The Synthetic Gallery is where the semester projects are performed and installed. It is a public mini-exhibition, open to other UiO students, staff, and invited guests, held during the exam period. It lives both physically, in a UiO common space, and online, as a static gallery on the course’s GitHub Pages site. Selected projects, with the makers’ consent, are kept in the public gallery for future cohorts to see.
The semester project is the exam for this course. It is graded A to F, and everything else in the course is an obligatory activity that must be approved before you can present here.
Performance or installation¶
Every project is shown in one of two ways, and you choose which in your proposal in week 10.
A performance happens in a slot, with you present and an audience watching. Examples are a live set, a reading of an AI-assisted text, a screening with a live element such as narration or a played soundtrack, or a demonstration of an instrument you built. A talk-through of a series with the work projected behind you counts too. You get five minutes, then five minutes of questions.
An installation stands on its own for the length of the event, and the panel and the audience come to you. Examples are a piece the visitor walks through or interacts with, a screen or a projection running on a loop, or a small exhibition of a printed series with you standing beside it. A web piece on a laptop with a visitor at the keyboard counts too. You are present at your installation, and the panel spends about ten minutes with you when they visit.
Nothing is ruled out by this. A written project becomes a reading or a printed exhibition; a screen-based project becomes a screening or a looping installation. The point is that the work meets an audience in a room rather than arriving as a file.
What a project can look like¶
Anything that meaningfully uses Creative AI for a creative purpose:
- a short story or chapter, read aloud or printed and exhibited,
- a poster series on the wall,
- a 30 to 90 second short film, screened,
- a song or short EP, played live or on a listening station,
- a small interactive web piece a visitor can use,
- a game prototype a visitor can play,
- a podcast episode, with a live introduction,
- a redesign of a real organisation’s brand, walked through,
- a curated exhibition of generated work,
- a critical essay that uses AI as a tool for the work and as its object of study, presented as a reading,
- a teaching resource, demonstrated with a volunteer from the audience.
Solo or in groups of two to three. In a group, the reflection names what each person contributed. The project should be ambitious enough to be hard, and small enough to finish.
Technical requirements¶
- The work 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 submitted with the work.
- The work and reflection must explicitly acknowledge which AI tools were used, with versions or dates.
What you must deliver¶
- The work, performed or installed. A performance gets a five-minute slot with five minutes of questions. An installation stands for the length of the event and is visited by the panel, with you beside it.
- A reflection of 1 000 to 1 500 words covering:
- The brief and the audience.
- The tools used, with versions.
- A timeline of decisions, including the moments where the AI surprised you and the moments where you exerted your will.
- One ethical question you ran into and how you resolved it.
- What you would do differently.
- A gallery page for the public online gallery, using the gallery page template, with your format, your technical needs, and consent options for inclusion in future cohorts’ material.
- Your full prompt log (the file you have been keeping all semester). It is part of the submission rather than an optional extra.
The reflection and the gallery page are due as you show the work, in the exam period. Your proposal in week 10 and your rehearsal in week 12 are the two checkpoints on the way there.
What “good” looks like¶
Examples of strong projects from prior offerings:
- 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, screened with a live introduction and the song played through the room. 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, installed as a printed wall with the maker walking visitors through every prompt and editorial decision.
- A short interactive piece in p5.js where the visitor types a memory and a generated soundscape plays back, installed on a laptop with headphones for the length of the event. 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 and presented as a reading with the transcript printed beside it. 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 visitor types a sentence and watches a tokeniser split it, installed on a laptop with a printed sheet 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 projects strong is not the polish but the fit between brief, tool, and reflection. A modest project with a clear, honest brief beats a flashy project with no spine.
Process memo, once more with feeling¶
When you submit, 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 will be the first things the audience at the Synthetic Gallery asks you, so be ready.
Archive¶
Pages from past cohorts appear below with their makers’ consent.