IN SESSION: AI — creative tool or existential threat?

Jessica Helfand is an artist, designer, and writer. She grew up in Paris and New York City, and received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale University where she taught for more than two decades. A founding editor of Design Observer, she is the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism including Design: The Invention of Desire (Yale University Press, 2016), Face: A Visual History (MITPress, 2019) and Self Reliance : Twelve Essays (Thames&Hudson, 2921). The first-ever recipient, in 2010, of the Henry Wolf Residency at the American Academy in Rome, Jessica Helfand has been a Director’s Guest at Civitella Ranieri, a fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Artist in Residence at Caltech.

Michael Horsham, is an RCA alumnus who has spent the last few decades working as part of the renowned Tomato collective, and as an independent thinker/maker and doer. Michael’s work has spanned commercial art, installations, advertising, branding and naming, as well as music and writing. Michael has always written, the latest iteration is Hello Human (Thames and Hudson 2022) an exploration of the history of visual communication with special reference to the coming influence of machines and machine learning.