The Object, Reimagined

The first student exhibition from ART 209 | Creative Systems in Practice is now up on campus and open for viewing.

The project is called "The Object, Reimagined," and the premise is straightforward. Students chose an everyday physical object and used AI image generation to explore what happens to that object's meaning when authorship is shared with a machine. The goal was never to improve the object or make it look better. It was to ask a more interesting question: what does this thing become when the student is no longer the only one making decisions about it?

The posters on the wall are only half the story. The real work is the process behind them. Students generated between 15 and 25 variations, working through movement and concept-based prompting rather than mimicking the style of known artists, and documented every decision along the way in Figma. That process documentation was the core of the assessment, not the final images. Each poster includes a QR code that takes you directly into each student's Figma workspace, where you can follow the full arc of their thinking from first prompt to final selection. That is where the learning actually happened, and it is worth scanning.

This project is the foundation for where the course goes next. Project 2 builds on this and will feed into Project 3. The arc is intentional: what feels like open-ended experimentation in Project 1 will become a set of transferable skills by the end of the semester.