Open Call for Lead Artist: Leonardo CripTech AI Lab 2025 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Open Call for Lead Artist: Leonardo CripTech AI Lab 2025

Dates or Deadline: 
8 October 2024 to 9 December 2024

A virtual creative incubator that utilizes community-driven digital and new media art projects to engage, critique and reimagine the relationship between disability and artificial intelligence. 

Leonardo CripTech Incubator is an art and technology program for disability innovation.  Encompassing labs, workshops, fellowships, presentations, publication, and education, this innovation incubator is a community platform for disabled artists to engage and remake creative technologies through the lens of accessibility. Employing a broad understanding of technologies, including prosthetic tools, neural networks, software, and the built environment, CripTech Incubator reimagines enshrined notions of how a body-mind can move, look, communicate.   

Leonardo is seeking a disabled artist to collaborate on leading CripTech AI Lab, one of three thematic foci for CripTech Incubator in 2025-26. The lab will recruit and engage a cohort of emerging disabled media artists to cultivate their practice using artificial intelligence as a creative tool. Grounded in creative access - the understanding and practice of access as a transformative medium - the lab will deploy Leonardo’s platforms for reach, recognition, amplification and dissemination. 

Lab activities will begin in May 2025 through October 2025, with precise dates and structure to be determined in collaboration with the lead artist and partners. 

The Challenge

The rapid development and integration of artificial intelligence into many technical, social, and cultural systems has exposed the technology’s intrinsic faultlines. Much deserved critique has highlighted how AI can reiterate existing race and gender biases; this lab will explore the logics of ableism that also underpin many AI frameworks. AI applications, even when designed to be assistive, can sometimes amplify culturally dominant standards of “normal” and “ability.” What new paradigms might emerge when disabled creatives contribute to the creation and applications of machine learning? Disabled artists working with AI can help chart a path for algorithmic futures where disabled people’s ways of knowing and being are valued. 


Invoking the approach of criptech – a practice by which disabled people and communities challenge or dismantle existing technologies and systems, as defined by Hamraie and Fritsch – this lab centers access as a creative practice for redesigning/remaking AI futures. 

Recognizing that disability exists across a spectrum and can be amplified by other forms of discrimination, this lab emphasizes intersectional approaches to using AI as a creative medium. We invite exploration of AI in more intimate settings, reimagining AI as a tool for interdependence, and for moving, thinking, and feeling through the world. We are also interested in ways that artists embrace inaccessibility as intrinsic features of AI systems, exploring them as opportunities for creativity and play in the spirit of disability innovation. 
 

The Lab Consists of Five Activity Phases:

  1. Artist Talk: a presentation by the lead artist introducing the participants and the public to their creative practice.
  2. Workshops: A workshop series led by the artist which leverages their specific areaof expertise and may also involve guest speakers, determined in collaboration with Leonardo. In parallel, the topic of disability and AI is explored through frameworks of the arts, the sciences, and community engagement. 
  3. Project Development: Participants prototype artworks that apply workshop skills, as well as creative access (captioning, description, etc) for these works. They will develop documentation of their process in an appropriate medium.  With the support of a curator/lead artist, participants develop artist statements about these works. 
  4. Panel Review and Virtual Exhibition: the lab culminates in a public panel review wherein experts provide feedback on participant project prototypes. Projects are revealed to a wider public audience at a virtual exhibition opening. 
  5. Print Publication: Outcomes published in Leonardo journal (MIT Press).

Eligibility

  • Mid-career or established artists working with new media and/or digital art, with particular expertise or experimentation in artificial intelligence. Experience with artificial intelligence may include machine learning, building datasets and training archives, model tuning, computational linguistics, natural language processing, LLM, genAI. Familiarity with tools such as Tensorflow, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, ChatGPT, RunwayML, etc is also welcome.  
  • Experience with teaching, facilitation, group collaboration, and/or social practice.

Who We’re Looking For

The ideal candidate will be disabled and/or deeply rooted in disabled community. Leonardo is seeking innovative digital and new media artists who have demonstrated the qualities below:

  • Collaborative Leadership: Experience facilitating dialogue and leading diverse groups towards collective goals through teaching, workshops, social practice, artistic collaboration, or other outreach activities. Willingness to collaborate with Leonardo stakeholders to develop syllabi sensitive to the ethical and historical dimensions of AI 
  • Cultural Sensitivity & Adaptability: Cultural competency with disabled communities, intersectional, racial justice cultural competency, and/or ethics of AI.
  • Strong Project Management & Communication Skills: Artists are independent self-starters, familiar with virtual collaboration tools, and responsive to the needs of multiple stakeholders.
  • Artistic Excellence: A strong record of artistic accomplishments that demonstrate innovative use of digital and new media.
  •  Creative Access: Expertise/experience and engagement with accessibility in artistic and creative contexts. 
  • Social Engagement: Artist has shown a commitment to their communities and have a practice that has addressed social challenges.

Budget

The lead artist will receive a USD $10,000 fee for preparation, facilitation, and reporting, plus an
assigned budget for lab production costs. The final production budget amount is determined
during the project proposal phase and requires Leonardo approval.

Diversity

Leonardo is committed to diversity and encourages applications from BIPOC, women, the
LGBTQIA+ community, and persons with disabilities, as well as applications from researchers
and practitioners from across the spectrum of new media disciplines and methods.

Application Process

You will submit your application on the linked portal, including upload of the following in a single document (doc/docx/pdf) Feel free to use our premade template to assist in your application: 

  1. Answers to the following questions, please keep responses around 150-250 words each:
    1. What specifically is compelling you to apply for this opportunity?
    2. List the primary media and material(s) used in your work. For example: code art, virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing, robotics, wearables microcontrollers, video, audio, etc
    3. Describe your experience and creative practice with artificial intelligence.
    4. Briefly describe how you might approach facilitating a virtual new media art/AI workshop including online activities and a group investigation of the issue. Are there any online communication or collaboration platforms you would utilize?
    5. Describe your experience with disability and/or accessibility in artistic/creative contexts. How would you bring this experience to bear on this opportunity?
    6. What do you hope to learn or collaborate on through this process?
    7. Up to 3 work samples either as links or uploads (No more than 5 minutes per sample)
    8. Three References (Name, Title, Organization, Affiliation, Email, Phone Number) 

We will also be asking for contact details, a short bio, website, field of study, and social media. This information will be kept internal unless you wish to be included into the Leonardo member directory.

In place of a written document, applicants also have the option of submitting an audio or video response to the questions above and submitting links to work samples separately. Please keep the total time 15 minutes or under and ensure your submission is accessible via a shareable link set to public or viewable to anyone with the link (YouTube, Vimeo, Google Drive, DropBox, etc.).

 

APPLY NOW

Application Deadline: 9 December 2024 AOE (Anywhere on Earth)
 

If you would like to discuss your ideas about this opportunity, sign up for office hours here. If you have access questions or need assistance please contact criptech@leonardo.info.

CripTech AI Lab is a Leonardo Lab supported by the Ford Foundation. 
 

About Leonardo

Fearlessly pioneering since 1968, Leonardo serves as THE community forging a transdisciplinary network to convene, research, collaborate, and disseminate best practices at the nexus of arts, science and technology worldwide. Leonardo’ serves a network of transdisciplinary scholars, artists, scientists, technologists and thinkers, who experiment with cutting-edge, new approaches, practices, systems and solutions to tackle the most complex challenges facing humanity today.

As a not-for-profit 501(c)3 enterprising think tank, Leonardo offers a global platform for creative exploration and collaboration reaching tens of thousands of people across 135 countries. Our flagship publication, Leonardo, the world’s leading scholarly journal on transdisciplinary art, anchors a robust publishing partnership with MIT Press; our partnership with ASU infuses educational innovation with digital art and media for lifelong learning; our creative programs span thought-provoking events, exhibits, residencies and fellowships, scholarship and social enterprise ventures.
 

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