Human Creativity in an AI World: Practice, Process and Play

Human Creativity in an AI World
Practice, Process and Play

This symposium explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping creative practice across the arts, writing, and education. Bringing together artists, researchers, and educators, the session examines how AI is being used not only as a tool for generation, but as a catalyst for new creative processes, collaborations, and ways of thinking about authorship and creativity. From experimental artistic workflows to new approaches to curriculum design, the speakers reflect on how creative practitioners and educators are responding to, and shaping the evolving relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence.

Key Note: Eldad Tsabary: AI as a Mirror of Human Creativity and Social Behaviour

Speakers

Chris Rees: AI Hallucination as Method in Writing Non‑Normative Industrial Gothic

Tenille McDermott: Coding a Co-Writer: Creating and Collaborating with a Bespoke Language Model

Irene Lemon: The CWA Cyborg

Speaker Biographies

Eldad Tsabary

Dr. Eldad Tsabary is a Professor of Music and Electroacoustics at Concordia University, formerly Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia, and Chair of the Music Department. Eldad is internationally recognized for his leadership in research-creation, collaborative performance, and experimental pedagogy. He is the founder of the Concordia Laptop Orchestra (CLOrk) and leads multiple SSHRC-funded initiatives, including the Reflective Iterative Scenario Enactments (RISE) project, which explores the enactment of crises through the operatic medium as a future-oriented scenario research. Building on decades of creative inquiry, Dr. Tsabary’s current research program, "The AI Mirror," employs a methodology of "discovery-by-synthesis"—building and testing novel AI platforms to investigate human cognition, sociality, and creative agency. By utilizing generative AI as a diagnostic instrument, his work seeks to rigorously define the irreducible qualities of biological presence and reclaim user agency in an era of commercial algorithmic curation. Beyond his research and institutional leadership, Dr. Tsabary has been a guiding voice in global academic discourse, serving as the Conference Chair for the International Conference on Arts and Humanities (ICOAH) for the past 11 years.

Christopher Rees

Christopher Rees holds a Master of Arts in Writing and is a PhD candidate at the University of New England (UNE). Chris's PhD project explores how AI-generated image hallucinations can be used ekphrastically within the creative process of writing disability-centred Gothic fiction. His research and creative practice focus on disability, illness, mimesis, the Gothic, and spatial environments. He has been published in Mascara Literary Review.

Tenille McDermott

Tenille McDermott is a PhD candidate in creative writing at James Cook University. Her practice-led research explores the intersections between time, narrative, and machine-generated text. She is the managing editor of Sūdō Journal and her creative work has been published in Griffith Review Online, Meniscus and Jacaranda Journal.

Irene Lemon

Irene Lemon is a creative practitioner and researcher exploring the intersections of performance, technology, and social imagination. Her work engages with theatre-making, artificial intelligence, and feminist storytelling to interrogate the roles of voice, agency, and embodiment in digital spaces. Through projects like The CWA Cyborg, Irene experiments with hybrid forms that invite audiences to question how technologies both constrain and expand our collective futures.

Image: produced by Chris Rees in collaboration with Midjourney