The exam for this course is a portfolio, and each student delivers it as an exposition on the Research Catalogue. The Research Catalogue is an open, non-commercial platform for artistic research run by the Society for Artistic Research. An exposition is its name for a page that holds work and the thinking around it in one place: media, text, and the links between them. The portfolio is due in the exam period and graded A to F.
An exposition suits this course because it keeps the work and the reflection side by side. A reader can play the sound, scroll the image series, or open the interactive piece, and read in the next column what you asked for, what you got, and what you changed. That is the same argument your prompt log has been making all semester, now made in public.
Compulsory assignments¶
Four assignments are compulsory, each assessed pass or fail. A1, an AI-augmented self-introduction, is due in week 2, and A2, a text in your own discipline, in week 5. The ethics essay is set in week 3 and due in week 7, and A3, a multimodal mini-piece, is due in week 8. A failed assignment can be revised once. All four must be approved before you can sit the exam.
The assignments are not finished when they are approved. Each one comes back as part of the portfolio, revised in the light of the feedback you received, so keep the feedback with the assignment.
What goes in the portfolio¶
The portfolio holds five things:
- The four assignments, A1, A2, the ethics essay, and A3, each revised after feedback, with a short note on what you changed and why.
- The final piece, made in weeks 9 to 12, as the centrepiece of the portfolio. Embed the media directly, so that a reader meets the work before reading about it. A live piece, such as a performance or a reading, becomes a recording. An interactive piece is embedded or linked so that a reader can use it. A printed or 3D-printed object is documented with photographs or a short video.
- The critical reflection, 1 500 to 2 000 words, covering the whole portfolio, written as a text section of the exposition. It answers the two questions of the course: where the AI surprised you, and where you exerted your own creative will. Point at a specific moment in a specific artefact.
- Provenance: every tool and model with its version or the date you used it, the human edits, and the consent you obtained for any voice, face, or likeness.
- The full prompt log, linked or attached. It grows out of the weekly practice log you have been keeping all semester, and it documents how the work in the portfolio was made.
The exposition outline lists the sections in order, with what each should contain. Start from it, then shape the page to the work.
What a final piece can look like¶
Anything that meaningfully uses Creative AI for a creative purpose:
- a short story or chapter, set as text with a recorded reading,
- a poster series, laid out as it would hang on a wall,
- a 30 to 90 second short film,
- a song or short EP, with the stems a reader can play one at a time,
- a small interactive web piece a reader can use,
- a game prototype a reader can play,
- a podcast episode,
- a redesign of a real organisation’s brand, walked through step by step,
- a curated exhibition of generated work,
- a critical essay that uses AI as a tool for the work and as its object of study,
- a teaching resource, documented in use with a volunteer.
The final piece should be ambitious enough to be hard, and small enough to finish.
Working in a group¶
You can make the final piece alone or in a group of up to three. Grades are individual, so each student hands in their own portfolio, their own reflection, and their own prompt log, even when the final piece is shared. Name each person’s contribution to any group work, in the portfolio and in the reflection.
Technical requirements¶
- The final piece must use at least two different data types, for example text and image, image and video, audio and code, or 3D and text. This is the technical bar of the course.
- All prompts, generations, and decisions must be logged and handed in with the portfolio.
- The portfolio and the reflection must explicitly acknowledge which AI tools were used, with versions or dates.
Accounts and timing¶
Anyone can register for a basic account on the Research Catalogue at no cost. A basic account can read and comment on expositions, but it cannot create one. To create an exposition you need a full account, which is also free, but which requires sending a proof of identity to the Research Catalogue’s support team. The Research Catalogue guide describes the steps. The upgrade takes time, so register and request the upgrade by week 9 at the latest, when you start planning the final piece. UiO is not a portal partner of the Research Catalogue, so the request goes through the platform’s own support rather than through the university.
[Recommendation: have the data protection officer check whether students can be required to send identity documents to the Research Catalogue, and offer a fallback, the same exposition built as a PDF or a static web page submitted in Canvas.]
What you hand in¶
Keep the exposition unpublished while you work on it, and share it with the examiners rather than publishing it. Then hand in four things in Canvas:
- the URL to the exposition,
- a PDF copy of the exposition, made with your browser’s print function on the day you hand in,
- the critical reflection,
- your full prompt log.
The PDF is the version that is assessed, because an exposition can still be edited after the deadline. The URL is there so that the examiners can play the media the PDF cannot hold. Before you hand in, open the URL in a private browser window and check that every video, sound, and embedded piece plays. The exam is in English.
[Recommendation: assess the PDF copy handed in at the deadline and use the URL for media. Confirm with the study administration how an exam with an external link is delivered in Inspera or Canvas.]
The proposal for the final piece in week 10 and the peer review in week 12 are the two checkpoints on the way there. Neither is graded, and both exist to give you feedback while there is still time to use it.
What “good” looks like¶
Examples of the kind of final piece that works well:
- A 40-second music video for an original song the student wrote, generated stems with re-recorded vocals on top and a hand-edited storyboard. The exposition puts the video first, then the stems and the storyboard frames beside the prompts that produced them. The reflection compared early Bob Dylan music videos with the new affordances of cheap motion.
- A redesign of the visual identity for a Norwegian charity, moodboards and vector marks generated and then rebuilt by hand into a system. The exposition walks the reader through every prompt and editorial decision, with each rejected mark kept beside the one that replaced it.
- A short interactive piece in p5.js where the reader types a memory and a generated soundscape plays back, embedded so that it runs inside the exposition. The reflection focused on what the AI got wrong, and why those errors became part of the piece.
- A recorded dialogue between two synthetic voices arguing opposite sides of the student’s ethics essay, scripted by the maker, with the transcript running beside the audio. The reflection asked what a synthesised voice does to an argument a listener is being asked to trust.
- A small web piece in which a reader types a sentence and watches a tokeniser split it, embedded with a table of Norwegian and English examples beside it. The reflection compared the piece with the explanations of language models it was built to replace.
What makes these strong is not the polish but the fit between brief, tool, and reflection. A modest piece with a clear, honest brief beats a flashy piece with no spine. The same holds for the portfolio as a whole: a reader should be able to follow a line from the first assignment to the final piece.
Process memo, once more with feeling¶
Your reflection must answer the two questions this course has used all semester:
- Where did the AI surprise you?
- Where did you exert your own creative will?
These are the first things a reader of your exposition will look for, so put the answers where they can be found.
After the grade: keep, delete, or publish¶
What happens to the exposition after grading is your choice, and it does not affect your grade. You can keep it private, delete it, or self-publish it on the Research Catalogue. Publishing is permanent: a published exposition cannot be unpublished, and it receives a DOI, a persistent identifier that lets others cite it. If you publish, choose a Creative Commons licence, with CC BY 4.0 as the default unless you have a reason to choose otherwise. If the final piece was made in a group, agree with the others before you publish it.
If your work includes a voice, a face, or a likeness belonging to someone else, their consent must cover publication as well. A person who agreed to appear in a coursework exercise has not thereby agreed to appear in a permanent public publication. Ask again if the scope changes.
Archive¶
Published expositions from past cohorts are listed below, with their makers’ consent.