Art, Consciousness, & AI
FALL 2025
This exciting hybrid course blends art, science, and technology to explore the mysteries of the human mind and its relationship with machines. Together, we will investigate how art reflects our understanding of consciousness, how AI is learning to mimic human thought, and what it means to create in a digital age. You’ll write, discuss, and create projects that explore these connections between your own consciousness and the fast-evolving world around you. Along the way, we’ll tackle challenging ethical questions about AI, creativity, and the future of human-machine collaboration.
Our journey begins by thinking about thinking. O_o o_O o_o O_O How we know the world around us, how we know ourselves, how we think, how we feel, how we connect with each other, and how we connect with the anthropocene… more than mere musings, topics such as these will pique our curiosities, inspire rich debates, and fuel our own creative expressions. From early cave paintings to modern integral installments, art and artifacts throughout time will help us access and appreciate how consciousness has both changed and shaped our way of being and relating. And we will explore local museums, scour the digital web, and interact with AIs to construct new understandings together. At different times, your journey will include reading texts, reflecting on concepts, discussing in peer groups, composing short papers, and creating shared projects.
This course is your chance to think deeply, create boldly, and imagine the future of thought, art, and intelligence, both for humans and machines!
And because of the nature of the course, being present both digitally and physically is critically important. But the work also has some flexibility. You will be expected to attend one weekly virtual class via Zoom for short presentations, questions, discussions, guest speakers, etc. And you will be expected to attend most if not all of our in-person meetings, which will include visiting local museums, exploring technology spaces, and presenting projects. The asynchronous work is highly flexible, with some constraints on cadence. Weekly, you’ll be asked to participate asynchronously in virtual discussions and connect in small groups, but the time, format, and means are (mostly) up to you and your peers.
Synchronous meeting requirements:
- Weekly virtual classes: to be scheduled on a weekday evening.
- In-person/F2Fs: there will be 3-5 sessions scheduled mostly on Saturdays/Sundays/weekends from late morning to early afternoon at locations such as the MoMA, the de Young, the Legion of Honor, and Hacker Dojo.
Introductory experience with programming is suggested, but not required.
Pending UC Approval: Interdisciplinary 
About the Instructor
Bryan Jennewein – Head-Royce School
Bryan Jennewein, or “Dr. Bry” as he prefers to be called, is a Computer Science and English teacher at Head-Royce School. For more than twenty years, he worked in industry for a variety of technology companies and start-ups, including Salesforce and Splunk/Cisco.
Throughout these career years, he has taught a variety of classes at the graduate, undergraduate, and high school levels, and in 2024 made the transition to teaching high school full time. He earned his undergraduate degree in English from Stetson University, and his master’s degree in English from Creighton University with a focus on the intersection of composition pedagogy and digital technologies. He earned his Ph.D. in Transformative Studies with an endorsement in Consciousness Studies from the California Institute for Integral Studies, where he designed a transdisciplinary approach toward appreciative methodologies that beget cultural flourishing for technology companies.
As an educator, Dr. Bry remains both a transdisciplinarian and a social constructivist, believing that great meaning and movements await those that would thoughtfully deconstruct the strictly disciplinary to instead fashion entirely new ways of knowing, being, and believing.
Dr. Bry currently lives in Oakland with his best friend, two cats, an air fryer, and a Disney+ account.