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.
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
Office Hours: 1 hour following Tuesday class; otherwise, by appointment.
Week 1: Introduction and Critical Framework
Lecture: Introduction, Critical Framework, and Cultural Automation Pt. I
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Lecture: Introduction, Critical Framework, and Cultural Automation Pt. II
Thursday, April 3, 2025
Student Presentations / Group Crit
Tuesday, April 8, 2025
Homework presentations (See end of lecture slides from Thursday April 3)
Week 2: Introduction to Worldbuilding
Workshop
Thursday, April 10, 2025
Student Presentations / Group Crit
Tuesday, April 15, 2025
Week 3: Generative Text
Lecture + Lab: Generative Text
Thursday, April 17, 2025
Student Presentations / Group Crit
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
Week 4: Generative Workflows
Guest Lecture: fuser.studio
Thursday, April 24, 2025
Student Presentations / Group Crit
Tuesday, April 29, 2025
- ComfyUI
- Install
- Documentation
- civitai
- Models
- Tutorials
- Alternate means (hacky)
- fuser.studio Workshop by Hirad Sab and Dalena Tran
- Homework
- Work towards your final project experimenting with generative workflows with either comfyui or fuser.studio. This should be a self contained coherent presentation that ideally inches closer towards your final project. You should explain how generative workflows were used in the course of your presentation and ideally start to develop your final project more. Use this week as an opportunity to for instance, take your last week’s exercise in text generations closer towards a story board, or using the research capabilities of LLMs to refine and build out more of your story, or to develop assets that may be directly integrated or form the basis for what you will integrate into your final work. Try to think outside the box and experiment with the capabilities of how an AI-mediated canvas may afford different forms of ideation than a traditional canvas would afford. Utilize txt2img, img2img, upscaling, LLMs, and the various example workflows to experiment with turning your ideas/concepts into prototypes/outputs. Feel free to utilize fuser.studio as the presentation format or use any other form for presentation (e.g. slides, figma, etc…).
Week 5: Generative Images / Video
Lecture: Generative Images / Video (Guest: Ruipeng Wang)
Thursday, May 1, 2025
Student Presentations / Group Crit
Tuesday, May 6, 2025
- Generative Images Lecture slides
- Generative Video Lecture slides
- Generative Image/Video Lab slides
- Homework
- Work towards your final project experimenting with generative images and video with either comfyui or fuser.studio. This should be a self contained coherent presentation that ideally inches closer towards your final project. You should explain how generative images / videos were used in the course of your presentation and ideally start to develop your final project more. Use this week as an opportunity to take everything you’ve built so far and start to build more of the final assets / form of your final project, for instance building more detailed assets of a story board or to develop assets that may be directly integrated into your final work. Try to think outside the box and experiment with the capabilities of how controlnet, ipadapters, and various ways of experimenting with feedback or video process might help you to turn your ideas/concepts into prototypes/outputs. Feel free to combine comfyui outputs w/ fuser workflows or vice-versa, or layer / integrate traditional art workflows such as illustration, photoshop, photography, video, 3d, game engines, other design tools, etc… Also feel free to utilize fuser.studio as the presentation canvas, or use any other form for presentation (e.g. slides, figma, etc…) to present your work.
Week 6: Generative Agents
Lecture: Generative Agents
Thursday, May 8, 2025
Student Presentations / Group Crit
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
- Generative Agents Lecture
- Generative Agents Lab
- Homework
- Explore the usage and implementation of generative agents with cursor or a similar program (e.g. vs code w/ copilot, claude code, aider, etc…) taking any inspiration from today’s lectures for example outputs.
- If you are looking for inspiration:
- Try to think through what an extension of an idea from history would look like? Can you push the idea further as a result of the affordance of being able to program an idea with a co-pilot / agent helping you along the way?
- Think of how the ideas from Generative Text or Generative Images / Video may pair with this assignment. Could you for instance use the outputs of one with another? For instance build a 2D simulation that is then fed into another process like a control net or a style transfer? Or explore how feedback may help you explore a novel process? Or can you start with a historical example like Game of Life and turn it into another idea such as a 3D game or the depth map for another process that is then generated.
- Try thinking outside the box and experiment with processes that feel UNFAMILIAR. Get weird and experiment!
- Ideally whatever you produce will also help you towards your final project, and is a self-contained presentation format leading with the idea, execution, and final results. However, it is not required that the outputs of your exercise make it into your final project. This is just a suggestion to help you continue advnacing your final project into completion. Good luck!
Week 7: Advanced Generative Agents I
Lecture: Advanced Generative Agents I
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Student Presentations / Group Crit
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
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