Panel Talk: Digital Creativity

“Can machines think?”It is the question that Turing alluded to in 1950 when talking about machine intelligence, and it comes back again when we talk about AI art. Nowadays, machine has become an indispensable element both in design and production. Then how machine and thinking is represented in digital design and art? This panel talk will discuss the visual creativity of machine from the input and output level, exploring the possibility of machine’s creativity in the future.

1.Data and digital creation

Data is a significant component of artificial intelligence. When training AI, programmers need to feed huge amount of data to a specific neural network. The training data is controllable as human can define its boundary. However, it is also uncontrollable in that the sample size is too large for human beings to scrutinize. Data is thus the “food” for neural network to help it approach the goal gradually in the process of learning and imitating. In this section, we will investigate the significance of big data to digital design — how it helps and controls data visualization, and how digital design innovates based on big data.

2.The logic of digital creation

Nature has its own rules for things, which is not only the law of universe, but also the logic of scientific thinking. Humans use mathematics to interpret laws of nature and realize more complex logic through machines. The creation of machine is the third form of creation besides artifacts and natural beings. Digital design, based on the strong mathematic logic, has the power of evolution, and it can evolve endlessly as nature. This panel will talk about digital creation under human-machine cooperation, and explore the development model in the future.

Date: December 22, 2021

Venue: Maoma Warehouse, Yangpu Riverside (No.32 Qinhuangdao Rd)

Academic Hosts: Cao Nan, Zhang Zhoujie

Cao Nan

PhD, Professor, College of Design & Innovation, Tongji University

Dr. Nan Cao is a tenured full professor at Tongji College of Design and Innovation. He was a research staff member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. His primary expertise and research interests are data visualization and visual communication design. He has received many career awards including the IBM outstanding technical award, IBM outstanding research achievement award, and the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award. His team invented Calliope·Data (https://datacalliope.com), the world’s first intelligent tool for automatic design and generation of visual narratives based on an input data.

Zhang Zhoujie

Independent Designer and Digital Artist

Zhang established Zhoujie Zhang Digital Lab in 2010. He is a pioneer in the realm of digital creativity. He has gained high reputation in China and abroad because of his uniqueness in digital art. He is currently a guest lecturer of Central Academy of Fine Arts and associate professor of Tongji University.

His work is known for being independent, experimental and futuristic. Zhang believes that objects in the digital world can grow and morph much like things found in nature, and he is dedicated to discovering and exploring the methods within these transformations. His work mainly focuses on the simplicity of logic, variety and unpredictability, which is based on his understanding of nature. 

His work has been collected by museums, galleries and private collectors, appearing in mainstream media such as Wallpaper*, the New York Times, CNN, and Vogue.