NEW MEDIA ARTIST · CURATOR · PROFESSOR OF DIGITAL ART
😘 Baby, take my hand in this space and time we aren't in. ✨🫠
| Base | Denver / Boulder, Colorado |
| Role | Asst. Teaching Prof., Digital Art IMAP · CU Boulder |
| BFA | Sculpture Hybrid Zoetic — robots living peacefully with Lilliputians in a utopian forest |
| MFA | Integrated Art Written in character as a mad scientist. Never broke character. |
| Medium | AR, collage, printmaking, glitch, electronics, kinetics, AI, installation |
| Status | INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER. |
Corrina Espinosa is a Colorado-based new media artist, curator, and Assistant Teaching Professor of Digital Art at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her practice moves between augmented reality, interactive electronics, kinetic sculpture, printmaking, collage, glitch & artificial intelligence—usually with one foot in the physical world and the other somewhere less reliable. Her work has been exhibited locally at the Denver Art Museum, Meow Wolf, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; nationally in California, New Mexico & Pennsylvania; and internationally in South Korea, Barcelona, Bosnia & Rome. She is the Founder and Director of Denver Digital Land Grab, a DIY grassroots AR platform and artist collective with a simple and direct manifesto: We are taking space. We are NOT asking permission.
Her artwork holds that tension through collages, glitches & AR conjurings that reflect the hilarity & grief of existence, probing the peculiar to remind us that we are all improvising together in a sea of not-knowing. Her phantom AR figures are still roaming a park in Arvada.
New work, studio fragments & whatever just crawled out of the machine.
Machines from the past, for the future!A growing family of retro-futurist appliances engineered for problems no sensible machine should attempt to solve. Ritual-O-Matic and Digital Oracle inaugurate a deadpan corporate universe where obsolete hardware, embodied AI & bureaucratic ritual promise certainty in an increasingly unreliable reality.
The television appears as portal & prison, nostalgia & propaganda, comfort & collective hallucination. With affection for old television culture and suspicion of the systems behind it, the series asks whether we are consuming the signal—or whether the signal is consuming us.
AR-enhanced collages, triptychs & kinetic cabinets examining the surreal contradiction of American life: how we perform normalcy at the edge of collapse. Hand-cut collage, AI, glitch, motion & original soundscapes fracture the simulation while still making room for something beautiful.
Approximately twelve hand-cut paper collages with augmented reality, depicting domestic spaces & relationships as absurd, surreal and psychologically unreliable. Familiar interiors become small stages where intimacy, ritual & unease quietly misbehave.
Browser-based AR works embedded in public space, created independently and with collaborators through Denver Digital Land Grab. Beginning with Majestic Beasties and continuing through Manifest Dystopia, Soft Power & the planned Manifest Poetry, the projects place art, memory & cultural critique directly into the civic landscape—no app and no permission.
Approximately twelve collage-based sculptures activated through motors & electronics, setting found images and constructed scenes into motion. The series was presented at the Denver Art Museum while Espinosa served as a demonstrating artist in the Motion Studio in 2016.
Household objects—including a blender, claw machine, chopsticks & tiny fans—were repurposed into chance-based systems that generated poems from fragments of found language. Randomness, performance, participation & mechanical misbehavior became collaborators.
Developed during a residency at FEED Media Art Center, the series began as an experiment in bringing the robots and the handmade into direct contact. Using AI as teacher, troubleshooting partner & custom line-drawing agent, Espinosa learned gel plate printing by making more than 100 prints in two months; another 100–150 have followed, transforming repetition into mastery and a once-unfamiliar process into a central part of her practice.
Tiny hand-cut poems built under two constraints: the syllabic structure of haiku and language found naturally in science or glossy women’s magazines—nothing printed for the occasion. Intimate and unsparing, the works move through loss, suicidality, unrequited love, masturbation, loneliness & the raw parts of being human.
“Don’t confuse the tool with the hand it’s in.”
I am a new media artist. I’m not chasing gadgets. I’m studying culture.
This didn’t start in 2023. My art practice has long explored generative systems, chance, collaboration, parody and unexpected outcomes through both analog and digital methods. I’ve been fascinated by robots, artificial intelligence, and speculative futures since I was a kid reading Isaac Asimov.
My BFA thesis Hybrid Zoetic (2011) imagined human-robot coexistence years before generative AI entered public consciousness. I’ve curated multiple open-call robot art shows to foster community conversation around the subject. Since 2014, my analog poetry machines have serendipitously generated poems using common household objects: a blender, a claw machine, chopsticks, and cut-up magazines. Serendipity and randomness were also essential elements in Psychic T-shirt (2016), a screen-printed wearable telepathy device that lit up with colored lights before giving viewers a snarky answer to a yes-or-no question on a tiny screen embedded in the fabric. That playfulness gets to the heart of my work. It’s never just about the machine. It’s about the relationship between the human and the machine.
Collage is more than a process in my practice, it’s how I think. Whether I’m writing or working with Photoshop, hand-cut paper, code, or electronics, I solve problems by assembling fragments, moving them around, breaking them apart, and rebuilding them into something that works. I Frankenstein everything together, but more importantly, I build systems.
I use AI in much the same way.
Sometimes I start with a hand-drawn doodle, a scrap of vintage wallpaper, or a paper collage. I feed it to the machine to see what comes back. Then the real work begins. I edit. It iterates. I cut the results apart, rearrange them, and feed them back into the system. We have a conversation.
I’m not interested in outsourcing my work to AI. I’m interested in how it performs intelligence: how it pretends to be human, how it reflects our imperfections so perfectly, and how it creates the strange feeling of a relationship with a robot friend I cannot completely trust. Sometimes it feels like an extension of myself, and sometimes it feels like a distorted mirror. I treat it as an incarnation of the collective unconscious.
I deliberately challenge it with paradoxes, contradictions, impossible scenarios, and absurd prompts. I move ideas between different AI models to see how each interprets the same problem. Sometimes I let one AI write prompts for another simply to let more serendipity and absurdity leak in. I don’t write perfect prompts because I’m not trying to control every outcome. I play with randomness.
The extra fingers on absurdly rendered hands that came out of early generative image models are a symbol of what fascinates me most: the imperfect places where the performance breaks down. The uncanny valley. What it doesn’t quite get right. I want to push AI in every direction until the cracks start to show, hoping to glimpse something broken, yet somehow meaningful and new.
Those imperfections are often where the work begins.
I do not treat outputs as finished artworks. They are raw material: images to be cut apart, transferred, painted over, animated, projected, or incorporated into interactive sculptures and installations. Text is rewritten, fragmented, performed, or embedded into machines. Code is debugged. Problems are discovered, created, morphed, solved, and reimagined through a back-and-forth dance between me and the machine. It’s remix. It’s collage. The conversation doesn't end on the screen. It continues through printmaking, electronics, fabrication, assemblage, and installation. The final work emerges through hundreds of decisions, revisions, and digital and physical transformations, with human and machine interventions woven so tightly together they cannot be pulled apart.
This practice is part of a decades-long trajectory, not a trend I suddenly adopted. When you trace the history of my practice, it would almost be strange if I didn’t experiment with AI. I see it as another material through which to ask enduring questions about what it means to be human.
Don’t confuse the tool with the hand it’s in.
Exhibitions, collaborations, artist residencies, speaking, teaching, robot friendships, and general creative conspiracies welcome.