Wrestling AI from the Inside with Artist Karin Fyhrie
About the Presentation
Artist and creative director Karin Fyhrie began experimenting with generative AI four years ago out of fear—for her industry, for the value of creative work, and for the shifting boundary between human and machine. She remains wary. She has also, reluctantly, begun to suspect that AI may be the creative medium she’s been waiting for.
This talk asks a question often buried beneath promises of speed and efficiency: What can AI make possible that no other medium can? Generative systems can produce enormous variation, but they do not move evenly through possibility. They pull toward familiar images, meanings, and associations.
Drawing on her video series Dream Logic, work from a recent Google Flow Sessions residency, and durational, free-associative experiments, Karin shares how she has learned to redirect those tendencies through dissonance, incompatible inputs, semantic corruption, and sabotage of model defaults.
The talk does not resolve her ambivalence. It opens a working conversation about what it means to use a probability machine in search of something genuinely unexpected. Join us.
About Karin
Karin Fyhrie is an artist and creative director interested in the tension between creative freedom and the systems that make it possible. She runs Sovereign Objects, a seasonal brand lab, and advises companies as a fractional design leader alongside her independent art practice.
Her career has resisted easy categorization, moving between brand, innovation, entertainment, emerging technology, new ventures, and artistic experiments spanning generative media and scent creation. Her design career has included roles at IDEO, Google Creative Lab, Netflix, Imaginary Forces, and COLLINS. At COLLINS, she served as Managing Partner of the San Francisco studio during the agency’s three-year run as Ad Age’s Design Agency of the Year, leading rebrands for Robinhood, Dropbox, and the San Francisco Symphony. Her work has been recognized by D&AD, The One Club, Fast Company, Communication Arts, the Emmy Awards, and others.
Her independent practice extends that inquiry through experiments in emerging media. Working with virtual reality, immersive storytelling, and generative AI, she explores how technology is changing the conditions under which creative work is made, experienced, and valued. She has received a Stanford Media Experiments grant; participated in artist programs with Google’s Flow Sessions and OpenAI’s Sora; and recently co-created Dream Logic, a series examining how the possibilities of creativity are changing.
About Futurespaces
Founded and led by Josh Goldblum (Bluecadet) Futurespaces offers live webinars and in-person tours that provide valuable insights into the creative process of creating contemporary experiences.