Abstract

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a studio tool; it is reshaping ideas of creativity, authorship, and artistic identity. Between its seductive presence on social media and the corporate promise of AGI, artists are left to question what it really means to work with AI. This essay argues for an approach to AI not as oracle or shortcut, but as a feedback-based, exploratory interaction in which human and machine co-evolve. Drawing on Leo Apostel’s model theory, James Gibson’s affordances, and the domain of aesthetic perception, it examines AI as seduction and possible fetish, the role of serendipity in working with pre-trained systems, and the pressures AI places on the figure of the artist. It also contrasts artificial intelligence with embodied craft intelligence and reflects on these issues through Asimov’s short story “Profession.”

Bio

Composer João Pedro Oliveira holds the Corwin Endowed Chair in Composition for the University of California at Santa Barbara. He studied organ performance, composition, and architecture in Lisbon. He completed a Ph.D. in Music at the University of New York at Stony Brook. His music includes opera, orchestral compositions, chamber music, electroacoustic music, and experimental video. He has received over 70 international prizes and awards for his works, including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023, the Bourges Magisterium Prize, and the Giga-Hertz Special Award, among others. His music is played all over the world. He taught at Aveiro University (Portugal) and Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil). His publications include several articles in journals and a book on 20th century music theory.

www.jpoliveira.com

Abstract

The materials genome initiative (MGI) is a US government initiative from 2011 to speed up, and lower the cost of, the discovery of new advanced materials, and their deployment in technologies, by applying data analytic methods inspired by biological genomics. Of course, materials do not have a genome. However, if we generalize the concept of a genome as a 1D discrete quantity that codes for the 3-dimensional arrangement of atoms, then we do have quantities that could serve as this generalized genome. In this talk I will briefly explain the main ideas, including some basic mathematics behind structure and point-clouds in general, all the way to the idea of the materials ribosome. The ribosome is the cellular machinery that converts a DNA code into protein molecules which then fold to unique 3D structures. I will draw parallels with the mathematics and machinery of regression which leads us to AI and machine learning where we find that a low-dimensional manifold exists in higher dimensional spaces, I call it the manifold of meaning, where the the semantic meaning resides. This manifold is interpolable and has direct relationship to the genetic code as discussed above.

Bio

Prof. Billinge has more than 25 years of experience developing and applying techniques to study local structure in materials using x-ray, neutron and electron diffraction including the development of novel data analysis methods including graph theoretic, artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches. He earned his Ph.D in Materials Science and Engineering from University of Pennsylvania in 1992. After 13 years as a faculty member at Michigan State University, and 18 years at Columbia University he took up his current position as Professor of Materials Science and Director of the California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI) at UC Santa Barbara. He also held a joint position of Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory between 2008 and 2022.

Prof. Billinge has published more than 350 papers in scholarly journals. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Neutron Scattering Society of America, a former Fulbright and Sloan fellow and has earned a number of awards including, in 2025, the Gregori Aminoff prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of sciences, and the Innovation in Materials Characterization Award of the Materials Research Society. He was honored in 2011 for contributions to the nation as an immigrant by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He is Section Editor of Acta Crystallographica Section A: Advances and Foundations. He regularly chairs and participates in reviews of major facilities and federally funded programs.

Abstract

In a world where human-level intelligence may soon no longer be limited to humans, one is compelled to ask: what is our purpose? I suggest that the only thing left for us is to simply be — human. To contribute our own unique perspective, unencumbered by concerns of health or resources.In this talk, I'll offer a window into my own worldview and how it shaped my work in industry and academia. I'll then cover the state of the art in AI, where things are heading, and how I think AI can be used in new ways to inspire human creativity.

Bio

Antonis Antoniades, PhD ’26, is an incoming Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind (Gemini Agents) and is completing his PhD in Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group. Some of his past work includes building multi-agent systems using reinforcement learning at Leela AI, Neuroformer, the first multimodal generative model for neuroscience and SWE-Search, a software engineering agent utilizing a search approach designed to emulate a human software engineer. He is also a passionate Guitar and Bouzouki player.

Abstract

In the lecture "Music Mirrors Mind," composer and director Gene Coleman explores the concepts of Neuroaesthetics and Neuro Music. Coleman defines Neuro Music as an area of research and composition based on the study and application of models and concepts from Auditory Neuroscience. He gives an introduction to his methods to compose Neuro Music, using examples from his recent works. He makes a case for why artists should understand how perception, cognition and thinking work and how they are the basis for creativity. The emerging fields of Neuro Music and Neuroaesthetics in conjunction with new technologies have the potential for enormous impact on the way musicians and artists think about and make their work. Coleman will talk about the influence of architecture and visual art on his work, his experiments with the Neurodata technology called "The Source," the creation of the Institute for Music and Neuroaesthetics and the Neuro Music ensemble CONJURE.

