Parag Kumar Mital

UCLA 2025

Course Description

This course explores the past, present, and future of how artists engage with digital media through its remix and adaptation of increasingly more automated algorithms.

Starting from early collage and montage practices, we’ll explore how artists have used cultural fragments as their medium to explore meaning through juxtaposition, appropriation, and détournement. We will then turn towards how computational methods enabled artists to explore such practices in increasingly surprisingly fidelity and magnitudes of data, leading to new aesthetics but also new questions surrounding its process and the underlying data. Finally we’ll speculate on the future of culture and machine learning in order to ask “Where is it all going?”. 

Throughout, we will also extend the discussion into topics such as perception, augmentation, deep fakes, surveillance, privacy, automation, shifting labor markets, and ethical and legal considerations in order to provide a framework for how to engage with the machine learning tools we will be learning to use. 

The course will aim to balance theory, background, computational practice, and peer discussion and will shift focus between visual media, text media, audio media, and simulated / procedural environments.

Previous Course

Please see here for the course materials for the course Cultural Automation with Machine Learning taught in 2023 at UCLA DMA.

Download Course Syllabus

Course Syllabus + Updated Course Schedule

Week	Dates	Class Topic	Guest
1	Tues, April 1, 2025	Lecture: Introduction, Critical Framework, and Cultural Automation Pt. I
	Thurs, April 3, 2025	Lecture: Introduction, Critical Framework, and Cultural Automation Pt. II
	Tues, April 8, 2025	Lab: Student topic/reading presentations
2	Thurs, April 10, 2025	Guest workshop:  Introduction to Worldbuilding	Breanna Browning
	Tues, April 15, 2025	Lab: Student research/concept presentations
3	Thurs, April 17, 2025	Lecture: Generative Text
	Tues, April 22, 2025	Lab: Group crit	Yasaman Sheri
4	Thurs, April 24, 2025	Lecture: Generative Workflows	Hirad and Dalena
	Tues, April 29, 2025	Lab: Group crit	TBD
5	Thurs, May 1, 2025	Lecture: Generative Images / Video
	Tues, May 6, 2025	Lab: Group crit	Peter Wu+
6	Thurs, May 8, 2025	Lecture: Generative Agents
	Tues, May 13, 2025	Lab: Group crit	Isabel Beavers
7	Thurs, May 15, 2025	Lecture: Generative Audio
	Tues, May 20, 2025	Lab: Group crit	Krishna Jhaveri
8	Thurs, May 22, 2025	Lecture: Advanced Generative Agents
	Tues, May 27, 2025	Project Day (work session)
9	Thurs, May 29, 2025	Final Project Presentations	TBD
	Tues, June 3, 2025	No class / exam week
10	Thurs, June 5, 2025	No class / exam week

Contacts

Instructor: Parag K. Mital

TA: Chelly Jin

Studio Manager: Breanna Browning

Office Hours: 1 hour following Tuesday class; otherwise, by appointment.

Discord: https://discord.gg/qWc8RdqN

Week 1: Introduction and Critical Framework

Week 2: Introduction to Worldbuilding

Week 3: Generative Text

Week 4: Generative Workflows

Week 5: Generative Images / Video

Week 6: Generative Audio

Week 7: Advanced Generative Agents I

Week 8: Advanced Generative Agents II

Lecture: Advanced Generative Agents II

Thursday, May 22, 2025

Project Day (work session)

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

Week 9: Final Project Due / Project Presentations

Thursday, May 29, 2025