Apply to the 2025 AI, Code & Art Summer Institute!

AI, Code, & Art Summer Institute is a pre-college program exploring the social impacts and possibilities of making with software. Led by software artists Lauren Lee McCarthy and Casey Reas, Social Software is housed with the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA, one of the nation’s top art and tech departments offering a comprehensive, multidisciplinary education in media creation, which fosters individual exploration and innovative thinking.

This institute explores questions such as:

• What is the potential of software within the visual arts?

• How has software affected the visual arts?

• As a designer or artist, why would I want (or need) to write software?

• What are the power relationships, inequities, and biases embedded within software and technology?

The institute is taught by professionally trained instructors using the most current software and technology. The institute culminates in a final exhibition and the creation of portfolio-ready work that students may include in their college applications in related fields.

Students in the 2024 cohort of the AI & Art class explored themes of digital identity, nostalgia, and the impact of technology on culture. Projects examined AI’s role in personal expression, storytelling, and creative production, using AI language models, generative images, video, and music synthesis. From reflecting on social media’s ties to loneliness to reimagining fashion cycles and machine sentience, students engaged AI as both a medium and a subject, questioning its influence on human experience and artistic practice.

See a selection of student work from the 2024 AI & Art Summer Institute: