Hours:  
Please note that the PAC Gallery will be closed Monday Oct 20 and Tuesday Oct 21 for Fall Break 2025
Monday - 10am-5pm, Tuesday - 10am-5pm, Wednesday - 10am-5pm, Thursday - 10am-7pm, Friday - 10am-5pm   
Closed: Monday, September 1 (Labor Day), 2025

Parking:
Guests and visitors may utilize the pay-to-park areas marked in green on the campus maps. Please use LOT H2 on the Allendale campus, across the street from the Haas Center for Performing Arts. When parking in pay-to-park, we highly recommend using ParkMobile. ADA parking is available in the KC LOT.  Large groups, please get in touch with the gallery for parking passes.

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.

Augmented Reality

Explore the layering of stories with the use of augmented reality throughout the exhibition.

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, 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.

Art at your fingertips

Explore the entire GVSU art collection with the free "Art at GVSU" mobile app. Discover over 28,000 works of art, take virtual tours, engage with AR overlays, and learn about the artists who created them.

Location

August 25 - November 7, 2025

PAC Gallery (PAC 1121)
Haas Center for Performing Arts, Allendale Campus
1 Campus Dr.
Allendale, MI 49401

Contact

For special accommodation, please call:
(616) 331-3638

For exhibition details and media inquiries, please email:
Joel Zwart, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections
[email protected]

For learning and engagement opportunities, please email:
Jessica Sundstrom, Learning and Outreach Manager
[email protected]