Bio

Gene Coleman is a composer, artistic director of The Institute for Music and Neuroaesthetics and a member of the META lab at UC Santa Barbara. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, The US-Japan Friendship Commission and the American Academy in Rome. He has created over 70 works for various instrumentation and media. Central to his work is the inventive use of sound, image and time, and the desire to create experiences that expand our understanding of the world. Since 2001 his work has focused on the global transformation of culture and music’s relationship with neuroscience, video and architecture. His most recent research and compositions explore the concepts of Neuro Music and Neuroaesthetics. He studied painting, music and film making at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where his teachers included experimental filmmakers Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr, composer Robert Snyder, and visual artists Barbara Rossi and Oliver Jackson. In 2024 his album of Neuro Music called Exploratorium was released on the UK label Falls Walls.

Abstract

My practice is driven by the ambition to design life—a synthetic, bottom-up pursuit of liveliness itself. This talk traces a research trajectory that builds on origin-of-life sciences, orchestrating three core agencies to prefigure a future artificial life form: AI ontologies (‘soft’ ALife) to model intelligence; electroactive microbes (‘wet’ ALife) to provide a metabolic, communicative ‘flesh’; and dynamic mineral substrates to form resilient, structural ‘bones.’ Such a pursuit demands a foundational ethic: to take full responsibility for the designed entities. Following Latour, this means learning to love our monsters. The ambition is not spectacle, but to forge mutualistic relationships with constructed life—relationships as demanding and creative as those with nature. The result is architectures that counter an extractive industrial logic by contributing through their day-to-day existence to the overall liveliness of the world. Expanding the potential of life is an Earth imperative. While autonomous artificial life remains the horizon, the urgent work is to build its ethical, material, and intellectual prerequisites. I will present this work, arguing for a future where our built environment is not just sustainable, but constitutively alive.

For further reading, you can download a PDF of her book "Liquid Life: On Non-Liner Materiality"

Bio

Professor Rachel Armstrong, PhD, is a practitioner and theorist whose work establishes a new trajectory for architecture: the design of artificial life. With a First Class Honours in medical science (University of Cambridge) and a PhD in Architecture (UCL), her practice is a synthetic pursuit of liveliness grounded in origin-of-life sciences. Her designs and prototypes are vibrant, metabolic systems that host, support, and propagate life, transforming architecture's role from creating static spaces to cultivating dynamic, living ecosystems.

Professor Rachel Armstrong's current roles also include:

Project Coordinator: Microbial Hydroponics (Mi-Hy)
Microbial WiFi Project
Exhibitor: Spika
EIC Ambassador

Abstract

I will present recent and ongoing work in the RE Touch Lab on emerging haptic and robotic technologies. Modern computing and AI operate at extraordinary speed over vast, high-dimensional data spaces, but their agency in the physical world is sharply constrained. Haptic and robotic systems provide this agency, but with constrained physical output bandwidth: they provide few degrees of freedom, and operate at far slower speeds than is feasible in computational domains. I will describe ongoing research in my group that is directed at alleviating such bottlenecks and at enabling computational systems with greater physical agency. A logical extension of these ideas: computationally authorable physical reality, an unmapped possibility whose territory and implications are compelling, if unclear.

Bio

Visell is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and MAT Affiliate Faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Visell directs the RE Touch Lab, where they pursue fundamental and applied research on the future of interactive technologies, with emphasis on haptics, robotics, and electronics, including emerging opportunities in human-computer interaction, sensorimotor augmentation, soft robotics, and interaction in virtual reality.

Dr. Visell’s research has been generously supported through multiple awards from the National Science Foundation and other government agencies, tech industry companies, and philanthropic foundations. He has published more than 75 scientific works, and served as editor and author of two books on VR, including "Human Walking in Virtual Environments" (Springer Verlag, 2013). His work has received four awards and more than a dozen award nominations at prominent academic conferences. Dr. Visell is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2018), of a Hellman Family Foundation Faculty Fellowship (2017), and a Google Faculty Research Award (2016).

Dr. Visell spent more than five years in industry working at technology companies. He was the digital signal processing developer at Ableton from 2001 to 2003, where he wrote algorithms that have shaped music produced by artists ranging from The Roots to Deadmau5. Previously, he was a research scientist working on speech recognition at Vocal Point (now part of Nuance, makers of the Siri voice assistant). Prior to that, he designed auditory displays for underwater sonar at ARL, Austin, Texas. Dr. Visell later worked in interactive art, design, and robotics research at the University of the Arts Zurich, at FoAM, Belgium, at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, and at the art-architecture-technology group Zero-Th, which he co-founded in 2004. His creative works and activities have been presented at cultural venues including Ircam / Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), SIGGRAPH, Phaeno Science Center (Wolfsburg, Germany), La Gaité Lyrique (Paris), the Oboro Center (Montreal), and the Biennale of Design St. Etienne (France).