I write about AI, authorship, cognitive sovereignty, and embodied creativity across essays, lectures, and research contexts.
CURRENT WRITING (SUBSTACK)
Everyone Wants AI Skills. We Need Digital Literacy First.
published in Creative AI Unfiltered, 7 Mar 2026An essay examining how the current push for AI skills often overlooks a deeper problem: the missing layer of digital literacy needed to actually understand and use these systems.
-> Read on Substack
The (Hidden) Cost of Creative AI
published in Creative AI Unfiltered, 29 Aug 2025Read “The (Hidden) Cost of Creative AI”, where I unpack the emotional, economic, and cognitive pressures behind working with generative tools — and reflect on how speed, automation, and constant output can quietly erode creative agency if we don’t design our workflows consciously.
-> Read on Substack
OLDER ESSAYS
Unveiling the Process: Designing the AI Awards 2024 with AI
published on Medium, 3 Dec 2024Essay documenting the design process behind the AI Awards 2024 trophies — six physical objects built from plexiglass blocks, pairing tactile materiality with generative illusion: holographic surfaces simulating embossed metal, cut-out foil letters casting real shadows that interact with AI-generated ones. Walks through the iterative dialogue with MidJourney that shaped the aesthetic direction, and describes using ChatGPT to distill award-committee evaluations into keywords before individualizing each trophy to its specific winner. Reflects on the limits of natural language as an interface for creative collaboration with AI, and argues for maintaining creative integrity and authorship even while delegating parts of the process to generative tools.
-> Read on Medium
AI Interpretation: Real-Time Visual Feedback of Group Discussions
published on Medium, 18 May 2024Documents a workshop intervention run secretly during sharing circles: a 360° microphone fed participants' own spoken reflections into a live text-to-image pipeline, projected on the wall in real time as they spoke. The moment participants noticed their words were being visualized and interpreted without their consent became the pedagogical core — surfacing, viscerally, how generative models default to stereotype and how exposing about it feels to be misread by a machine in front of a group. Delivered at AFO (Academia Film Olomouc, using DALL-E 3) and FUK Festival, Prague.
-> Read on Medium
Orchestrating Pixels: How AI Art Direction is Redefining Creative Industry
published on Medium, 12 Nov 2023Essay documenting the process of art-directing the AI Awards 2023 visuals — six images, each translating a laureate's specific achievement into generative imagery, set into an existing frame format. Argues that the real craft of working with AI image tools isn't in the click of a button but in the orchestration beforehand: a literal prompt describing an achievement produces generic, unusable results, while finding the right visual metaphor — in this case, a Baroque-and-Rococo-inflected language of gold filigree and floral excess, reframed through a contemporary generative lens — is what makes the image actually work. Frames the AI art director's role as translation, not generation: bridging the gap between a brief and an image AI alone cannot bridge.
-> Read on Medium
TroublingGAN: Creating Knowledge through the Alternative Use of Neural Networks in Artistic Research
published in AIxDESIGN (Medium), 15 June 2022Read my essay “TroublingGAN” on Medium, where I reflect on training a custom GAN on images of “troubling times” and explore how generative AI can be used as an artistic research tool to question how images shape what we see, feel, and believe.
-> Read on Medium
Bob Ross Lives! - Workshop on the Creative Potential of GANs
published in Coded Bodies, edited by Margarita Osipian. Amsterdam: Hackers & Designers, 2020Book chapter documenting a workshop I co-facilitated at Hackers & Designers Summer Academy 2019, exploring the creative and ethical potential of GANs at a moment when AI-generated media tools were just becoming accessible without coding skills. Participants prototyped speculative use cases — both beneficial and malicious — for synthetic media, using early tools like RunwayML. The workshop became the origin point for Strange Attractions and later evolved into Collective Vision of Synthetic Reality, my speculative-design methodology for crowd-sourcing visions of AI-generated futures.
-> Read on Hackers & Designers
Collective Vision of Synthetic Reality
published on Medium, 7 June 2020Methodology writeup for Collective Vision of Synthetic Reality, the participatory workshop project I created to crowd-source public visions — hopes, fears, and speculative scenarios — for the emerging world of AI-generated synthetic media. Workshop participants use a custom-designed deck of educational cards covering accessible AI models to brainstorm and prototype speculative future use-cases, which are then mapped on a scale from utopian to dystopian impact. The project premiered at Ctrlz.AI Zine Fair in Barcelona (January 2020), as an off-site event alongside the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT).
