Liz Flyntz

I'm a designer, writer, and curator. I work mostly in collective practice with other people, and I often use archival material to think through complex systems or to design for speculative futures.

I'm the principal of Program, a design practice I founded in Baltimore in 2023. Most of my current work there is agentic AI product design — object models, trust and transparency architecture, and the question of how a product should behave when what's using it is another AI system. Program also works in information architecture, moving image, exhibition and installation design, recently including film titles for an experimental documentary and a gif series for a professional astrologer and witch.

I teach in two programs at Johns Hopkins University. In Film & Media Studies, Video +/- Art is a survey with a production component. The course is built on the case that video developed on a separate track from film, with different economics and different politics. We discuss the ways early video runs directly to the surveillance infrastructure and social platforms we live inside now. My new course Networked Art looks at how artists have adapted their distribution and market approach as each new technology arrived. In the Program in Visual Arts, I teach UX Design Fundamentals, where we look at design ethics, history, and grid systems as well as software.

I'm a co-founder of the Ant Farm Antioch Art Building Creative Preservation Initiative, or AFAAB — with Catalina Alvarez and Tim Noble — which works on the preservation of the Ant Farm and SouthCoast-designed art building at Antioch College. We are sometimes called the punk preservationists. We reconstructed the threatened building in VR, and held virtual events inside it throughout the pandemic. We also successfully nominated the building for listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.

To guide my own collaborative practice (and simultaneously inspired by media theorist Paul Ryan and my work designing digital products as part of a team) I developed a methodology for collaborative work I call The Collaboration Agreement. I hope others might find this helpful in their own collectives and creative engagements.

My current research is on archives and generative AI: what happens when a dispersed historical corpus is parsed computationally, and what that does to the voices inside it. My current project, Rhythms of Inflation, is a documentary libretto built entirely from the scattered archive of the Antioch-Columbia Pneumatic Campus (1970–1973), the first air-supported college building in the United States. It grows out of a longer project on the convergence of progressive pedagogy, media technology, and radical architecture in the early 1970s. I'm convener and lead PI of Archive Fever & AI, a one-day convening at Johns Hopkins supported by an Envisioning the Future Award from the JHU Sesquicentennial Awards Program.

I write about video art, documentary, participatory and collaborative art making, and media art history, mostly for Afterimage. I co-edited and co-wrote The Present Is the Form of All Life: The Time Capsules of Ant Farm and LST with Gabriel Florenz and David Everitt Howe for Pioneer Works Press.

I keep four ongoing series on Medium: Archival Futurism, which looks at what the archives have to say about the past's conception of the future; a Program for Design, on agentic AI and interaction design; Pedagogical Reckoning, on the US higher education crisis; and Video +/− Art, annotated programs for the screening playlists in my video art history course.

With Byron Rich, I've also worked as the bio-art collaborative Epicurean Endocrinology (now wound down), on hormones, food, and endocrine-disrupting compounds.

Before Program, I was Director of UX and Design at DOOR3 in New York, from 2021 to 2022.