DTC 338 | Fall 2025
This exhibition presents collaborative essays and individual artworks from DTC 338: Generative AI (2025). The works explore the creative, ethical, and aesthetic challenges of making art with AI. Each group selected a specific issue—such as data ethics, hybrid-authorship, or authentic emotion—and researched how contemporary AI artists address that challenge in their own workflows and ethics.
Students began with individual inquiries through AI dialogues and experiments, then brought their perspectives together to create a unified text-and-media document and in theor own creative production of an artifact. These projects combine research, critical reflection, and generative work, showing how artists can treat AI not as a shortcut but as a collaborator guided by human intention. While AI tools contributed ideas, variations, and imagery, the groups shaped the decisions at every step.
Every AI-generated image begins long before a user enters a prompt. It starts inside a dataset, an often invisible archive containing millions of images collected from the public internet. These datasets shape the visual vocabulary of generative models and determine what an AI system can “imagine.”
This project examines how various AI models interpret language by testing prompts across seven categories, including misspellings, poetic phrasing, and comparisons between human-written and AI-generated instructions. Through controlled experiments with ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Gemini, Freepik, and DeepAI, the team discovers that prompts function more as negotiations than commands.
Artificial intelligence can now generate images, narratives, and performances with remarkable aesthetic fluency, but it still lacks the most fundamental ingredient of emotional storytelling: human experience.
For most of modern media history, authorship has operated like ownership. Films had directors, books had writers, albums had artists, and even collaborative works ultimately funneled into one or a few named creators. The public could interpret a work, but they were never part of constructing it. The tools of production were expensive, specialized, and slow, which created a natural gatekeeping around who could meaningfully contribute to the creation of media. Audiences observed. Artists created.
This project explores how AI is changing the meaning of photography and authorship. We examine how artists blend human emotion with machine-generated imagery. Through hybrid processes, photography shifts from capturing reality to reimagining it. The work asks: when both human and machine create the image, who took the photo?
By Sasha Sabic
A poetic visual dialogue between human gesture and algorithmic synthesis.
By Danielle Gilmore
How can handcrafted candles be transformed through AI-generated imagery and video? Combining original candle photography with outputs from Midjourney and Sora, the work examines how machines reinterpret mood, atmosphere, and aesthetic choices.
By Muniroth Ly
A creative experiment in prompt aesthetics, tracing how abstract, ambiguous language transforms AI-generated imagery across iterative cycles of distortion.
By Tucker Christensen
A creative experiment in prompt aesthetics, tracing how abstract, ambiguous language transforms AI-generated imagery across iterative cycles of distortion.
By Callum Robinson
Artificial intelligence can now generate images, narratives, and performances with remarkable aesthetic fluency, but it still lacks the most fundamental ingredient of emotional storytelling: human experience.
By Diego Silan
A creative study where sketches evolve into AI visuals, demonstrating how thoughtful prompts influence aesthetics while revealing shared authorship between human intention and machine interpretation.
By Marine Malisetyan
This project explores hybrid authorship by combining my original photos and paintings with AI to create new expressions of my past work. The process helped me reconnect with art after many years and rediscover my creative voice. Overall, it shows how AI can expand personal expression and support an artist’s return to their craft
By Anatolii Liskov
Step into a parallel Vancouver where time fractures and the city reveals its hidden futures. A photo journey through AI-generated cyberpunk skylines, post-apocalyptic ruins, and shimmering eco-utopias.
By Marnie Cooper
The Curiosity, Simulated research project examines the boundary between human curiosity and AI simulation through a glitchy digital cat. It highlights how human wonder, uncertainty, and interpretation differ from AI’s predictive patterning. When curiosity meets its simulation, a new form of exploration appears. Human curiosity is the engine. AI is the vehicle.
By Marnie Cooper
A museum-style interactive kiosk that imagines the consent questions artists were never asked before their work was used to train AI models.
By Elijah Houston
An interactive, multi-artifact exploration of nature, emotion, and human–machine collaboration using p5.js generative systems.
By Zavien Houston
A generative video game cover tool combining human design choices and AI-generated artwork.
By Rachel Karls
An interactive, multi-artifact exploration of nature, emotion, and human–machine collaboration using p5.js generative systems.
By Chelsea Cowsert
An interactive generative art piece exploring emotion, simulation, and embodiment through a p5.js grid that visually responds to states like calm, anxiety, nostalgia, and overwhelm.
By Samuel Barclay
An interactive, multi-artifact exploration of nature, emotion, and human–machine collaboration using p5.js generative systems.
By Luke Higgins
A generative video project exploring RunwayAI and ElevenLabs with a reflective essay on process, authorship, and experimentation.
By Abbas Azarm
Skybound Relic uses AI video-generation tools to prototype a video game concept, exploring creative possibilities and hybrid human–machine workflows while visualizing a cinematic adventure efficiently and cost-effectively.
By Rostyslav Mitrianu
Skybound Relic uses AI video-generation tools to prototype a video game concept, exploring creative possibilities and hybrid human–machine workflows while visualizing a cinematic adventure efficiently and cost-effectively.
By Dakotta Bhatti
A cinematic, hybrid human-machine visualization of an original poem exploring the tragic bond between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker.