Current States of Being: Exploring AI’s Influence on Memory, Identity, and Creativity
Artificial intelligence weaves its way through our daily lives, entangling technology, memory, and cultural identity in both visible and unseen ways. Current States of Being brings together works by three artists: Danielle Ezzo, Ameera Kawash, and Eryk Salvaggio. Each artist critically engages with AI as both a tool and a subject, unraveling its biases, possibilities, and entanglements with history.
Through still and moving imagery, textiles, digital manipulation, and language, the artists explore how AI reinterprets tradition, distorts memory, and generates new narratives. Together, their works interrogate the tension between human agency and machine-driven creation, between preservation and mutation, and between past and speculative futures.
The exhibition invites us to consider AI not as an impartial tool but as a collaborator, a disruptor, and a reflection of our own cultural and technological landscapes, unraveling and reweaving what it means to create in an era of algorithmic imagination.
-Sarah Knobel, exhibition curator, associate professor of Art & Art History and Digital Media and Film
In Eryk Salvaggio’s Pollen Series, the artist worked with an image generation model trained entirely on public domain images from museums and libraries. He combined these with a collection of failed AI images and images of archival debris, such as bad scans or damaged negatives. Using this dataset of glitches, Salvaggio prompted the model for pollen, resulting in strange and abstract textures combining various forms of digital and analog debris.
An Incantation in Twelve Prompts is a poem paired with photographic images. The poem delineates a relationship between two lovers—the image maker and the medium of photography itself. Each stanza serves as a prompt, which is then fed into a text-to-image stable diffusion model.
Artists’ discussion with Q&A
Thursday, September 4, 11:30am-12:30pm, in Carnegie Room 10
Artists’ reception
Thursday, September 4, 4:30pm
In the Gallery
Brown bag lunch with the artists
“Critically Thinking About AI: Ethics, Archiving, and Decolonizing Digital Heritage”
Friday, September 5, 11:30am-12:30pm, in Newell Center for Arts Technology 108
The events are free and open to the public
Cover image: Ameera Kawash, Tatreez Garden (image generated from custom AI generator), 2025.
Kawash is an Arab-American artist and creative technologist whose work explores decolonial innovation and futuring. Tatreez Garden is an interactive generative artwork that entwines Palestinian embroidery (tatreez) with plants rooted in Palestinian ecology, culture, and cuisine. Tatreez—a form of embroidery traditionally crafted by Palestinian women over generations—is a wearable art form that embodies identity, resistance, connection to land, and cultural memory.