Why Innovation Matters

– How people could change their behaviors interacting with AI technology, visual research and artistic practice

Yuling Chen

Research statement phd application

On a dressing table, a person or a woman might have found her research of people’s behavior odd and discomfiting. This is the scenery I imagined for my research, why innovation matters – how people could change their hehaviors interacting with AI technology, visual research and artistic practice, at PhD information at the university of Toronto. In 2018 I worked as a young canada worker at Inuit Art Foundation as the archival research officer of the summer. During my work, I completed various archival projects at the foundation, using and creating archival organization structures on Google drive. I made the hashtags, tags, and labels on the scanned photographs, publications and books at the organization, making them more accessible and easier to locate and find. Through this innovation, I have streamlined how people find, locate and use the information on the web. From my research I also understood how this could happen with advanced AI technology, visual research and artistic practices. My plan at the university of Toronto for the research would be investigating various information on the web and in different urban locations through digital technology, self-proposed projects and exhibitions plans written out as reports, papers and posters. 

One of my idea for my investigation and exploration would be designing a visual exhibition of how people interact with the images on the web, videos and digital media through participating in the exhibition using a joy stick to paint live on screens. I would then photograph their painted images, traces and patterns through photography and screenshots. I would then actively write about my research in my papers using graphs, images and texts. This research works directly engage with my professors at OCAD University, such as Bentley Jarvis, Simone Jones, and Kathy Kiloh, and the artist Isaac Julien’s works, using technology as the primary tools to explore how information works in terms of changing people’s behaviors and why innovation matters in these scenarios, updating on the constantly shifting and changing landscape of innovative technologies, writing about the elements such as algorithms, and how it changes over time to accommodate the users experience. 

My research would directly engage with indigenous thoughts, artworks and collections that I had learned since my time at the Inuit Art Foundation, for example the inuit artist, Kenojuak Ashevak, in Canada and in the world. Her thoughts and messages of perseverance in the face of hardship, to seek God, to search for lights in life have deep resonation in my own life, of which i search for faith, spiritual enlightenment and higher calling in transparency, illumination and enlightening methods of information excavation through interacting with AI, making art and looking at others’ artworks. The faculty of information at University of Toronto provides a resourceful facility for my research, facilitating the exchanges between art, humans and technology. I would like to propose three faculty members at the University of Toronto, Eric P.S. Baumer, Christoph Becker, and Denise Birkhofer, to be on my PhD committee. I have already made contact with them about my PhD research direction through emails. I have particularly invested in terms of reading about the professors’ works on feminist perspectives, compassionate sociocultural impacts of AI technology and building a sustainable future. I found their takes on technology and the resources at the faculty of information at the University of Toronto especially exhilarating in terms of directing my works towards the similar and the same techno-future narratives finding a common ground with people we interact with and who we normally don’t know or interact with much about the socioeconomic justice and future-oriented works. 

For instance, what particularly interested me was how AI technology was being used in finding a solution for Israel Palestine conflicts or international diplomacy between Israel and Canada¹. Israeli ambassador Iddo Moed is proposing to Canada that they could work together on AI in terms of making it a solution for safer bilateral relationships. This has inspired me to look into how AI could offer alternative solutions to how people interact with each other. I have shot several videos and did a large amounts of writings about how people’s behaviors have changed since 2011 or 2019 after Hong Kong protests which implemented heavily of social media which have always had AI augmented algorithms to control the platforms and contents on the platforms. These videos are stream of conscious narratives, urban environments and landscapes, combining with found images on the web after digital conversation with language model software such as chatgpt documenting how human behaviors change or shifted since a decade ago as the economy was integrated with AI by various government policies, corporate leadership and social economic movements. 

My research at the university of Toronto would be a fully planned out research in how people interacted with AI, visual research and art. It is inspired by my works in the professors Bentley Jarvis, Simone Jones, and Kathy Kiloh’s classes at OCAD University, working with technology to determine how human behaviors changed accordingly as I changed, edited and tweaked the works they interacted with. The course oral histories as memory work at the university of Toronto in the faculty of information would be an example course showing how I implement my studies at the university of Toronto to fit in my research. The indigenous traditions of oral histories would be a primary methodology in my research to lead investigations, explorations and creative practices in discovery of human behaviors and how it adapt itself to technological changes, to discover why innovation matters in this research, field studies and works.

Bibliography 

1 Robertson, Dylan, Israel pitches Canada high-tech trade and safer AI as diplomatic tensions persist, CityNews, July 26th 2026