Tues: 10/07 =
Artificial Intelligence: Intelligence of Art
> Panel <
VADA Director, Daniel Barnett in conversation with Scott Anderson, Fabian Offert and Nathan Vonk
Barnett probes his panel on the paradoxes presented by AI and tech with regard to unlicensed use of an analog artist’s work, the implications that ephemeral, time based media has for gallery and museum ecosystems. > How do machine learning models represent culture and what is at stake when they do?
Tues: 10/07
11:30am-1:30pm & 7:00-9:00pm
Visual Art and Design Academy
Daniel Barnett
moderator
> In 2007 Daniel became VADA Program Director leading an amazing team of educators, but has always maintained the vital link to students, teaching Painting, AP Studio Art and VADA Student Leadership Council. < > He also plays a key role in guiding the Friends of VADA, whose current major initiative is supporting a new art facility. < > Daniel considers his greatest accomplishment to be the successful cultivation of a community in which radically diverse students welcome each other like family and thrive as growing artists and people.<
Scott Anderson
panelist
panelist
> Scott Anderson, Art Professor Westmont College. As a primarily an analog artist, Anderson has a bone to pick with the ability of AI to “learn” from the body of his work without recognition or licensing/ royalties.<
> Scott received his M.F.A. in illustration from The University of Hartford, and an M.A. in illustration from Syracuse University.< > His illustration work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, LA Weekly, The Village Voice, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, MAD Magazine, and many others.< > His work has been recognized by Communication Arts, American Illustration, and the Society of Illustrators New York, and he is both a Gold and Bronze award recipient from the Society of Illustrators Los Angeles.< > A gallery artist as well, Professor Anderson exhibits paintings annually with Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara.<
Fabian Offert
> Fabian Offert is Assistant Professor for the History and Theory of the Digital Humanities and Director of the Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning (HUML) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.< > His research focuses on the epistemology, aesthetics, and politics of artificial intelligence, with recent publications appearing in AI & Society, Visual Resources, the Journal of Digital Social Research, American Literature, and Media + Environment, among others.< > His most recent book project, Vector Media (Meson Press/University of Minnesota Press, 2025) writes a new historical epistemology of artificial intelligence, asking how machine learning models represent culture and what is at stake when they do.< > Fabian is also principal investigator of the AI Forensics international research project on explainable artificial intelligence, supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, and 2025 Rudolf Wittkower Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome.<
Nathan Vonk
panelist
> Nathan Vonk purchased Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara’s most venerated galleries with an international reputation in 2004. Representing some of Santa Barbara’s most recognized painters, including Patricia Chidlaw, Phoebe Brunner, Meredith Brooks Abbott, Whitney Brooks Abbott, Angela Perko, and the living artist most associated with Santa Barbara, Hank Pitcher. < > Nathan’s view of the tumult around Art, AI and technology is not clouded by the traditional leanings of his gallery. < > Nathan is a fierce supporter of arts in the area serving on the boards of the Community Arts Workshop, the Visual Art and Design Academy as well as serving on the Brave New Work advisory committee. <
Wed: 10/07, 10-11:00am =
State of the Art
>Panel<
Nancy Baker Cahill and Beatie Wolfe with Alan Macy, discuss their work and that of others in the exhibition as well as examples from other internationally renown artists.
Baker Cahill, recent recipient of the Whitney Museum’s “Walter Annenberg Distinguished Lecturer Award” and whose work “Cento” (pictured here) is currently on view there, will be in conversation with the internationally renowned artist, activist and self proclaimed “Musical Weirdo”, Beatie Wolfe. Wolfe will be appearing via video link from Paris where she will be accepting the Ars Electronic award for “Environmental Impact” for “Smoke and Mirrors”, the work shown in our exhibition. Alan Macy, a long time artist, and renmowned electrical engineer is a founder of BioPac, a biomedical instrumentation developer and manufacturer based in Goleta, California.
