Awardee: Virginie A. Duzer chairs the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures where she teaches advanced French classes on topics as varied as architecture, avant-garde movements, youth revolutions, art history or literature. She has published “L’Impressionisme littéraire” in 2013 (PUV), and her forthcoming book is entitled “le Mobilier de la couleur” (Cohen & Cohen).
Title: Artificializing Surrealism: a revamp of my cannibalizing surrealism class, with AI onboard
Goal: Virginie aims to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into her course on Surrealism, an aesthetic movement that initially focused on text and later developed into a more “image” centered movement. At the center of surrealism aesthetics, “automatism” or “écriture automatique,” will be explored with the help of AI tools like Chat-GPT and AI image generators. The project will encourage students to address several questions: What can AI help us understand about the surrealist aesthetic, and can AI recreate automatism? Virginie hopes to create an exhibit of these AI generated works and display them at the Hive.
Project Outcome: By considering what artificial intelligence can help students understand about the surrealist aesthetic, and how artificial intelligence can recreate automatism, students in Professor Duzer’s French 182 course on the Surrealism aesthetic movement came to see artificial intelligence as a powerful expressive and analytic tool. Unfortunately the undoubtedly amusing discussions students had with artificial intelligence posing as if they were French surrealist writers aren’t available to show. However, class creations depicting the aftermath of having students create images, painting and photographs using artificial intelligence are currently exhibited at the Hive.
Click here to view additional images created by Virginie’s students.
Hahn recipients have the opportunity to showcase their projects to the Pomona community with a presentation. Unfortunately, Virginie was not able to make it to the showcase in person but was kind enough to showcase the work through a video, which you may view below: