Recently, CMA Assistant Professor Varvara Guljajeva published two research papers at ARTECH'21. ARTECH is the 10th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts, hosted in the city of Aveiro, Portugal. ARTECH is a prestigious conference that hosts cutting-edge research in the intersection of art and technology. It promotes interest in the current digital culture. Varvara's two research projects presented at ARTECH'21 studied the impact of AI on arts.

The title of the full paper accepted by ARTECH'21 is "Synthetic Books". In this paper, Varvara raised a critical question about how we shall evaluate the artistic quality of AI-generated content. She studied the recent artworks that used natural language processing (NLP) models as materials to design interactive arts. These interactive arts, though used NLP models that were programmed without any art purpose, were able to engage humans in dialogues, reflections, and compositions. She called people's attention to this emerging situation since humans and AIs will further collaborate in synthesising such publications. She proposed categorising the AI-generated or AI-aided publications as synthetic books.

Varvara also co-authored a short paper titled "The Beautiful Encounters" with Mar Canet Sola from Tallinn University and Alvaro Cassinelli from the City University of Hong Kong. This is an art project that resonates with the surrealist painter Rene Magritte’s work and aims to introduce an interactive scenario as a case study that applies AI technology. The article’s focus lies on the research process exploring methods to integrate the real-time image of the sky into an interactive artwork. The technical part explains how multiple technologies, like face tracking, its alignment, the AI model of face-parsing, shaders, and web technologies, are combined in the project. In the end, the paper discusses the importance of contextualizing AI-related artworks in relation to art history.

Accepted Papers List:

  1. Varvara, Guljajeva. 2021. Synthetic Books. In 10th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts (ARTECH 2021), October 13–15, 2021, Aveiro, Portugal, Portugal. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3483529.3483663 Pre-print version: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zu188x8nua2cjdf/syntheticBooks_VarvaraGuljajeva_self-archived.pdf?dl=0
  2. Mar Canet Sola, Varvara Guljajeva and Alvaro Cassinelli. 2021. The Beautiful Encounters. In 10th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts (ARTECH 2021), October 13-15, 2021, Aveiro, Portugal, Portugal. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3483529.3483744 Pre-print version: https://www.dropbox.com/s/56jggit89zv3wzv/artech2021-100_preprint.pdf?dl=0