WED 10/07
10:00- 11:00am
Center Stage Theater (MCASB)
Alan Macy
moderator
Alan Macy, founder of the Santa Barbara Center for Arts and Technology, an artist’s residency program that is at the creative heart of the artistic community’s work in the art + science exploration. Macy’s work in the Biotech sphere is world renowned and involves he development of new products for the purposes of recording physiological variables in the Magnetic Resonance Imager (MRI) and functional MRI and during virtual reality (VR) sessions. He has developed amplifiers and signal processing methods to remove artifact from biopotential signals recorded in the MRI. In the area of VR, he has been focusing effort on implementation methods to monitor physiological variables during VR protocols and then employ algorithmic results, from these variables, to modify the VR subject experience.
Beatie Wolfe
artist
“Musical weirdo and visionary" (Vice) Beatie Wolfe has beamed her music into space, been appointed a UN role model for innovation, and held a solo exhibition of her ‘world first’ designs at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
Named by WIRED as one of "22 people changing the world,” Wolfe is at the forefront of pioneering new formats that bridge the physical and digital. Wolfe's latest innovations include a visualisation of 800,000 years of NASA’s CO2 data, which premiered at the Nobel Prize Summit; a Brain Installation which was exhibited at the London Design Biennale in Somerset House and is currently on show at the Museum of Science Boston, and a Big Oil x Methane project which won Prix Ars Electronica’s Golden Nica.
Other recent projects include the world's first bioplastic record with Michael Stipe and EarthPercent, a collective mail art project with DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh and a new body of work with Brian Eno. Wolfe is also the co-founder of a groundbreaking research project looking at the power of music for dementia.
Nancy Baker Cahill
artist
> Nancy Baker Cahill is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist whose hybrid practice focuses on systemic power, consciousness, and the human body. < > A transdisciplinary artist and expanded filmmaker, her work examines complex systems, with an emphasis on the relationship between consciousness, intelligence, and embodiment.< > Systems thinking plays an important role in her poetics; she is especially concerned with power and its biopolitical impacts, particularly ecological and social harms.<
> Baker Cahill is an artist scholar alumnus of the Berggruen Institute and a TEDx speaker.< > In 2021, she was awarded the Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor and a C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship. < >She is a 2022 LACMA Art + Tech Grant recipient, winner of the 2024 Infinity Festival's Monolith Award for New Media Fine Art, winner of the 2025 Full Dome Festival's Janus Award for Best Feature Film, and is an Affiliate of the Harvard metaLAB. <
> Her work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; RFC Art Collection, Miami, FL; The Winthrop University Collection, SC, The Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, IL, and 0x Collection, Prague, CZ.<
Wed: 10/07; 2:30-3:30pm =
> Artists’ Presentation <
ISABEL BEAVERS is a transdisciplinary artist whose work explores ecologies, examines environmental histories and postulates about climate futures through multimedia installation + new media.
Beavers' work addresses the climate crisis at the intersection of queerness, more-than-humans, spirituality, and technology. Most recently their projects have explored the eco-social implications of deep sea mining, marine health in the Puget Sound, and mega-fires in California. Beavers’ work has been presented, exhibited, and screened nationally and internationally. They hold an MFA from the SMFA at Tufts University and a BS from the University of Vermont. They were the 2021 AICAD/NOAA Fisheries Art + Science Fellow, 2022 Creative Impact Lab Amman Lead Artist with ZERO1. They are the Artistic Director of SUPERCOLLIDER LA and 2024-25 Hixon Riggs Early Career Fellow in STS At Harvey Mudd College.
Isabel Beavers +1
artist
ISABEL BEAVERS is a transdisciplinary artist whose work explores ecologies, examines environmental histories and postulates about climate futures through multimedia installation + new media.
Beavers' work addresses the climate crisis at the intersection of queerness, more-than-humans, spirituality, and technology. Most recently their projects have explored the eco-social implications of deep sea mining, marine health in the Puget Sound, and mega-fires in California. Beavers’ work has been presented, exhibited, and screened nationally and internationally. They hold an MFA from the SMFA at Tufts University and a BS from the University of Vermont. They were the 2021 AICAD/NOAA Fisheries Art + Science Fellow, 2022 Creative Impact Lab Amman Lead Artist with ZERO1. They are the Artistic Director of SUPERCOLLIDER LA and 2024-25 Hixon Riggs Early Career Fellow in STS At Harvey Mudd College.
