Transcript (auto generated, there may be errors or inconsistencies)

Roddy Schrock

Hello, this is Informer, a show that reveals the latest ideas from artists, thinkers, and technologists. Informer invites you behind the screen to meet the people sketching, hacking, and imagining the next versions of our world.

I'm Roddy, your host, and in each episode, I spotlight creative minds grappling with a changing world through art, technology, or often both. I hope you'll subscribe to this podcast at informerpodcast.com, where you can also find show notes, links, and more information on all of the artists and projects that we discuss.

In this episode, recorded early June 2020, Stephanie shared an in-depth recounting of the remarkable trajectory of her career to becoming one of the leading artists bearing witness to the challenges posed by emerging AI. Through an extended biographical opening, she speaks about always being on the edge of technology, while becoming disillusioned with careers in publishing and advertising, as well as navigating a world which wants to overlay its own narratives on her as a person and as a practitioner.

Stephanie's story speaks to anyone who has worked or is working on finding their way as an artist in a world under capitalism. And she really lays out clearly the inherent limitations in trying to improve technology's development by imbuing it with so-called values. I find Stephanie's work to be incisive and playful in the way that it gets to the impacts of AI. Underlying all of her work is a very welcome optimism, particularly at this time when there's a tendency towards a dystopic imagination.

This episode starts with Stephanie recounting her childhood in Tottenville, New York, the southernmost tip of New York City.

Stephanie Dinkins

My grandmother had a practice of gardening, and she had a big garden that was on this corner, and it was kind of public. Looking back, I see it as her public practice, her social practice. I really think my art practice is built on her way of working in the world in terms of her garden—which she would never call an art practice, right? Never.

Technology has always been in some weird way a piece of my life, and the desire to take things apart and hopefully get them back together has always been a piece of my life. I distinctly remember changing the brakes on my first car. Getting the book, pulling the car in the backyard, and going, "Well, if this guy can do it, of course I can do it. Hmm, I think I can handle that."

I used to work in publishing, too. But there was a point in publishing when the L.A. riots happened, and people were still thinking about putting out a book as something hyper-important. There were just a lot of things that came together that pushed me out of that and sent me to Central America with my camera, trying to make a portfolio, and then trying to get back into photography and going to photo school.

I went to ICP, which is interesting because it's kind of a hard photo school, and I was there making video before lots of people were making video, and making weird sculptures from trees. I was just making weird things in this photo space, so it was always me trying to expand out the observation into different forms of legibility, I guess.

Roddy: Maybe it would be helpful if you could talk a little bit about particularly your focus on machine learning.

Stephanie: Right. Machine learning is hyper-interesting in that it is so large and so encompassing. It's a space that I can hang out in for a very long time—and might require that. It's not shifting and then gone; it feels like a space that shifts and gets better and deeper. It embeds itself more deeply into who we are as people. So, for me, that says, "Oh, I'm going to be here for a long time."

It's not going away anytime soon. It's only going to get deeper and more crucial to think about my community's relationship to it. And it's funny, Roddy, because the more I think about it and the way this has rolled out for me—from me to the people I live near, to technologists—it just seems to keep spanning out. If we're really looking at this and thinking about the trajectory, the whole middle class is in such danger. I don't know that we understand as a class of folks what's coming at us.

For me, that's the ball that keeps rolling, and the thought around it is really interesting and fun to start thinking about how we manage all of this and how we get ready for it. This moment now even is about huge shifts in the way that we operate—some of which won't go away, some of which, even though we think they won't, will. It's like a little knock on the door saying, "Hey, there's some stuff coming down the pipe that we really need to be paying attention to." And I feel like we're being asked to actually not pay too much attention to it.

Roddy: One of the things that I'm hearing from artists that are engaging in technology in adjacent ways is getting to the point that you're making around the necessity to help people begin to grasp the immensity of scale in what is coming down the pike in terms of machine learning and its impact.

I wonder if you could dig in a little bit to both what you see as the real threats that you are foreseeing, and what are some ways in which your work is helping people understand that? How can we understand these threats and really try to avoid some of the worst-case scenarios that seem somewhat likely right now?

Stephanie: Yeah, that's such an interesting question, because in a way, Roddy, I think that I have no real idea of what the implications are. I've come to think of artificial intelligence as these ecosystems that are being laid out. These ecosystems of control in lots of places, of care in other places, but definitely multiple ecosystems that will touch our lives in more and more intimate and consequential ways.

