Crossroads: Art and AI Panel Conversation presented by Immersive Arts Alliance
Thursday June 1, 2023
6PM: Doors
7PM - 8PM: Panel Discussion
With Vanessa Chang, Evo Heyning, Toshi Anders Hoo, and Bogdana Rakova
Seated program within the TECHS-MECHS exhibition
Contact us at [email protected] with any accommodation requests.
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All ages
Your ticket for Crossroads: Art and AI grants you access to both the exhibition and the panel, and includes a limited edition print booklet featuring the TECHS-MECHS chronology – a fascinating exploration of Mexico's rich technological and cultural history.
This event marks the closing of TECHS-MECHS, our monumental solo exhibition featuring historic works by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. In the exhibition, Lozano-Hemmer presents a critical history of Mexican Technology and showcases several pieces that investigate the impact of technology in society. Many of these technologies, such as thermal and surveillance cameras, have been repurposed from their initial military and policing applications.
As TECHS-MECHS comes to a close, this relevant and thought-provoking panel explores the role of AI in society, looking at its potential ripple effects and ramifications. In the spirit of the exhibition, the panel will examine artificial intelligence within a broader historical and social context.
The rise of public interest and speculation in art and artificial intelligence is undeniable. Billions have been invested, court battles are underway, and a complete upending of the labor market is imminent. As evidence we are at a crossroads, a seemingly endless spring of unbidden computer-generated art pours forth daily on our social media channels. The technology seems to have uncovered a wellspring of creativity — and unleashed a torrent of controversy.
While there are vital questions about legality in the corporatization of AI and its impact on working artists and designers, this conversation reclaims the long legacy of machine-assisted artmaking and its creative potential. This panel considers AI from an artist's perspective, in an effort to peer around the curtain of hype and panic. The panelists will explore how the technology works, how these tools are and can be used creatively, and the future of art and AI.
Bogdana (Bobi) Rakova is a technologist, researcher, innovator, and community advocate. She is a Senior Trustworthy AI fellow at Mozilla Foundation with a passion for empowering people to trust AI systems through actionable models of evaluation and engagement in the AI lifecycle. Previously she was an AI auditor at the Responsible AI team and Accenture, a key contributor to IEEE’s global ethics standards initiative, a senior machine learning research engineer at Samsung’s innovation Think Tank Team, and a startup founder at the intersection of AI and workforce automation.
Evo Heyning is a producer, interactive media strategist and sees past corners to brighter futures across fields from XR to AI. She is the VP and f XRGuild.org, Founder of Open Metaverse interoperability at omigroup.org, Producer at LightLodges, related to light art and publishing interactive media, from books to projection mapped public art. Realitycraft is her design lab and generative art gallery and she is the author of the Promptcraft guidebook, creating art and media projects in AI from storybooks to film and video tools for the public.
Toshi Anders Hoo is an award winning filmmaker, researcher, and creative technologist whose work has been featured around the world including the United Nations, TED, The Smithsonian, NASA and The Dubai Museum of the Future. Toshi worked with futurist Ray Kurzweil for a decade consulting and producing a variety of emerging technology projects and research. Toshi joined IFTF in 2016 as the Director of IFTF’s Emerging Media Lab leading up research and prototyping projects exploring the future of human communication, collaboration and connection, through the lens of emerging media technologies.Toshi studied at Mass College of Art and Design and was co-founder of the media arts collective Noise Laboratories. Toshi is an internationally recognized researcher, speaker and thought leader in forecasting both the applications and implications of emerging media technologies and the new relationships, power systems and mythologies that emerge with them.
Vanessa Chang builds communities and conversations about art, technology, people, and planet. She is Director of Programs at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. She earned a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. She's also taught in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts and was lead curator with CODAME Art & Tech. She has appeared on NPR’s On the Media and State of the Art and her curatorial work has been profiled in such venues as Art in America and KQED Arts. Her writing has been published in Wired, Slate, Noema, Los Angeles Review of Books, Journal of Visual Culture, among other publications. Her first book, The Body Digital: A Brief History of Humans and Machines, from Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT, was published in November 2025.
Immersive Arts Alliance (IAA) is a Bay Area non-profit that supports and presents ambitious works of public art, stewarding collaboration between a diverse range of artists and creative communities.
IAA formed amidst the chaos of the pandemic with a shared vision: to build world-class public art, accessible to all, into the Bay Area arts ecosystem — and especially by activating Bay Area sites conducive to open-air art experience.
IAA prioritizes projects that invite and catalyze conversations about vital topics of pressing importance in contemporary society. In this way, we extend and enrich the Bay Area’s arts legacy of innovation and imagination.
