Lia Coleman (they/them) is a Chinese-American artist making art for their ancestors. Coleman’s artwork often straddles the line between the handmade and the digital.
Through handmade embroidery and gestural drawing, Coleman uses repetitive movement as a means of ritual. Like a séance, their creative process attempts to connect with ancestral knowledge held within the body.
In a similar manner, Coleman repurposes digital technologies like ML and neural networks to serve their personal creative process. They find a strange comfort in the manual labor of assembling and cleaning digital datasets of thousands of images. In this process of collecting and cleaning data, Coleman attempts to record and archive the past– a process which is inherently never complete. They embrace the unpredictability of neural networks as a reflection of their own experience grappling with the elusive nature of ancestry and the past.
Currently Lia works at Modyfi and co-organizes the NeurIPS Creative AI Track (formerly the NeurIPS Workshop on Machine Learning in Creativity and Design). In the recent past, Lia has researched creative AI at Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) Robotics Institute, taught MFA-level courses in ML art at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and worked for organizations such as RunwayML, the Partnership on AI, Meta, and Tesla. Lia is an alum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, BSc Computer Science) and the School For Poetic Computation.
Their artwork has been shown internationally in Dubai (Foundry Downtown), Germany (Gallery Obrist Essen), Malta (Spazju Kreattiv), Saudi Arabia (Islamic Arts Biennale), Canada (NeurIPS AI Art Gallery), and the United States (Feral File, Science Gallery Detroit). Their work has been featured by Vox, Wired, Tribeca Film Festival, Mozilla Festival, New York University, the NeurIPS Conference, and Gray Area. Their writing on AI art has been published by Princeton Architectural Press, the journal DISEÑA, and Neocha Magazine.
