Arlington Community Education

Learn about paper-cut art and how this bold, intricate technique is used in the work of illustrator, graphic designer, professor—and ACE cover artist—Peter O Zierlein. “I draw with a knife,” he says about his technique of cutting organic, round, angular, and sharp forms into folded paper that he uses as a starting point for illustration, graphic design, pattern design, stencil design, and installations. Peter will discuss the broad history and the practice of paper-cut art; its use in cultural and religious contexts; and myriad ways he uses the medium to create fine art prints, posters, patterns for wallpaper and textiles, murals, sculptures, plywood boats, and more. His client list includes The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian; German publications Berliner Zeitung, Stern, and Spiegel; and other national and international newspapers and magazines.

The arrival of ChatGPT and other large language models have kicked off a new era. Computer programs can now reason, solve problems, and do creative work just as well as (or even better than) human beings. We will examine the design of these new kinds of artificial intelligence (AI), with a special view to their place in the story of science. Early scientists envisioned a “view from nowhere”—an objective, mathematical view of the world free of subjective biases. This way of doing science produced the modern world and all of its technology. But GPT technologies are solving the general AI problem by moving away from this view from nowhere concept and making computer programs more like minds—predictive, dynamic models of particular environments. Science seems to be making a circle, back to a view from “somewhere.” Combining lectures and discussion, we’ll draw on both the humanities and science to shed light on the meaning of this new development for our daily lives and the world at large.