About

The MAC, short for Museum of Artificial Culture, is a terminal project examining what gets lost when generative AI makes branding decisions without cultural context.

AI tools are fast, scalable, and increasingly embedded in professional workflows. They are also trained on predominantly Western, English-language data, which means the outputs they produce by default carry assumptions about beauty, tone, identity, and aspiration that do not translate globally. Most of the time, no one stops to ask why.

This project does.

Through four AR-enabled poster pairs, The MAC puts the default and the designed side by side, making visible what AI produces when culture is not accounted for, and what changes when it is. The four cultural contexts, United States, Japan, UAE, and Brazil, were selected to surface distinct failure modes across Hofstede's cultural dimensions and Hall's high and low context communication spectrum.

This is not an argument against AI. It is an argument for using it with intention.

The MAC was created by Kea Powell, a graphic designer and strategic communication professional with nearly eight years of industry experience, as the terminal project for a Master of Science in Immersive Media Communication at the School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon, Winter 2026.