Isabel Beavers and ______ , founding members of the influential art and science collective, SuperCollider, discuss their work and engage in conversation with the students of the Visual Art and Design Academy, in an inspiring presentation of ther own recent work.
Isabel Beavers
artist
Wed: 10/07; 2:30-4:30pm =
A Critique by Women of Color
Haewon Jeong
scientist/ panelist
> Panel <
> An Early Career Award winner from the National Science Foundation, Jeong is Assistant Professor Electrical and Computer Engineering with a focus on Machine Learning and Data Mining, Social Computing. < > Jeong's research team develops theoretically grounded tools for trustworthy and reliable machine learning systems by drawing ideas from different fields, such as information theory, statistics, machine learning, and distributed systems. Her thesis established important foundations on how to apply coding theory to building reliable large-scale computing systems.< > Jeong received her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, from Carnegie Mellon University and her BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
Curator of the Art, Design and Architectural Museum, Ana Briz in conversation with
Computer Science Assitant Professor Jaewon Huong and indigenous artist Kira Xonokira about inherent bias in AI.
Briz and her guests discuss how AI models are trained, and on what source material which might lead to poutcomes cement historical biases with regard to race, language, science, gender, art and much more.
Ana Briz
moderator
Recently appointed C Assistant Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the ADA, Briz is a researcher, writer, and curator. The abolitionist imaginary informs her curatorial practice and research interests. Her research is situated in the field of performance, art, and visual culture in the United States, and focuses on queer, feminist, and anti-racist work by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in California. She is broadly interested in issues related to social justice, displacement, and resistance in contemporary art and culture.
Briz is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California (USC) and holds an M.A. in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere from USC and a B.A. in Art History from Florida International University.
Kira Xonorika
Artist/ Panelist
KKira Xonorika is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and futurist. Their work explores the multidimensional connections between ancestry, the future, gender, and magic. Through transcultural, feminist, and AI-collaborative frameworks, Xonorika weaves worlds that center multi-species intelligence to decolonize binary relations in history and identity.
For indigenous cosmologies, taking the form of other non-human species involves connecting with an element of their strength, which can only be possible through a certain anatomical configuration—a process of bodily reorganization through symbiosis. Through the lens of AI, this piece explores speculative futurity centering intelligent collaboration with aquatic bodies.
WED 10/07 5:30-6:30PM =
> Lecture <
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
Santa Barbara Museum of Art Chief Curator, James Glisson, investigates how historical artists, awash with the science of their time, may have anticipated the AI advances of today.
In a fascinating look back through art history, Glisson draws not only on much of the work on display in the museum but the artists they influnced and been influenced by as he weaves an intricate threading of many historical movements, perspectives and personalities that looked well ahead. Glisson will field your many questions and observations at the end of the lecture.
James Glisson
Curator and Author
SBMA’s Chief Curator since 2020, has Glisson has been active in curating significant exhibits, including Going Global: Abstract Art at Mid-Century (2022), Out of Joint: Joan Tanner (2023), Scenes from a Marriage: Ed & Nancy Kienholz (2023), Inside/Outside (2023), Serenity and Revolution (2024), and the current presentation Made by Hand/Born Digital (2024).
He has been responsible for SBMA’s acquisition of more than 100 artworks, including significant pieces by Daniel Lind-Ramos, Ilana Savdie, Marshall Brown, Ann Craven, Narsiso Martinez, Shizu Saldamando, Gisela Colón, Yassi Mazandi, Nancy and Ed Kienholz, Jane Dickson, Rose Salane, Forest Kirk, Wyatt Kahn, Awol Erizku, Keith Mayerson, Vian Sora, Helen Frankenthaler, Edie Fake, Jessie Mockrin, Garth Weiser, and Joan Mitchell.
The chief curator directly oversees the curators, is responsible for shaping the exhibition and acquisition program, and leads the registration staff, who care for the museum’s nearly 26,000 artworks that span thousands of years.