The Georgia Tech Library and Interdisciplinary Media Arts Center presented Media Arts Day 2025 on Thursday, Jan. 23. The event consisted of various activities that took place in different locations throughout the library. Co-sponsored by the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, organizers intended to celebrate new and unique ways of creating art that intersects with technology.
Preparing for the Media Arts Day event is a complex process. Charlie Bennett, Public Engagement Librarian and originator of the event, explained that his work concentrates on ways to communicate research or rarified information across disciplinary lines and outside the Institute.
Bennet initially put out a call for proposals for the first panel of the event. Both Dr. Sophie Landrieux Kartochian and Jelani Liddell responded to the institute-wide proposal. Seeing that both of the initial cold proposals were about AI, Bennett felt it was fitting to reach out to Emily Weigel, who had been involved with Bennett’s radio show, Lost in the Stacks, before. With the addition of Weigel, they decided to focus on the pattern of AI throughout media arts.
“We are trying to de-silo Georgia Tech. We want people to be able to collaborate and communicate their work to their colleagues, who maybe have not had as much experience with this discourse,” Bennet said.
The challenge for Media Arts Day 2025 was finding people within media arts and picking a topic that intersected with all of their specialties, which turned out to be AI as a tool in ongoing practices. Fred Rasco, Lost in the Stacks co-host, served as moderator with Bennett for the first event of the day, the Creative and Academic Engagement with AI Tools panel.
“AI is the spice that is the same in each of these dishes but with different ingredients,” Bennett noted after seeing how people were using AI in their fields. “I was very pleased to be able to gather some of my colleagues and some people that had interesting work and just let them do their thing.”
After the panel, Alison Valk demonstrated how her team leveraged virtual reality (VR) goggles to create a virtual reality archive for a Vertically Integrated Project (VIP), that she worked on.
Later that afternoon, the “Lost in the Stacks Interview: How To Trick Your Algorithm” program featured a live podcast recording for the Lost in the Stacks podcast, where Bennett interviewed Professor Christina Shivers about her current research project, “How To Trick Your Algorithm.”
On the podcast, Bennett inquired about the potential of AI in terms of development within architecture and the process of utilizing it creatively. In the end, there was an opportunity for viewers to ask questions about Shivers’s work.
The last event of the day featured Jason Wright, who demonstrated the uses of the new Interactive Media Zone in the library located on the bottom floor of Price Gilbert next to Blue Donkey. This zone allows users to interact with the screen and experience video in novel ways.
Bennett brought up the idea for this event about two semesters ago to the Event Coordinator team, which included Nathan Dodson, event coordinator at the library, who played a key role in the planning and execution of Media Arts Day. He explained that planning must be done as far in advance as possible to avoid any potential obstacles.
“When they [the library] want to do big events like this, they basically need to get started two semesters in advance, based on the availability of the panelists they want to have, availability of the rooms they want to reserve, and people’s calendars. Really, the main obstacle is getting it all planned far enough in advance to accommodate for any last-minute hiccups and make sure we are not planning it at the last second,” said Dodson.
Despite the detailed planning, the week’s inclement weather was an unfortunate obstacle. Bennett said he knows from the success of last year’s event that there was a dip in attendance this year.
Nonetheless, Media Arts Day 2025 was a success. The variety of AI-focused events allowed attendees to have a unique experience.