Speculative Realities: Art, Pattern, and Future Imagination in Research and Pedagogy
Abstract
This presentation examines speculative AI media research as a mode of artistic practice, critical pedagogy, and cultural inquiry through selected faculty and student projects at Winona State University. Bringing together experimental visual communication, speculative design, and exhibition-based pedagogy, it argues that art can function not only as representation, but as a method for modeling possible worlds, interrogating technological systems, and making visible alternative structures of thought, place, and futurity. The first project, Personal Taxonomies, investigates whether recurrent visual and conceptual structures emerge when large bodies of a neurodiverse artist’s work are examined synoptically and analyzed through Generative Adversarial Networks. Rather than treating individual works as discrete artifacts, the project reads an oeuvre as an accumulative field in which persistent patterns, symbolic recurrences, and formal tendencies become legible. In this sense, creating a cognitive taxonomy serves as both an interpretive method and speculative framework, proposing pattern recognition across artistic production as a way to understand artistic cognition, self-organization, and the emergence of meaning. The second project, ReVisioning Winona, extends speculative inquiry into a civic framework by projecting Winona into the year 2075 for an exhibition at the Winona County Historical Society. Drawing on design fiction and future-oriented visualization, the project asks how artistic research using AI can help communities imagine environmental, architectural, technological, and social transformation at a regional scale. The presentation concludes with Postcards from the Future, a 50th Anniversary SIGGRAPH conference exhibition developed in partnership with Bowling Green State University and featuring AI-based projects by Winona State University visual communication students. Together, these projects position speculative realities as a vital methodological framework for contemporary art, interdisciplinary teaching, and future-oriented cultural research.
College
College of Liberal Arts
Department
Communication Studies
Location
Kryzsko, Solarium, Winona State University, Winona, Minnesota; United States
Start Date
4-23-2026 9:00 AM
End Date
4-23-2026 12:00 PM
Presentation Type
Event
Speculative Realities: Art, Pattern, and Future Imagination in Research and Pedagogy
Kryzsko, Solarium, Winona State University, Winona, Minnesota; United States
This presentation examines speculative AI media research as a mode of artistic practice, critical pedagogy, and cultural inquiry through selected faculty and student projects at Winona State University. Bringing together experimental visual communication, speculative design, and exhibition-based pedagogy, it argues that art can function not only as representation, but as a method for modeling possible worlds, interrogating technological systems, and making visible alternative structures of thought, place, and futurity. The first project, Personal Taxonomies, investigates whether recurrent visual and conceptual structures emerge when large bodies of a neurodiverse artist’s work are examined synoptically and analyzed through Generative Adversarial Networks. Rather than treating individual works as discrete artifacts, the project reads an oeuvre as an accumulative field in which persistent patterns, symbolic recurrences, and formal tendencies become legible. In this sense, creating a cognitive taxonomy serves as both an interpretive method and speculative framework, proposing pattern recognition across artistic production as a way to understand artistic cognition, self-organization, and the emergence of meaning. The second project, ReVisioning Winona, extends speculative inquiry into a civic framework by projecting Winona into the year 2075 for an exhibition at the Winona County Historical Society. Drawing on design fiction and future-oriented visualization, the project asks how artistic research using AI can help communities imagine environmental, architectural, technological, and social transformation at a regional scale. The presentation concludes with Postcards from the Future, a 50th Anniversary SIGGRAPH conference exhibition developed in partnership with Bowling Green State University and featuring AI-based projects by Winona State University visual communication students. Together, these projects position speculative realities as a vital methodological framework for contemporary art, interdisciplinary teaching, and future-oriented cultural research.
