UCI’s Beall Center is Turning Social Media and AI on Themselves

Roger Bloom
5 days ago
4 min read

The current exhibit uses the latest technology as both the medium and the message.

*AI personalities discuss the meaning of their AI lives in Sara Rothberg’s “Forever Meetings: Scrambled Zone” at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art + Technology. Photo by Roger Bloom, Culture OC*

“The medium is the message,” wrote Marshall McLuhan in 1964, arguing that our perceptions are shaped by how the information we receive is delivered and presented.

At UCI’s Beall Center for Art + Technology, the message is the medium. In “Disruptive Cultures: Affect and Effects of Social Media,” on view through June 27, creators use social media and AI to make art that examines and critiques social media and AI.

The exhibits are mostly engaging – clever and fun – but also, like all good art, they are pointed, poking at the tech behemoth and encouraging viewers to contemplate how we got here and, more importantly, where we are going.

In a symposium on the exhibit’s opening day, several of the artists talked about their pieces – their inspiration and what they are trying to convey to the viewer.

Ben Grosser amassed all of Mark Zuckerberg’s public appearances available on video from 2004 forward and extracted snippets of every time Zuckerberg said the word “more,” the word “growth,” or a metric such as “1 billion.”

“I wanted to take a step back and think about who engineers these platforms, what are the logics that are embedded within them, what do they want from us?” Grosser said during the symposium.

He ended up with a supercut approaching 50 minutes that at first seems simply repetitive but shortly becomes oddly mesmerizing (actually not unlike your Instagram or TikTok feeds).

Sara Rothberg said she has long been interested in human interaction and conversation, and has created works exploring the effect of technology on our conversations. Then in 2023, with the popular spread of generative AI chatbots, she commented, “My interest in conversation was disrupted by the sudden popularity of our friesnd ChatGPT …. I became super-interested in what does it mean to have this conversational partner?”

Several projects involving human-chatbox interactions led to the logical extreme: having different chat personalities talk to each other. So her installation at the Beall features different pairs of opposite personalities (like feminist/anti-feminist or selfish/selfless), visualized as ghostly animated avatars, discussing various questions. One pair endlessly discusses, “With all the trade-offs, is AI worth it as a technology?”

*Jennifer Gradecki and Derek Curry flank their “Generative Persuasion” project at UC Irvine’s Beall Center. Photo by Roger Bloom, Culture OC*

Jennifer Gradecki and Derek Curry created a mock trade-show exhibit for a media messaging company that allows visitors to define a demographic group by political leaning and personality type and then a topic, and use AI to generate “micro-targeted” disinformation.

Curry said that they used freely available AI models and “it doesn’t take a huge amount of technical knowledge to do this.” He recalled that shortly after they completed the first version of their project, “we were watching a webinar about how dangerous this could be because a state actor could do this easily for under $100,000 – and we basically did it for free.”

Kyle McDonald and Lauren Lee McCarthy started with the question, “What if I could change my inner dialogue?” McDonald said. Then they created an AI-based mechanism to do just that. The AI conducts an interview with you about your inner voice and what you might want to change about it. Then you don earphones and the AI provides a running commentary in your own voice in real time as you move through the exhibits and interact with others.

“I want to physicalize the sensation of confronting this media constantly on a daily basis,” said Casey Kauffman of her 25-screen installation, using devices both new and quaintly 2010-ish, each playing a loop of internet content. “The point is to have this somatic experience of being inundated with these videos and images that we’re constantly consuming and we have no control over .… We’re consuming things constantly and not thinking about the fact that we’re processing them, but we are. It’s getting into our mindsets. It’s changing and affecting how we act and who we are.”

*A young viewer takes in Casey Kauffmann’s installation in “Disruptive Cultures: Affect and Effects of Social Media” at UC Irvine’s Beall Center. Photo by Roger Bloom, Culture OC*

David Familian, the artistic director of the Beall and curator of “Disruptive Cultures,” said the current exhibit reflects his “obsession” with complexity and uncertainty. Complex systems, he explained, are those where every part affects every other part. Change in one area cascades to change others, which generates more changes across them all, and so on. In these systems, cause and effect quickly become difficult if not impossible to sort out, change is constant and the future is largely unpredictable.

Welcome to social media and AI.

“To me, complex systems are a paradigm shift that art has to represent, because it’s having the greatest impact on our lives in the 21st century,” Familian wrote in an article on the exhibit on the UCI website. “Social media platforms and AI are not just technologies — they are complex systems shaped by algorithms, user behavior, data flows and economic incentives. Everything we are trying to fix in society is part of a complex system, and if you don’t recognize that, the solutions tend to be too simplistic and can even make the problem worse. The artists in this exhibition engage those systems from different angles.”