Name: Presentation - A Critical Look at AI use in the Arts with Jess MacCormack
Start: 2026-01-15T18:00:00-06:00
Location: RPL Film Theatre

Presentation - A Critical Look at AI use in the Arts with Jess MacCormack

Join multimedia artist Jess MacCormack for a presentation on AI’s use in the arts. Jess will take a critical look at why and how AI is being used by artists, its addictive nature in combination with social media, and how it is being developed without ethical reflection and subsequently propelled by capitalism and greed.
About the artist:
They/Them
Jess MacCormack is a queer, mad artist , activist and white settler working on the unceded ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.
Their art practice engages with the intersection of institutional violence and the socio-political reality of personal trauma. Working with communities and individuals affected by stigma and oppression, they use cultural platforms and distribution networks to facilitate collaborations which position art as a tool to engender personal and political agency. Working in various mediums – graphic novels, digital art, performance, installation, video and community art – their work explores queer politics, embodiment and criminalization.
Jess Mac’s digital art has been shared through various online platforms, such as Artforum International, Hyperallergic, Canadian Art, VICE Creator’s project, White Hot Contemporary Art, Bitch Magazine, PAPER Magazine and Art F City. Their animations have been screened internationally at festivals such as the Ottawa International Animation Festival, MIX-26 the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival, Transcreen Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival, LA Film Fest at UCLA, Inside Out, Imaginative Film Festival and International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA). MacCormack’s interdisciplinary practice has been supported and exhibited by the Academie der Künste der Welte (Cologne, Germany), arbyte (London, UK), articule (Montréal, Canada), Western Front (Vancouver, Canada) and many other local and international galleries.
They have an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University (2008) and were an Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at Concordia University (2010-2013). Jess is currently an instructor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design and is working towards their PhD in Contemporary Art at Simon Fraser University.