Treefort Music Fest 2025 wasn’t just about the music. It was a playground for innovation. This year, Hackfort, Treefort’s tech-centric showcase, brought together digital art and artificial intelligence in a groundbreaking live event: AI Design Duels. Hosted by Joelle Ater and Zubeida Alawi of Boise Art Revel, this electric competition invited local designers to craft a collective comic narrative about life in the year 2035, with a twist: each panel was powered by AI tools and voted on by the audience.
Over three thrilling rounds, artists created visual stories live on stage, their workflows projected in real time, with the crowd deciding who advanced. The result? A communal exploration of the future through the lens of human-AI creativity.
What Made the AI Design Duels So Unique?
The concept: a futuristic comic panel relay. Each artist had 30 minutes to illustrate a panel imagining life in an AI-run world, where every aspect of our daily lives, from morning routines to relationships and urban infrastructure, is guided or governed by intelligent systems.
Audience votes propelled the most compelling panels forward, giving the event a dynamic, evolving storyline; one that shifted tone and style with every new creator. What unfolded was less a competition, and more a living experiment in co-authorship between humans and machines.
Meet the Visionaries: Panel Highlights from the 2025 AI Design Duels
Tiffany Eller – Round 1 Winner & Overall Champion
Tiffany’s panel set the emotional tone of the entire sequence. A heartfelt exchange between a human artist and a humanoid AI, her piece imagined a future where creativity transcends boundaries. With warm, painterly strokes and a poetic quote from ChatGPT—“When minds are free and hearts are wide, we paint the stars with love as guide”—Tiffany explored the union of human inspiration and machine assistance. It was a quiet yet powerful meditation on coexistence, one that clearly resonated with the audience and judges alike.
Pace Jackson – Round 2 Winner
Pace took the story into an edgier, more abstract realm. His panel mashed up retro comic strips, hand-drawn figures, urban elements, and surreal overlays in a chaotic, postmodern visual collage. Data grids hint at a future society grappling with fate and algorithmic determinism, while fragmented human forms suggest the tension between analog identity and digital control. His piece sparked conversation, challenging viewers to decipher meaning in the visual noise of a hyper-connected world.
Ken Brook – Round 3 Winner
Ken’s concluding panel delivered a cinematic climax. Set in a neon-drenched city square, a holographic Treefort 2035 stage anchors the scene; futuristic, immersive, and buzzing with digital life. Ken layered vignettes of holographic fashion, AI-powered avatars, and data-glitched portraits to show a world where individuality is mediated by screens. The cyberpunk vibe and meticulous color palette grounded the sequence in a speculative realism that felt both celebratory and cautionary.
Honorable Mentions
The competition also featured compelling entries from yours truly (Gordie Tamayo), Noah Riley, and William Beukelman, each bringing their own visual language and narrative flavor to the concept of an AI-managed future. Their work contributed to a kaleidoscopic view of what tomorrow might look like; one shaped as much by fear and skepticism as it is by curiosity and awe.
Final Thoughts: Why AI Design Duels Was a Festival Standout
AI Design Duels wasn’t just a Hackfort event; it was a bold, community-powered experiment in speculative storytelling. By giving artists real-time access to AI tools, and letting the audience actively shape the story, Boise Art Revel created a participatory model for how we might imagine and design the future together.
