Step Into the Unknown
at Brave New Work
World Leaders in Art and Technology
Gather in Santa Barbara to Discuss Our Future
By Leslie Dinaberg | October 2, 2025
Read more of the 2025 Fall Visual Arts preview.
Whether you find it irresistible or hate it, embrace it or worry it, AI is in every single place. The intersection of artwork and expertise takes heart stage subsequent week for a three-day, citywide symposium, “Brave New Work: AI and Tech in the Hands of Artists,” arriving in Santa Barbara October 7-9.
A multi-venue gathering of main artists and scientists and members of the public, this program is the brainchild of govt producer Michael Delgado, who has labored in partnership with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara; Santa Barbara Community Arts Workshop; Santa Barbara Center for Art and Technology; Santa Barbara High’s Visual Arts and Design Academy (VADA); and a number of departments at UCSB, together with Media Arts and Technology and the Art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&A), to convey thought leaders and cutting-edge artistry to our city.
“The most exciting thing about the event is that you can interact with the artists and their technologist counterparts as they discuss how, through collaboration, they are moving art and technology on a path that serves humanity and makes us better,” says Delgado. “Technology is neutral. How we apply it is up to us. Science and art can usher in a true renaissance period for our time, but we need to be a part of that conversation.”
Brave New Work options internationally famend up to date artists Nancy Baker Cahill, JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, Victoria Vesna, and Beatie Wolfe, in addition to expertise leaders Kevin Davis, Ken Kosik, and Alan Macy, amongst others.
“Working outdoors the white dice of galleries and museums, our artists use the social cloth of a neighborhood as a canvas, orchestrating native enter to make culturally colourful installations, experiences, and performances to ship common messages of hope, resistance, inclusion, environmental stewardship, and private id.
“The term ‘AI’ solicits a strong response, mostly negative from the general art community. And, for good reason,” admits Delgado. “It is powerful, invasive, and moving incredibly fast — all the attributes that raise our ‘fight or flight’ instincts. But making art is what separates us from other beings or robots. It defines our humanity. The pursuit of art and science collaborations puts us on a path to a more hopeful future.”
The pressure between human expression and expeditious applied sciences is the coronary heart of the symposium, he defined. Santa Barbara is a number one heart for AI and different applied sciences which are remodeling how we work together with each the pure and digital environments.
Among the concepts on the desk are:
Where do these worlds intersect and why? And what does that imply for artwork and for science?
How are these fast-changing applied sciences impacting the conventional gallery and museum ecosystems?
What does it imply to be an artist as we speak? What does it imply to be a scientist?
“Interestingly, the artwork, which may seem so new, is rooted in several well-known modern art movements. You can draw a through line from Cézanne and the Impressionists to Surrealist filmmakers, abstract expressionism — especially the ‘gesture’ in a Jackson Pollock painting, the cynicism of pop art and the grandeur of environmental works by Smithson or Heizer and especially the light and space artists like James Turrell; all the way to the time-based, ethereal immersive installations of the artists in the show,” says Delgado. “You can even argue that our own plein air artists like Michael Drury and Andy Vogel, with their expert depictions of Southern California’s unique light and preoccupation with our place in an earthly landscape, are kinfolk to someone like Victoria Vesna or Beatie Wolfe.”
Wolfe’s challenge, titled “Smoke and Mirrors,” makes use of artwork to speak six a long time of local weather information, particularly rising methane ranges (“smoke”), set alongside the verbatim promoting slogans deployed by the Big Oil trade to disclaim, doubt, and delay (“mirrors”) local weather consciousness by the a long time, ranging from 1970 till current day.
This evocative visualization is predicated on NASA’s “Blue Marble” {photograph} and produced in collaboration with the artistic studio House of Parliament. It will likely be set to the music titled “Oh My Heart,” a recording that was launched as the world’s first bioplastic file by Wolfe (who will likely be a part of a panel on October 8 known as Signals & Systems: Artists Rewiring Perception in the Age of Intelligent Media), Michael Stipe (REM), and Brian Eno’s EarthPercent.
“Smoke and Mirrors” is a part of a free program of projected public artwork works at the Santa Barbara Public Library Plaza on October 8. In addition to Wolfe’s piece, the screening (from sundown to 9 p.m.) can even embrace artwork works by Nancy Baker Cahill, Richelle Ellis/TremendousCollider.la, Victoria Vesna, and Yuge Zhou.
“Stone Speaks,” a particular AR (Augmented Reality) set up by Baker Cahill, will likely be on view at the Welcoming Reception at MCASB’s Paseo Nuevo Arts Terrace on October 7. Inspired by conversations between Baker Cahill and Sophia the Robot about the accelerating local weather disaster, and the adaptive potential of human-machine collaboration, “Stone Speaks” was initially geolocated concurrently over Madinat Jumeirah in Dubai and Miami Beach in Florida, to underscore the borderless nature of the local weather disaster.
