Art, algorithms and imagining alternative futures with Sophia Brueckner

Sophia Brueckner’s path to becoming an artist, technologist and professor has been anything but linear.

An associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, Brueckner has long pushed against the boundaries of art and technology, and uses her work to show that algorithms and creativity can coexist.

“I always wanted to go to art school, but I was also really good at math, science and technology,” she says. “For some reason, the world treats those things as completely separate, which is so frustrating. To me, using math and technology for creative expression makes total sense, but the world isn’t structured that way.”

This is why, she says, her journey took so many zigzags. From completing an undergraduate degree in applied mathematics and computer science, to working as a software engineer at Google, to returning to graduate school for an MFA at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and a master’s degree at the MIT Media Lab, Brueckner has woven together art, science, and critique in every stage of her career.

“I wanted to be the person shaping the future of technology, not just responding to someone else’s vision,” she says.

At the age of 21, Brueckner became one of the most prolific iGoogle app developers in the world with millions of users of her apps. But the experience of seeing her design choices impact people’s lives at scale, sometimes in ways that left users feeling betrayed or violated, sparked deeper questions.

“That was a major turning point for me,” she says. “It made me think deeply about the impact of my work.”

Her graduate work at RISD and MIT built on those questions, exploring how interfaces shape our behavior and how artists can propose alternative ways to live with technology.

“We are all, in a sense, cyborgs,” she says. “I started wondering: knowing that repeated interactions with interfaces shape us, could we do more than just avoid harm? Could we instead design them to shape us in more positive ways?”

That thinking led her to U-M in 2015, where she teaches courses on science fiction prototyping, critical technology studies and digital fabrication. In each of her classes, she challenges students from all disciplines to expand their ideas about both technology and art.

 “I’ve found that people really struggle to imagine different futures,” she says. “The tech industry is presenting us with a vision for a very particular kind of future, and it can be hard for people to imagine anything else. My work is about expanding those possibilities and helping people see that other kinds of futures are possible.”

Brueckner’s fascination with science fiction has become a central thread of her teaching and practice. As a graduate student, she created her now-renowned course on science fiction prototyping, which encourages students to think like authors by taking current trends and envisioning the ethical consequences of designing at scale. 

For Brueckner, bridging art and engineering is essential to that work. She sees strength in what each discipline brings, and insists that the future depends on this dialogue.

 “Artists’ superpower is critique,” she says. “Engineers often don’t get trained to critically evaluate what they’re building. At MIT, I’d see these dystopian projects and think, ‘Don’t you realize how evil this is?’ But everyone would just say, ‘That’s awesome!’ Artists, on the other hand, sometimes criticize everything without proposing alternatives. We need both. We need to both critique and be hopeful.”

This interest in alternative social and technological models inspired Brueckner’s Empathy Box Project, based on the divide described in Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By reimagining Dick’s fictional empathy technology as a tangible artwork, she invites people to experience what connection through technology could feel like if it’s designed around sharing experiences without the use of broadcasting. 

Brueckner also collaborates with colleagues across Stamps and UMSI through the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing. A current project she is excited about includes Bowerbot, which uses AI to emulate the elaborate aesthetic displays of bowerbirds as a way to rethink creativity beyond humans and machines. The project is inspired by bowerbirds, a species known for creating elaborate, aesthetic structures decorated with colorful objects to attract mates. 

By trying to use AI to emulate the bowerbird’s behavior, she hopes to open up a broader conversation about nonhuman creativity—and what it means to automate artistic expression.

“I’m not just thinking about whether machines can make art, but about nonhuman creativity in general,” she says. “Bowerbirds are the most artistic animals, according to many scientists. They build these elaborate, beautiful compositions of colorful objects. Their arrangements aren’t about collecting the most of something or being the fastest or strongest. They are artistic displays to attract mates.”

This project connects directly to Brueckner’s broader vision of AI and art, and her interest in AI’s future in relation to people and animals.

“I think AI is going to be a tool, like a paintbrush or a camera,” she says. “It’ll become a craft that people have to learn to use expressively. Just like how having a great camera doesn’t make you a great photographer, using AI won’t automatically make you a great artist. It might make it easier to be a mediocre artist, but truly good art that is original, skillful and impactful can’t be so easily replaced.”

Looking ahead, Brueckner is designing a new course on AI for the art school, one she hopes to co-teach with the engineering faculty. Whether building new tools, creating art, or guiding students, Brueckner sees her work as an invitation to expand what technology can be.

“I especially love helping students take a creative idea and figure out how to make it real,” she says.

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Learn more about UMSI associate professor and Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design professor Sophia Brueckner by visiting her faculty profile or her personal website.