work critically examines AI, addressing issues such as intellectual property, social ethics, privacy, creative authorship, and surveillance. These talks have provided grounding and provocation, after which participants respond visually by creating collages from an array of provided ephemera.
In this workshop, rather than listening to a guest speaker, participants will engage directly in collage-making while learning about our project findings. In doing so, they will experience firsthand how collage inquiry can serve as a tool for reflecting on complex, rapidly evolving issues like AI—where metaphor, symbolism, and image association often reveal insights that elude purely verbal analysis.
Participants will leave with their own visual reflections on AI, strategies for incorporating collage inquiry into their teaching or outreach, and a deeper appreciation of how visual metaphor can open up new ways of understanding technological and cultural change.
Please note that adding a workshop to your Sched itinerary does NOT mean you have registered for the workshop. You must register via conference registration.
Dog Ears is an alternative reading list and zine collaboratively developed by workshop participants. Its title and triangular form reference the practice of folding over the corner of a page in a book. It signifies reading in progress; a place to return to. A dog-eared book has been well-read, well-worn, perhaps overly-loved. It is the tactile result of a book passed among friends or strangers.
Led by artist-publisher dani neira, the workshop’s participants will learn to make an accordion-folded zine, and collaboratively design an alternative reading list. Dog Ears broadly defines “alternative” as independently published materials, artists’ projects, or other non-traditional means of production and dissemination.
As a part of the project’s critical and conceptual grounding, the workshop will discuss community-based strategies in independent publishing, and the reading list as a networked structure where meaning is produced. This web of relationships will be explored through the lens of kinship, framed by queer, feminist, and BIPOC perspectives on citational justice.
*Workshop Participants: Please bring a zine, artists’ book, or otherwise “alternative” book that you feel kinship with. The participants’ books will create the collaborative reading list — which is the content of the zine! Bringing a physical copy is ideal, but if this is not possible, a title in mind works as well. New to the world of independent publishing? Don’t worry! There will be a small zine library to select from.
Key Themes for Discussion: - Affect, materiality, and printed matter - Zine-making as pedagogy - Citational justice and approaches to developing reading lists and collections - Strategies of resource and knowledge-sharing in independent publishing
