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Exhibition and Displays Schedule

Current Exhibitions

Fall 2024

Envisioning a Sustainable Future with AI and Art

What world do you want to live in? To respond to the challenges of our time—climate change, ecological collapse, and social conflicts over limited resources—we must be able to envision a new future. The solutions to these challenges are connected and involve everyone. They require imagination, creativity, resolve, and persistence. 

While the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is connected to these global challenges, it also has enormous potential to transform the way we think about these global problems and the way we teach, especially the way we teach abstract concepts and ideas in science. Generative AI has the potential to trigger imagination in developing solutions to these societal challenges. 

The triptychs in this display contain AI images generated with prompts designed by students in the Global Change and Paleoclimatology courses at UNCO in Spring 2024. These triptychs show us the world as we see it today (or Earth as it has been in the past), a future we don't want (tomorrow), and a future that we can build if we want (a better tomorrow). 

Use the images to spark your own vision of the world you want to live in. What does that world look like? 

This display is free and open to the public now during open library hours in the Mari Michener Gallery.

Fall 2024

Promising Future, Complex Past: Artificial Intelligence and the Legacy of Physiognomy

Promising Future, Complex Past: Artificial Intelligence and the Legacy of Physiognomy, a traveling exhibit created by the National Library of Medicine, presents the history of physiognomy – the practice of assessing one’s mental character based on physical attributes – and explores its influence on the contemporary artificial intelligence and computer science technologies that gather and interpret bodily data. Now debunked as pseudoscience, physiognomy enjoyed periods of legitimacy and popularity over a history spanning millennia, influencing the fields of medicine, biology, philosophy, anthropology, psychiatry, and criminology. After serving as a tool for scientific racism and eugenics, physiognomy was roundly discredited in the 20th century. 

We’ve rejected the harmful aspects of physiognomy, but efforts to gain information from human physical characteristics continue with today’s technologies, which have the potential to make the world safer, improve health, and affect how we get information. 

This exhibit is free and open to the public and Spanish translation is available. 

We'll be displaying this traveling exhibition developed by the National Library of Medicine from November 12-December 20, 2024 during open hours in the Mari Michener Gallery. 

Promising Future, Complex Past: Artificial Intelligence and the Legacy of Physiognomy

The National Library of Medicine produced this exhibition and companion website.

Upcoming Exhibitions

Spring 2025

The Mari Michener Gallery is accepting entries for the upcoming exhibition, Worldbuilding: The Art of Speculative Imagination, scheduled for the Spring 2025 semester.

The exhibition seeks to highlight the creative works of UNC students, faculty, and staff as they imagine what a different world (or a different version of our own world) could be. All submissions should adhere in some way to the exhibition theme.

Stay tuned for more!

Have ideas or suggestions for future exhibits? You can submit them via our form here.