Exhibit - Stories Reimagined: Artistic Narrative in the Digital Age
Jonathan Thunder, Head in the Clouds, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 2021, 2025.25.1a.
Stories Reimagined
Artists often play the role of storyteller. They have been the illustrators of important social, cultural, and religious narratives that have been passed down over generations. Artist have also used storytelling as a tool to share and interpret their own lived experiences with others and advocate for social change. Today, when digital tools present new ways to create and mediate our narrative experiences, Stories Reimagined brings together artists working in this genre alongside technological applications and collaborators.
We are in an era where technology is rapidly evolving, enabling us to create artwork enhanced by digital tools, produce new works born in a digital space, and work alongside AI (Artificial Intelligence) to generate novel conceptual constructs. The results can be engaging and eye-opening, as many of the works in this exhibition illustrate. These works draw together threads of memory, imagination, myth, social action, and creative expression. Many are further enhanced and their narratives layered with audio, video, text, and digital animation.
With each of these approaches come risks and challenges, as artists, colleagues, and viewers must learn to operate new technologies and consider the ethics of their use. And yet, the work in this exhibition reveals the amazing potential to reimagine storytelling through the intersection of art and technology.
Layering Technology Over Artwork
Advances in technology, such as AR (Augmented Reality), allow artists and collaborators to create enhanced storytelling experiences. These enhancements can be audio, video, text, and animation that are digitally layered over objects in the real world without modifying or changing the existing works of art or exhibition space. This layering expands the narrative opportunities, as symbolic objects or locations can be identified, animated movement can suggest direction, and the spoken word of key subjects can narrate the story. AR encourages active learning and longer engagement with artworks and narratives, but its use must be balanced with content that is relevant and authentic.
Explore the layering of stories with the use of augmented reality throughout the exhibition.
Jose Guadalupe Posada, Calavera de Don Quijote (Skull of Don Quixote), restrike print, 2004, 2005.00159.1
Animation by Joseph Van Harken.
Primary Prompt: Animate the items as if they are weightless, perpetually suspended in the chaotic scene - the central figure riding and secondary figures flying and running.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) Assisted Artwork
AI (Artificial Intelligence) has simultaneously opened new possibilities for artists while generating ethical challenges that must be addressed. Increasingly, it is becoming easier for anyone to work with AI to create images, especially in the digital image world. One simply inputs text prompts into an AI image generator, and an image is produced. However, this must be balanced against the reality that AI continues to be trained on many images for which artists have not consented or been compensated for. Additionally, training and use of AI consume enormous amounts of energy that are not evident to the user. How do we balance an amazing creative opportunity with ethical behavior and potential environmental consequences?
Corey Anton, Robot Artist #7, digital print on Baryta, 2023, 2024.5.1.
Corey Anton, professor of Communication Studies at Grand Valley State University, published "A. EYE CANDY: A Museum of Imaginary Robots and Other Digital Delights." The digital images that comprise the book were generated by using some of the early AI image-making programs.
AI Tools Used: Stable Diffusion 2.1, Clip Interrogator
Prompt POSITIVE: One weird robot that is creating an insanely surrealist painting atop a wooden easel while standing on a glass table, ultra-photorealistic robot, weird mixed-media, deviant art, anthropomorphic animal, realistic robot character design, extremely surreal, extremely photorealistic, mixed-media award-winner, surreal character design, super photorealistic, alloy, crisp image, super ultra-photorealistic, facing you
Prompt NEGATIVE: cartoon, comic, sketch, drawing
Advanced Settings, Guidance Scale, 9 to 5.
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Exhibition Resources
This exhibit is no longer on display.
Haas Center for Performing Arts Gallery (PAC 1121), Valley Campus
August 25 - November 7, 2025