In Conversation: Stephanie Dinkins and Mimi Ọnụọha Moderated by Salome Asega

Join us on Tuesday, October 31 from 6-8pm for an artists’ talk with Stephanie Dinkins and Mimi Ọnụọha. The artists will speak about their work featured in What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI in conversation with moderator Salome Asega, Director of NEW INC. 

Mimi Ọnụọha’s Library of Missing Datasets series assembles the blank spaces in a sprawling datascape. Through a filing cabinet with empty or concealed files, the artist shows us what is rendered invisible or intentionally hidden. Stephanie Dinkins’ Conversations with Bina48 (Fragment 11) documents encounters with Bina48, a social robot developed to reflect the beliefs and memories of a Black woman, revealing that Bina48’s coding has given her no meaningful awareness of Blackness, race, or racialization. Dinkins’ N’TOO redresses this algorithmic erasure by offering a framework for co-authoring alternative models of AI. For this work, featured in What Models Make Worlds, an interactive intelligence trained with data drawn from oral histories by the artist’s family generates a “multigenerational memoir of a Black American family.”

This event is presented as part of the current gallery exhibition What Models Make Worlds on view through December 9.

Live captioning will be provided. 

About the speakers

Recently named an influencer on Time Magazine’s list of The 100 Most Influential People in AI, Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who creates experiences that spark dialog about race, gender, aging, and our future histories.  Her work in AI and other mediums uses emerging technologies and social collaboration to work toward technological ecosystems based on care and social equity. Dinkins’ experiences with and explorations of artificial intelligence have led to a deep interest in how algorithmic systems impact communities of color in particular and all of our futures more generally.   

Dinkins’ experiments with AI have led full circle to recognize the stories, myths, and cultural perspectives, aka data, that we hold and share form and inform society and have done so for millennia. She has concluded that our stories are our algorithms. We must value, grow, respect, and collaborate with each other’s stories (data) to build care and broadly compassionate values into the technological ecosystems that increasingly support our future.

Nigerian-American artist Mimi Ọnụọha‘s work deploys choice moments of seeming absence to question and expose the contradictory logics of technological progress. Through print, code, data, video, installation, and archival media, Ọnụọha offers new orientations for making sense of the gaps that define systems of labor, ecology, and relations.

Ọnụọha’s recent solo exhibitions include bitforms gallery (USA) and Forest City Gallery (Canada). Her work has been featured at the Whitney Museum of Art (USA), the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (AUS), Mao Jihong Arts Foundation (China), La Gaitê Lyrique (France), Transmediale Festival (Germany), The Photographers Gallery (UK), and NEON (Greece) among others. Her public art engagements have been supported by Akademie der Kunst (Germany), the Royal College of Art (UK), the Rockefeller Foundation (USA), and Princeton University (USA).

Salome Asega (she/her) is an artist, researcher, and educator working between participatory design and emerging technology. Salome believes in leveraging the power of collective imagination to redistribute power, change culture, and shift policy. Before joining the NEW INC team in 2021, she worked at the Ford Foundation as a Technology Fellow supporting artists and organizations in the new media arts ecosystem. Salome has participated in residencies and fellowships with Eyebeam, The Laundromat Project, and Recess and has exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale, MoMA, Carnegie Library, August Wilson Center, Knockdown Center, and more. Since 2015, Salome has been teaching studio and design methodology courses in the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design.