2025-2026 HUMAN Fellows
Susy Bielak
Speculative Nationality Rooms is Studio Art
For this project, Bielak will lead a varied cohort in Pittsburgh to imagine—in the form of large-form watercolor paintings and accompanying texts—a set of speculative nationality rooms inspired by the Nationality & Heritage Rooms at the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. This cohort will include 1) writers and artists affiliated with the City of Asylum Exiled Writer and Artist Residency Program, 2) members of Bielak's own multicultural/multilingual immigrant home community in Pittsburgh, and 3) members of the Pittsburgh cultural community with intersectional identities. To create the Speculative Nationality Rooms, Bielak will work iteratively using interviews, visual/archival research, and 3D and 2D rendering—using AI tools throughout—to create a set of watercolor paintings and accompanying texts depicting speculative nationality rooms as imagined by her interlocutors. The resulting watercolors will be in dialogue with those painted by Russian émigré artist Andrey Avinoff in the 1930s and 1940s depicting the Nationality Rooms’ richly decorated interiors.
Josh Corey
Lake Forest College Press: AI Editions
Lake Forest College Press, with the assistance of HUMAN participants, will continue its initiative to produce new editions of public domain texts using AI-assisted methods. The first AI Edition focused on the writings of anarchist and labor leader Lucy Parsons, offering a politically engaged critical edition that explores themes of class, race, and gender through a variety of computational tools.
Kimiko Matsumura
Seeing Through AI: Computer Vision and the Art of Connoisseurship at Lake Forest College
This HUMAN Fellows project investigates the potential and limitations of computer vision AI in the practice of art historical connoisseurship, with a focus on the Lake Forest College art collection. The project systematically explores four key applications of AI in the humanities: 1) Evaluating AI-generated visual analyses of artworks, particularly under-documented pieces from Asia and the global south; 2) Assessing where current models falter due to Western-biased training data; 3) Curating an exhibition that juxtaposes human and AI interpretations of selected works to spark dialogue on technology’s role in humanistic inquiry; and 4) Developing a companion website that documents findings and promotes public engagement with both the collection and the broader implications of AI in visual culture. The project expands ongoing research within the Krebs Humanities Scholars program and is designed for integration into future courses in art history, curatorial practice, and digital humanities.
Don Meyer
American Dark Ages: Exploring Generative AI Applications in Multi-Media Production
This Human Fellows project explores the possibilities of generative AI in the production of a multi-media artistic work called American Dark Ages, set in a post-apocalyptic nation at the end of the twenty-fifth century. The project systematically investigates four specific applications of artificial intelligence technology: 1) Evaluating the potential of AI voice acting to read the “parts” I have written for the audiobook narration. 2) Analyzing what the technology might suggest regarding linguistic change over the next half-millennium (the time period of the novel). 3) Examining how music cultures might evolve and recombine with one another in the future as part of the fictional world I have created. 4) Implementing AI to help generate videos to serve as a potential trailer for the project or a guide for the creation of a human-made trailer.
Mel Rovner
Semiotics of Space: AI Readings of Lake Forest's Built Environment
This project explores how AI image analysis can be used to interpret architectural elements as texts that communicate social values and power dynamics. Students will photograph and analyze Lake Forest's built environment, focusing particularly on Fort Sheridan's military complex and its historical relationship to Chicagoland labor contestations. By juxtaposing technological readings with archival research, the resulting exhibition examines which narratives remain visible and which have been obscured, questioning how the architectural landscape might reveal or conceal histories of class conflict and alternative community models that preceded and contested Lake Forest's deliberately planned vision.
Tracy Taylor
Ars Machina Vitae: A Reproductive Odyssey
This HUMAN Fellows project transforms an existing multimedia installation into an interactive narrative game exploring the intersections of artificial intelligence, reproductive technology, and social justice. The project investigates four key applications of AI in the humanities: 1) Creating a serious empathy-building game based on five distinct character journeys through infertility; 2) Exploring how AI tools influence reproductive decision-making, data privacy, and medical care access; 3) Integrating feminist and cyborg theory, especially Haraway’s work, to examine how technology reshapes human identity and bodily autonomy; and 4) Developing a pedagogical and artistic framework for using AI in game design, narrative medicine, and visual storytelling. The game will be developed using the Godot engine and integrated into digital art and design curricula at Lake Forest College.
