Nick’s artwork is entwined with his research on creative cognition and perception. He employs abstract art shapes and flows that can be interpreted in many different ways depending on the viewing angle and intentional stance of the viewer. His drawings and paintings can be viewed in different orientations to find objects and visions, similar to finding shapes in the clouds. This style of dreamlike and imaginative cognition is something he strives for in designing the experience of interaction with his artworks.

He often works with others in collaborative drawing, which is where he draws a lot of his inspiration. The contributions of other artists during the creative process provides interesting tensions that he needs to resolve to continue the artwork. In this way, collaboration pushes the boundaries of his artistic work and expands his artistic constraints.

His work is heavily musical in the sense that he strives to translate the sounds he hears in music into the lines of an artwork. In that way, the lines flow, merge, and combine, together harmoniously with what he calls perceptual logic. Perceptual logic is a cognitive science theory that describes the manner which creative productions are perceived. Through time, artists develop a certain recognizable style of art, and perceptual logic is the cognitive mechanism whereby style is acquired. His work explores the bounds of perceptual logic, and his computational projects strive to enable an AI agent to have perceptual logic, such that it might be able to contribute as an equal in a co-creative process.

In addition to physical art, he also works with computational interactive art, computational creativity, and co-creative artificial intelligence. He is a human-computer interaction (HCI) and user experience (UX) research expert. He has industry experience as a UX research intern investigating creativity support tools at Adobe’s Creative Technology Lab, Google, and YouTube. He is passionate about designing systems to facilitate collaboration and bringing the benefits of collaboration to Art, AI, and HCI more broadly.

He was an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Software and Information Systems at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for 4 years teaching classes in Human-Centered Design, Co-Creative Artificial Intelligence, and Computational Creativity. He was a Ph. D, student at The Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Interactive Computing in the Human-Centered Computing Ph.D. program. With a specialization in cognitive science and computational creativity, I defended my dissertation, titled “Creative Sense-Making: A Cognitive Framework for Quantifying Co-Creation”. It investigated technical approaches, research methods, and cognitive theories to inform the design of co-creative systems. Before his Ph.D. work he was an undergraduate student at Case Western Reserve University, studying Cognitive Science and Studio Art. Visit his website: http://www.nickmdavis.com for more information.