For the first time since before the COVID-19 pandemic, the faculty of arts Media Lab is active again. They have returned to hosting events, workshops and projects this academic year. Their grant-funded strategic initiative, Beyond the Prompt: Generative AI, Creativity and Responsibility, is focused on facilitating conversations about the novel impacts of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) on academia and our daily lives. The coming months will feature a variety of guest lectures by prominent international artists who have been creating artworks on the topic of AI. They will be explicitly interdisciplinary events, including perspectives from technology, fine arts, music and engineering, in hopes for members of different faculties at the U of M to collaborate and learn from each other’s methodologies.

Media Lab director Monika Vrečar stressed the importance of addressing AI with “critical angles […] not just practical angles, [such as asking,] ‘Okay, how are we going to deal with students plagiarizing?’ But, to actually talk to people who have insight into [the] history of developing of the technology and […] What are the kind of implications that it has on broader society and on us as people?”

The first event will link the history of AI with Cold War military projects as the American visual artist Trevor Paglen delivers a keynote on how they have inspired his recent work. It is titled The Lizard People: How UFOs, Magic, and Mind-Control Explain Visual Culture in the Age of AI. He is set to speak on Jan. 15 at the Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art. Paglen will also speak in a graduate seminar at the U of M the following morning, accompanying readings he has assigned.

Paglen is a conceptual artist whose work highlights the realities of modern surveillance infrastructure and related social issues such as privacy, power dynamics and control — and now the implications of AI on these issues as well. His recent work has been inspired by the history of facial-recognition technology. He is known for his past work highlighting the social implications of satellite technologies as well. Paglen’s work has been included in both fine art and film course materials at the U of M.

“Seeing is not just a technical process, but it’s also a relational process,” Paglen introduced his 2024 lecture at Rhode Island School of Design. “It’s a historical process, a cultural and political process. Computer vision and AI are often described by the people who develop these tools in just purely technical terms. And when you hear vision or perception described in purely technical terms, it doesn’t mean that those forms of synthetic vision are devoid of histories and politics, it just means that they’re being ignored by the people developing them. So, if that’s the case, then what sorts of histories, what sorts of cultural assumptions, what sorts of politics, are built into these kinds of technical systems?”

There are more guests planned for the Media Lab later in the semester. Lakota performance artist and composer Suzanne Kite will speak about the intersections of AI and Indigenous knowledge systems on Jan. 31. Australian-American environmental engineer and New York University professor Tega Brain will speak about the infrastructure and automation of ecological data in early March. And finally, Iranian-German composer Misagh Azimi will also speak about his research on music composition in late March. Kite and Azimi will likely demonstrate performances of their work as well. Azimi’s lecture is planned to be alongside a panel of philosophy professors. The coming guest lectures have been collaboratively funded by the Media Lab’s grant, the school of art, the faculty of architecture and the Plug In ICA.

Vrečar commented, “A lot of professors are struggling with how to grade assignments, how to detect plagiarism, how to deal with the fact that a lot of students are now using AI tools in their writing and in their learning, and how to navigate this new landscape […] We’re not going to be able to just ban the use of AI forever, right? So there’s a conversation that’s urgent and that we need to have, because the problem is here and it’s quite severe already.”

The Media Lab is a space on campus dedicated to providing faculty of arts students with audio-visual equipment, technological support and film screenings. They also hosted virtual workshops and accompanying in-person debates in collaboration with the faculty of education throughout fall 2025 as the start of the Beyond the Prompt initiative. The space primarily caters to film students, but it is open to any students with media-based assignments to work on — especially as more professors have been assigning alternative projects for their courses. The Media Lab also recently added a podcast studio to their available amenities.