Ellis’s work can also be environmentally themed. Titled “Left Behind,” with collaborative animation and sound design by Isabel Beavers, it options panorama drawings on discarded plastics collected close to the North Pole. As the plastics float to the water’s floor like glaciers in the ocean, it asks the query, “What is left behind when the ice melts?” As Ellis wrote in her artist assertion: “Human impact is reshaping our planet, affecting the farthest reaches of our planet. This work reflects on such impacts, gathering artifacts from the places we alter without noticing.”
Vesna’s work, “[Alien] Star Dust,” which premiered at the Natural History Museum in Vienna as a site-specific immersive artwork expertise, is a research-based artwork challenge that invitations viewers to achieve an intimate understanding of the significance and complexity of mud. In addition to being an internationally famend artist, Vesna can also be a professor whose work bridges each artwork and science at the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts and California NanoSystems Institute.
Zhou’s piece, “Trampoline Color Exercise,” goes in a very completely different path, as a moving-image collage of leaping gymnasts whose uniforms and identities shapeshift as they flip and tumble on pink gridded trampolines. “Growing up in China, watching the Olympic Games, it’s such a ritualistic family event every four years,” says Zhou, who left China for the U.S. in 2008.
Using aerial vantage factors from archival broadcasts of Olympic Games footage, this artwork piece, which was proven in New York’s Times Square, is a hen’s-eye meditation on the human kind and the athletic pursuit of perfection. It’s additionally a well timed but delicate nod to international nationwide flags and fluctuating affiliations in our ever-changing geopolitical local weather. “But also the powerful symbolism, what it represents, the kind of the rivalry between the superpowers,” says Zhou. “The idea is that even if people don’t understand this piece from a deeper level, it’s kind of like a really playful kind of a reference to just the fun of the play of the primary colors and the athletes pursuit of perfection, … but if you kind of look at it in a deeper sense, it also is kind of about the ever-changing kind of geopolitics that we have, the superpowers kind of shifting from one nation to another; there’s this shifting allegiance.”
Composer JoAnn Kuchera-Morin — whose identify could also be acquainted as the Director and Chief Scientist of the AlloSphere Research Facility and Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music in the California NanoSystems Institute at UCSB — will carry out excerpts of her groundbreaking concerto by which she makes use of quantum mechanics in the approach {that a} composer writes a traditional work for a conventional orchestra. Taking place on campus on October 8 between 2:30 and 4:30 p.m., friends could have the alternative to see the AlloSphere — a 30-foot-diameter, three-story-high steel cylinder inside an echo-free dice, designed for immersive/interactive scientific/creative investigation of multidimensional information units. In addition to creating this analysis program, Kuchera-Morin is famend as a pioneer in musically and visually immersive experiences, now most acknowledged in the applied sciences employed at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
Additional program highlights embrace a panel on The Human Element: Designing Empathy into the Machine Age, that includes Kevin Davis, Director of Amazon Alexa AI, and Forest Stearns, Artist in Residence at Google Quantum Lab (Oct. 7). There can also be a dialogue of Encoded Gazes: Women of Color on Bias, Power, and Possibility in AI, with Ana Briz, curator of the UCSB Art, Design & Architecture Museum; Haewon Jeong, assistant professor, Electric and Computer Engineering, UCSB; and artist Kira Xonorika (Guarani) (Oct. 8).
A Brief History of the Impossible is the title of a chat by James Glisson, chief curator of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, who will discover how historic artists anticipated AI in an insightful look at artwork historical past by the lens of up to date applied sciences (Oct. 8).
In addition, Sivia Perea, curator of UCSB’s AD&A Museum, will reasonable a dialogue of Architectures of Perception: Immersion, Intelligence & the Shape of Conscious Futures, a multidisciplinary panel that explores how architectures — digital, organic, cultural, and materials — form consciousness and notion. Participants embrace Markus Novak, director, UCSB Media Arts & Technology Program; Dr. Ken Kosik, Harriman Professor of Neuroscience & Co-Director, UCSB Neuroscience Research Institute; and artist and environmental materials researcher Minga Opazo (Oct. 9).
In addition to a lot of networking alternatives, informal receptions, and public artwork elements, there are additionally companion programming occasions happening in parallel with Brave New Work, together with an October 7 VADATalks presentation on Art x AI: Who Makes, Who Owns, Who Decides? On October 9, there’s a workshop known as AI Foundation: Tools for Image & Video Creation, which is a hands-on artistic lab the place individuals dive into the experimental artistic panorama of generative AI visuals. In addition, from October 2-12, there’s a particular exhibition at SBCAW known as Symbiosis or Schism, the AI-Human Odyssey, curated and arranged by the Brill Foundation.
Ultimately, says Delgado, “Brave New Work is an intimate forum. Lectures are capped at only 150-200 attendees. The value of this conference is precisely in its scale. It is a rare opportunity to see world leaders talk about their explorations at the intersection of art and science and to interact with passionate regional leaders focused on building a like-minded community.”
For extra data, the full schedule, and tickets for these occasions, see bravenewworksb.org.