Sophia Brueckner
Associate Professor of Art and Design, Penny W Stamps School of Art and Design, Associate Professor of Information, School of Information and Associate Professor of Digital Studies Institute, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
Sophia Brueckner is a futurist artist/designer/engineer. Inseparable from computers since the age of two, she believes she is a cyborg. As an engineer at Google, she designed and built products used by millions. At RISD and the MIT Media Lab, she researched the simultaneously empowering and controlling nature of technology with a focus on haptics and social interfaces. Her work has been featured internationally by Artforum, SIGGRAPH, The Atlantic, Wired, the Peabody Essex Museum, Portugal’s National Museum of Contemporary Art, and more. Brueckner is the founder and creative director of Tomorrownaut, a creative studio focusing on speculative futures and sci-fi-inspired prototypes. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Nokia Bell Labs, was previously an artist-in-residence at Autodesk, and is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan teaching Sci-Fi Prototyping, a course combining sci-fi, prototyping, and ethics. Her ongoing objective is to combine her background in art, design, and engineering to inspire a more positive future.
Abstract
Native to Australia and Papua New Guinea, bowerbirds’ uniquely curatorial behavior has long fascinated ornithologists and evolutionary biologists, who cannot explain their creative process. Different birds choose and arrange objects in surprisingly different ways. They are often described as the artists of the animal world because their creations are as difficult to understand as those of human artists. Their arrangements demonstrate a sensitivity to scale, composition, texture, and the interaction of color. There is no way to express their process as a step-by-step algorithm or optimization problem. Like human art, their compositions transcend easily measurable metrics like efficiency, quantity, and strength. Bowerbot is a robotic bowerbird that transforms an empty gallery space by arranging colorful objects such as flowers, leaves, and trash. Visitors will offer Bowerbot objects, which it might accept or reject. Using artificial intelligence (AI) trained on photographs of bowerbirds’ elaborate bowers, Bowerbot will learn how male bowerbirds create “artworks” to attract a mate.
Parking/Accessibility
The closest public parking garage to the Samuel T. Dana building is the Forest Ave. Parking Garage located at 650 S Forest Ave, Ann Arbor, MI 48104.
Forest Ave. Parking Garage located at 650 S Forest Ave, Ann Arbor, MI 48104.
For guidance on directions, U-M faculty/staff parking, and accessibility, please visit: https://maps.studentlife.umich.edu/building/samuel-trask-dana-building
This series is co-sponsored by
Please reach out to Ben Surgalski ([email protected]) with any questions.