RMAIIG June 11 Event: The Call for Creatives Closes on June 1

The Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group wants you. To be precise, it wants the creative you – even if it’s been hidden away, underutilized, or ignored for years.

On Wednesday, June 11 RMAIIG is featuring its premier “AI and the Creative Arts” exhibition, but the equally important date to remember is Sunday, June 1.

That’s the deadline for submissions, and RMAIIG is inviting “artists, designers, photographers, writers, musicians, and creatives of all disciplines to submit work for our upcoming session.”

As Andres Sepulveda Morales makes clear, “Absolutely everyone is encouraged to submit something they’ve created, whether it’s with the help of AI, about AI, or some combination of the two. Don’t be daunted if you’re not a professional ‘creative,’ as we’re looking for a real diversity of community voices to contribute to this exhibition.”

Sepulveda Morales is the curator of the event and the founder of RMAIIG’s “Ft. Collins AI for Everyone” subgroup. It’s clear that he wants to channel the “AI for Everyone” theme into this exhibition when he said, “The future of technology shouldn't be shaped only by those who profit from it. It should also meaningfully include the people who will live and work with its consequences every day.” He continued:

As a technologist, I see how tech experts and business folks dominate the stage while the actual end user affected by these tools rarely gets a word in. There's a balance that needs to be struck, and that's why I pushed to include the community in this session. I've been reaching out personally to creatives across Colorado, and what struck me wasn't a resistance to new technology like I had incorrectly guessed, but rather their genuine surprise at being asked to participate at all. “Wait, you actually want to hear what I think about this?”

The event will feature submissions in two formats, with an online virtual gallery and an on-site exhibition. For the virtual gallery, all approved submissions will be included, and for the exhibition on June 11, selected submissions will be able to showcase their work in-person and discuss them with attendees. Priority for the physical exhibition will be given to works that are made in physical mediums or are able to be physically displayed. RMAIIG expects to invite a maximum of 20 creatives to the exhibition.

In addition to the exhibition, the June 11 event will feature two speakers, Lee Frankel-Goldwater and Mark S. Johnson. Frankel-Goldwater is a CU Boulder professor and the co-author of the forthcoming book, Lily in a Codebox: The Search for AI’s Poetic Voice, which is described as a human-AI collaboration on poetry and art. Johnson has been a professional photographer and digital artist for more than 30 years. He will discuss what he calls his period of anger and mourning upon seeing what Midjourney was capable of – before he reinvented himself as an artist. His talk is titled, “Finding Your Place as an Artist in the Age of AI.”

The submission form for the event can be found at https://shorturl.at/DPnRk. Sepulveda Morales says that he encourages anyone with questions or concerns to reach out to him at andres@redmage.cc.

Note that the writer is a member of RMAIIG'S Executive Committee and Board of Advisors.