Stephanie Dinkins: On Love & Data

Stamps Gallery is proud to present the first sur­vey of renowned trans­me­dia artist Stephanie Dink­ins, who cre­ates plat­forms for dia­logue about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as it inter­sects race, gen­der, aging, and our future histories. 

Through her work, Dink­ins has become a cen­tral fig­ure nation­ally and inter­na­tion­ally rec­og­nized for expos­ing bias and inequity within arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tems. Weav­ing together art pro­duc­tion and exhi­bi­tion, com­mu­nity-based work­shops and pub­lic speak­ing all with the inten­tion of encour­ag­ing action towards mak­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tems more inclu­sive, acces­si­ble and transparent. 

In this exhi­bi­tion, Dink­ins will debut new and inter­ac­tive instal­la­tions and work­shops that build on her con­cept of Afro-now-ism. In this poetic man­i­festo-like text, Dink­ins asks her audi­ence, par­tic­u­larly from com­mu­ni­ties of color, to not only con­front the litany of vio­lences that humans have wielded upon one another based on the insti­tu­tional and social con­struc­tions of race, caste, class, and gen­der to main­tain sta­tus quo and the cur­rent sys­tems of power — but rise above it by tak­ing action to start build­ing the world that they desire. 

She writes: ​“Instead of wait­ing to reach the prover­bial promised land, also known as a time in the future that may or may not man­i­fest in your life­time, Afro-now-ism is tak­ing the leap and the risks to imag­ine and define one­self beyond sys­temic oppres­sion… For black peo­ple in par­tic­u­lar, it means con­ceiv­ing your­self in the space of free and expan­sive thought and act­ing from a crit­i­cally inte­grated space, allow­ing for more com­mu­nity-sus­tain­ing work.” 

Through her instal­la­tions and work­shops Stephanie Dink­ins: On Love & Data devel­ops a dia­logue with the audi­ence on the hier­ar­chies embed­ded within machine learn­ing and AI archi­tec­ture and one’s indi­vid­ual agency in trans­form­ing the algo­rithms within it. The audi­ence will explore and par­tic­i­pate in cre­at­ing a more inclu­sive data-based nar­ra­tive of what gov­er­nance of the peo­ple, by the peo­ple and for the peo­ple can look like in an AI medi­ated world where care is encoded within our dig­i­tal civic system. 

Stamps Gallery Direc­tor and cura­tor Sri­moyee Mitra will lead an in-person exhibition tour August 28, 2–4pm.

Learn more here.

This exhi­bi­tion is gen­er­ously sup­ported by the Andy Warhol Foun­da­tion for the Visual Arts.