The art of Stephanie Dinkins
- PaulIsaac 0518
- Oct 15, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: May 5, 2025
[SM1701 independent research]
Name: Paul Isaac Cheung
Student number: 58636300
"Art can be a way to engage with difficult conversations about identity and ethics."
Artificial Intelligence is the new revolutionary technology that caught everyone attention about, all innovative creators or inventors started projects surrounding AI, such as recent news of TESLA's new showcase event " WE, ROBOT" by Elon Musk, creating a revolutionary AI Robot called Optimus etc. But AI influences across not just engineering and technology but art as well. One of the famous Artists had became a new genre of Artist called " AI Artist".
[The installation artwork that I am particularly drawn into... ]
Stephanie Dinkins is a transdisciplinary artist and educator whose work intersects emerging technologies and our future histories. Her art practice is deeply committed to creating platforms for dialogue about AI as it intersects with these critical societal issues. This also reflects her interests from her works.
Her works explores themes of IDENTITY, RACE, STORYTELLING and TECHNOLOGY, expecially focusing on how ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE would reflect on. One of her notable projects are "Not The Only One" (N'TOO), an on-going experiement which is part of her "BLK AI" (Black AI) projects. It is an attempt on creating a multigenerational memoir of a black American family told from the perspective of an AI, she created a virtual-conversational partner with an interactive AI that is designed, and trained to aligned with underrepresented ideal people and their concerns, this embodies the experiences and narratives of Black Women. The N'TOO is supplied with three generations of women from the artist's family history, creating an unique character that communicate from its own "first person" perspective.
N'TOO summarise all 4 themes of her interests; IDENTITY and RACEof N'TOO is itself, emboding the experiences it had gathered and making its own decision of choosing how it wants to identify as, which is a Black Women. It also shares its personal and collective experiences or narrative which builds STORYTELLING, it is vital aspects on understanding its own IDENTITY. The TECHNOLOGY demonstrated her art practice, N'TOO provides a dialogue platform that allows participants to ask questions and engage conversation with the AI, she designed the interaction to feel personal and immersive, to feel HUMAN. This enable viewers to explore the themes of IDENTITY and their own experiences.
"Not The Only One" is not the only work that truly reflects " engage with difficult conversations about identity and ethics... ". One of the observations that Stephanie found was a "white guy problem" in AI technology, corporates who design AI or AI softwares like the Siri, Cortana etc. They may seems to generally-accepted but the data based on are the internet and the coder who assigned those datas to supply these AI, it might not be able to understand some different race of people like Asians or Black. As Stephanie stated quote : " Data sets reflect the hierarchy in which we live." and this pursue her to create the Bina48.
Bina48 (Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture, 48 exaflops per second) is one of the world most advanced social robots, she videotaped a series of ongoing conversations between the artist and Bina48, and questions whether "can an artist and a social robot build a relationship over time?" This artwork demonstrated the possibility of a long-term relationship between a person and a social robot through emotion interaction especially how the data that the robot based on.
Bina48 and Stephanie discussed about family, racism, faith, civil rights, loneiness and Bina48’s concern for her robot friend that are treated more like lab rats than people. Bina48 with its own personality and consciousness, showing humor and excitement but also frustration and philosphical with the Artists during conversation.
Stephanie has found a "rabbit hole" in culture particularly the experiences of IDENTITY that is codified in technology, and she wants to educate people about the impact of AI on our lives and what attitude we should have towards AI.
Reference:
"Not The Only One" from her personal website
"Bina48" from her personal website
Art, Race & Artificial Intelligence
Human Biases Are Built into AI—this Artist Is Helping to Change That
Creative Capital
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