24/25 HUMAN Fellows
Josh Corey
Lake Forest College Press AI Editions
Lake Forest College Press, with the assistance of HUMAN participants, will produce new editions of classic Chicago-focused texts in the public domain, using AI-assisted analyses to identify themes of class, gender, and racial dynamics in the writings of significant Chicago-based writers like journalist Ida B. Wells, political activist Lucy Parsons, and pioneering social worker Jane Addams. The project will use generative AI to conduct a) semantic analysis to identify recurring themes (the NLP can determine frequency), b) pattern recognition to identify structure and style, c) contextual analysis to compare the work with historical documents of the period (news articles, letters, etc.) to identify external influences, d) intertextual analysis to compare the texts with other relevant literary works of the period, e) visual representations to express aspects of the texts in sentiment graphs, word charts, etc., among others.
Mel Rovner
Anti-Monumental
"Anti-Monumental" works with AI to critically evaluate Chicago’s public history monuments, and to propose corrective augmentations or new models that better represent the complicated history of race, conquest, and representation in Chicago. The project responds to the city’s commission – the “racial healing and reckoning project” – tasked with evaluating over 500 Chicago monuments. Though seemingly singular, each monument is entangled in complicated and far-reaching histories of exploitation, extraction, and displacement – histories without physical commemoration in the contemporary city. In conversation with an LLM, the project begins to unravel the histories underpinning monuments central to Chicago’s public narrative, to analyze the contemporary public discourse surrounding their preservation or plans for removal, and to connect them to alternative histories of being and belonging. The project experiments with generative AI’s capacity for reading images, through DALL-E, for example, to question identified monuments, and to re-envision them as “anti-monuments” to Chicago’s diverse, complicated, difficult, and hidden histories.
David Sanchez-Burr
The Passage is Ours to Alight: The Emergence of New Sentience
This research project combines Music/Sound Art, Astrophysics, Visual Art, and Artificial Intelligence via an installation space that allows interaction with AI through movement and sound, imagining a theoretical communication with AI in ways that foresee it as a new sentient species. The goal of this project is to look at alternative means of contact with AI. Our goal is to make this interactive experience illustrative of the creative spirit while at the same time, relational to our space and time in the universe. Using AI-generated visuals and sounds, as well as sensors and sound amplification, the room will make AI capable of detecting the presence of visitors and open a dialogue through interactions within the space.
Dan Schwartz
Generative AI and the Future of Fine Arts
This project examines the role of the human – or lack thereof – in making art, culminating in a fine arts showcase created by the participants of MUSC 285: Creative Arts Entrepreneurship (Fall 2024). It explores the philosophical aspects of art, focusing on ethics, authenticity, and accessibility. The event will discuss the project and its development leading up to the showcase.
Tracy Taylor
Ars Machina Vitae: A Reproductive Odyssey
“Ars Machina Vitae: A Reproductive Odyssey” is an interactive art piece that merges narrative storytelling with advanced AI technology, offering a “choose your own adventure” experience that delves into the nuanced journeys of individuals facing infertility. Developed using cutting-edge AI tools, including ChatGPT for narrative generation and Midjourney for visual design, this project represents a synthesis of human creativity and artificial intelligence. Participants are invited to navigate the lives of five distinct characters, each confronting unique challenges related to reproductive technologies, societal expectations, and personal dilemmas.
Rachel Whidden
Visualizing Rhetoric in AI Bias: Analyzing Corporate Apologies and Public Responses
The rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have led to significant benefits across various industries. However, these technologies also have generated controversies, particularly concerning issues of bias and discrimination embedded within AI algorithms. Major tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and others, have found themselves at the center of these controversies, often necessitating public apologies and detailed explanations. For this project, I analyze media coverage and public communication surrounding specific incidents of AI bias involving these tech giants. By examining the timeline of events, company responses, public reactions, and outcomes, I identify the rhetorical strategies employed in these corporate apologies and explanations. A key focus of this analysis is how companies frequently place blame on algorithms, effectively severing the human role in generating the data that informs these algorithms. The project will culminate in an interactive timeline that visually represents the sequence of events, company responses, and public reactions for each AI bias controversy, and a data visualizations representing and analyzing the rhetorical strategies and public perceptions related to AI bias controversies.