And then I think about, well, who's making all of these technologies? I would love to think that it doesn't matter who makes the technology, but we know that we have blind spots and we are not really capable of seeing that far beyond our own interests, sadly, in many cases. Even when that is the central idea of what we're doing, you know, we gather in groups that are similar or of constituencies of the same peoples. I can't tell you how many times I'm in the room with the same set of people who are thinking around the same things now. I feel like that's really dangerous because even we who are trying to do good in lots of ways have blind spots or have things that we just don't understand or don't have access to.

So for me, that says, "Oh no, there's some way in which we have to make this process, or at least what's happening, more transparent." So people are thinking about it and then start enticing people into the idea that, yes, there's possibility for you to influence these systems now while they are fluid. We really need you to be doing that. Otherwise, we're going to go more and more tunnel vision into a view of who belongs where, why they belong there, and how we keep them in the space that they belong to.

If you think about surveillance—just being watched or your data being collected to see what you do—if someone wants to shut you out of certain parts of the ecosystem, it gets easier and easier to do so if it's automated. Right. And so how do you start to bring other views to counteract what's going on there? How do we bring people in? That becomes bottom line for me.

We can't do this to ourselves. Just watching the news in the past few days says that we have so far to go just in general before we put all these ideas or our beliefs or values into systems that have more and more control. So how do we start to deal with them? Really what I'm saying is, how do we start to deal with a lot of our historic stuff so that we can actually get to the bottom of it?

I'm super fascinated by the Central Park dog walker and the bird watcher. It's so fascinating. Those are technologies. The technology of having cameras in our pockets these days, to some extent, protects us; to some extent, it lets us make things visible that weren't before. But it's interesting to me that they're both named Cooper and that her family could have possibly owned his family at some point. There's a cycle that you could go straight back to the Antebellum South and come right to Central Park in 2020. All the space in between is space that we haven't dealt with.

We refuse to deal with it, which is why I'm interested in the idea that perhaps if we get the middle class more engaged in this, we see all of our stakes in it versus seeing it as this group's problem or that group's problem. Maybe we start to deal on different levels.

Technology or machine learning has been really great in giving citizens who engage it power. If we say video cameras—we have these cameras, we can engage them and use them as weapons against oppression in certain ways. With machine learning and databases, we can start to look at least at the data that we're basing things on. If we don't know what the black box is doing, at least we can start to think about, "Well, what is the data that we're using and how can we pull up some of the deficiencies and make them readily apparent?"

I have a fight with data because in some ways, people use data to validate everything, which means if you can't use data to validate it, then it's not true. So if you don't have that kind of learning or access to that information or the ways to collect and offer that back out, you have a deficiency of being able to fight the fight. But at the same time, data can also be used to say, "Hey, look, we can show you directly that these communities are not getting served in the ways that the community two blocks away is." And why is that? So there's this kind of set of power and disempowerment in it.

For me, it's about where do we find the balance of how technology brings things to surface without letting it be the be-all-end-all and overriding ideas and intuition? Other ways of knowing are equally valid—someone's intuition about something, or a story. A narrative, and especially the accumulation of narratives, has weight just as numbers and hard data can. But often now, I hear ideas getting truncated by data. And that scares me.

I'm trying to figure out how we make the new smart technologies, or how we ask that they have enough balance in them to recognize those things. And if they are eventually self-organizing, how do we imbue in them the idea that things like ethics and fairness are a core part of the way they think about things, and that we're not skewing them to one side or the other?

Lately, I've been in rooms where people are talking about things like values. I hesitate when it comes to values—although I do think values and ethos are important—because people are starting to weaponize the idea of values. Whose values go into these systems becomes important. But usually, it sounds as if they're not saying that we need to do a broad look at what our values are as a human society, or even as a society of sentient beings, and then try to parse that. They're saying, "Oh no, our liberal values are the values that need to win," or "Our conservative values are the values that need to win." It's like, oh no. Is this really what we're trying to do? You're saying the technology is capable of so much more than that, but then you just want to use it to replicate what we have and what we've done.

Roddy: Stephanie, I really appreciate you diving into this as deeply as you are, because it's really helping me see your work in light of your aims towards advocacy for broad societal change in a much bigger way. Could you talk a little bit about what the role of art is for you in that? What is it about art that you see as being perhaps one of the movers that can wedge loose these hugely, seemingly intractable social issues? Where is that intersection for you?

