On Seeing | AI and Creativity – Rashed Haq, Diana Nicholette Jeon and Hayley Lohn

We are excited for our next panel conversation between photographers showcasing the wide range of creativity on a single idea or series. Our online program On Seeing is a monthly conversation bringing together members of the Griffin community to share their work, ideas and creativity with a broader audience. We are thrilled to bring together these artists who have unique perspectives on creativity and the world they inhabit.

Join us online on Thursday February 16th at 7pm Eastern / 4pm Pacific / 2pm Hawaiian time. 

This event is FREE to Griffin Museum members. $10 for Non Members. Interested in Membership and its benefits? See more about what the Griffin offers here.

This month we are pleased to bring together three artists Rashed Haq, Diana Nicholette Jeon and Hayley Lohn, exploring how AI and algorithm disruptions enhance and spark creativity.

Rashed Haq – Human Trials

© Rashed Haq, from series Human Trials

We live in a world of ubiquitous networked communication and generate a tremendous amount of data as many of our interactions are digitized from shopping and entertainment to socializing and medical diagnosis. Algorithms sift this data to make sense of who we are, and assign to us a gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, education level, class, marital status, status as parent, reliability as an employee, citizenship, locations frequented, entertainment preference, shopping preference, and depending on who is doing the assignment, identification as a terrorist. The invisible algorithmic categorization is used to shape our lives, often without us knowing. These can come in the form of what we can easily see or buy through personalization or recommendation engines, or they come in the form of decision engines such as whether we should be called for the job interview, or if we should be fired for low productivity, or whether our mortgage loan application will be approved. Often the underlying data and the algorithm are generating distorted views of their subjects – because the data and the algorithm can be incomplete, inaccurate or biased. In this project I visualize this distortion based on possible portraits of people who do not exist, created using artificial intelligence that is retrained on a set of my photographs produced in the studio using light painting.

Diana Nicholette Jeon – Unleashed

© Diana Nicholette Jeon, from series Unleashed

Diana Nicholette Jeon brings a sense of her personal history and experimental processes to her lens-based art. She uses beauty as a conceit to engage viewers with challenging subject matter. Jeon believes media has mana and often uses it to underscore the conceptual underpinning of a series. Her current work in process, The River, explores issues of copyright and authorship via the use of AI and was named a Finalist in the 2022 Lens Culture Black ands White Awards and Photolucida’s Critical Mass.

Jeon’s work has been exhibited worldwide in Solo and Group exhibitions; recent venues include Honolulu Museum of Art, Blue Sky Gallery, Hawaii State Art Museum, and the Exposure, Capture, and Head On Photo Festivals. Awards include multiple Hawaii State Art Collection Purchase Awards, the Julia Margaret Cameron Award, and the 2022 and 2020 LensCulture B+W Award. Gente di Fotografia, B+W Magazine, SHOTS, Pf, Don't Take Pictures, and Lenscratch are among the media outlets that featured her work.

Jeon holds an MFA in Imaging and Digital Art from UMBC. She lives and works in Honolulu, HI.

Hayley Lohn – Insider Trading in Congress, 2022

© Hayley Lohn, from series Insider Trading in Congress

Hayley Lohn was born in Vancouver, Canada. She is currently based in Vancouver. She has a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Psychology from the University of Western Ontario and graduated from the International Center of Photography’s Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism program in 2021. Her work explores topics around technology, the natural world, and psychology.

Her work has been printed in Elle Canada and Findrangers, and seen in Lenscratch, New York Magazine, Fotodemic, The Fever Club, Cortex Creatives and in 2019 she won first place in Enroute Magazine’s “Canada Views” contest. Her work has been exhibited at the Photo Fringe 2020 festival and the International Center of Photography. In 2021 she was a finalist for the Lucie Foundation’s “The Portrait Project” competition and the Lucie Foundation gallery sells copies of this work. In 2021, she was accepted into the Eddie Adams workshop class of XXXIV. In 2022 she received a scholarship to attend Review Sante Fe. In 2023, she will be exhibiting two solo exhibitions for her project Digital Skins. One at Vancouver’s Capture photography festival in April, and the other in NYC at the United Nations in November.