-> Read on Medium
A Future Scenario for Deepfakes: Personalized Synthetic Advertising
published in The Hmm Dossier On Deepfakes, 29 May 2020Essay commissioned by The Hmm, a Dutch platform for internet culture, for their themed dossier on deepfakes. Moving past the celebrity face-swap panic dominating public discourse, the piece speculates on a near-future where personalized synthetic advertising — deepfaked ads featuring people you actually know, generated from data already being collected — becomes a mainstream marketing reality. The essay walks a lay audience through the underlying technology in accessible terms, grounding the speculation in genuine technical understanding.
-> Read on THE HMM
Using Runway ML to Create Black Metal Visuals
published on Medium, riginally written July 2019, published September 24, 2020Early experiment chaining two neural network models — DeepLab for semantic segmentation, SPADE for image synthesis — to transform nature footage into visuals echoing the stark, high-contrast aesthetic of Norwegian black metal album art. Written from years of designing visuals for musicians by hand, the piece questions whether faking analog grain and scratches digitally is dishonest craft, and finds in generative AI a different kind of authenticity: not imitation of the old technique, but a genuinely new way of arriving at a related aesthetic. One of the earliest documented examples of treating a generative pipeline as a creative material rather than a shortcut.
-> Read on Medium
ACADEMIC ARTICLES
Reimagining Human-AI Co-Creation Through Tactile Exploration
published in Tangible Territory, TT Journal, ISSUE 6, September 2023
Article documenting a collaborative research workshop I designed and ran with 12 interdisciplinary artists and researchers, exploring participatory, embodied approaches to human-AI co-creation. The workshop opened with a collective physical exercise using clay, deliberately grounding discussions of AI in bodily, tactile experience rather than abstract or purely conceptual terms — pushing back against the tendency to separate mind from body when thinking about creative collaboration with AI. Originated at FAMU as part of a Ministry of Education-funded research project on participatory approaches to synthetic media.
-> Read on Tangible Territory
TroublingGAN: Generated Visual Ambiguity as a Speculative Alternative to Photojournalism
published in Journal for Artistic Research, 31 (2023)Artistic research I led, using a customised StyleGAN model deliberately trained on a heterogeneous dataset to expose it to failure rather than optimize for clean output. I treated the resulting unexpected moments as the actual subject of inquiry — asking what kind of knowledge a generative network produces, and whether failure itself can be a tool for artistic research. The project takes "troubling times" (the theme of Uroboros Festival 2021, which I co-founded) as its observed object, using StyleGAN as a pattern-recognition tool to develop an intuitive understanding of the rapid social, ecological, and political instability of the present moment.
-> Read on JAR
Rising Together: Fostering New Sensitivities towards AI
Published in Shape of Future Earth, 72-87. Bratislava: Academy of Fine Arts and Design Bratislava. (ISBN 978-80-8189-072-7) Essay opening with an original guided meditation I wrote — a tactile encounter with a ball of clay, imagined as contact with an alien intelligence — used to ground an argument about AI's disembodiment. Drawing on research into algorithmic bias and discriminatory training data, I argue that AI's "objectivity" is a myth, and that its lack of embodied, sensory grounding is precisely what limits genuine creative partnership with it. The piece critiques the spectacle of one-click AI generation tools eroding artistic agency, and proposes embodied, sensory communication — modeled on the way a baker works with a sourdough starter — as a better foundation for human-AI co-creation than language alone.
-> read the whole publication (PDF)
How Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) Changed the Way We Look at the World Or the Necessity of Visual Scepticism in the Post-Truth Era.
Published in Data and Art 2019 Conference Proceedings, 117–43. Brno: Brno University of Technology Faculty of Fine Arts. Conference paper examining how GANs erode the reliability of images as evidence of reality, and what that means for public trust in visual media. I argue that meeting this shift with blanket fear or fascination misses the point — what's needed instead is broad public familiarity with how these tools actually work, so people can develop genuine critical judgment rather than either naive trust or reflexive distrust of synthetic images.
-> read in conference proceedings (PDF)