Stephanie: Yeah, it's all getting so mixed up these days. But when I think of the role... people have told me, "Oh, you should run for office." I was like, "No, I don't think I'm going to work very well in that kind of constrained situation." As an artist, it's so interesting because A, I get to put thoughts in the world in ways that suit my thinking. I'm not a writer at all. Writing is super painful for me. But I can present ideas in a different format that allows people to digest them and think about them. And I also think that "artist" becomes the place where people are not expected to be pushed in a way to think about these things.

So there's something nice about being able to walk into a broad variety of spaces under the title "artist"—a community center here in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, or the stage of a major AI conference at Stanford—and have people look at me a little bit skeptically, and then have them take you seriously enough to have conversations with you and see that you are pushing them a bit. I think it's incremental. I don't think I'm doing anything huge, but I know that there's something being pushed. And I think that pushing from directions that are unexpected is really important.

You know, artists also tend to go and lay the groundwork often in ways that aren't threatening to people. And so I hope that there's some groundwork being laid that allows others to step in and start taking up some of it as well. I see myself as seeding ideas and then hoping that they start, like a dandelion, just blowing into our system so that they get changed incrementally. I find that a really important role.

Roddy: I'd love to ask you just a couple questions building off of that, looking at it from the other direction, and a little bit about your relationship to the "art world," whatever that means to you. How do you see your work resonating within whatever the art world means to you?

Stephanie: Yeah, I have no idea what the art world means to me. Although, if I'm really thinking about it, for me, the art world is much more the social engagement world—the world of people trying to use art to expand and make space for things. The way I work is often taken as something "other" by everyone, or claimed by different constituencies. So for me, I feel like I'm a person who's chosen this way of thinking about what they do—art—and does it.

I've spent a very long time trying to figure out, where do I fit in these spaces? New Ink was a great space for me, because it allowed me to see the technologist world as an art space, and a space that was really pretty welcoming to me. They got the ideas and got the practice. My practice seemed like art to them. Whereas when I'm working in the more general gallery or academic scene, I'm not sure they see me as an artist, and people have told me basically as much.

So it becomes an interesting point of friction for me, because again, it's like me always trying to find space, but being okay with not having space and being patient. Just knowing that art making for me is important, and then finding a place for it to live and be shared became almost secondary. And then it was found. It’s kind of the idea of a moment. I always think of it as the moment when we're at a crossroads, and the moment, the work, and the ideas all came to the crossroads at the same time. And that's what allows for something else to happen.

But whether the work is considered art or not is always debatable. It's media. Sometimes it's narrative. I've been given an award for "committing acts of journalism," which I just love. Like, what does that mean, actually? It's kind of about the idea of collecting oral histories, which is a documentation, which really gets back to the whole photography basis and being an observer, and then offering that up to the world in different ways.

I hang out with the New Frontiers folks at Sundance, and that makes me a media person. It's just a super interesting space to be in. But I usually always come back to the idea that I'm an artist. And that's because it's an expansive title that allows for many things to happen. And I relish that.

Roddy: Well, that's so fascinating. And like so many of the people that I've been talking to for this project have said in so many words—sometimes very differently, but have gotten back to this notion—that by calling yourself an artist, it actually allows for a more expansive practice and a more expansive circulation in the world. And also, there's this point at which I think you're implying this too, where at some point the labels that people put on you are a little bit irrelevant, because you know that you're an artist, and that is the driving force in so much of what you do.

I wonder, what are the things that you see as being the bright spots right now?

Stephanie: Yeah, I think I see a lot of upside and positive potential. It all depends on our purview. But it's really interesting to be an artist who's functioning in the media space and to be involved in things where people are thinking about where and how media art lives again, or how these technological arts live and get woven back into the fabric of what art is and how it gets supported. Like, that's a plus. I think that's kind of exciting, really.

I'm thinking about AI ecosystems. And as much as I'm thinking of them as these big overarching crazy things, I also think of them as this amazing point of opportunity. It takes taking it up, and it takes being able to imagine yourself in the space of working with it. If you can get there, I think the potential is unlimited, whether we're talking the potential to make something that becomes commercially viable or the potential to make something that becomes a broader supportive system for the support of people living now and beyond.

So I'm excited by that. I'm excited by what the technology might bring us. I always wonder if we as humans can get out of the way enough to let that happen. Like, both get out of the way and get in line and working with it to have that happen.

Roddy: Well, that's so good to hear for someone that's as intimately aware of what's happening, to hear you remind me also—or just everyone—that there is real positive potential in this. I think that's actually really important to hear sometimes. And I think it's very easy to either go full utopia or full dystopia on this kind of stuff.

Stephanie: Yeah, I try to go full protopia on it.

Roddy: Until next time, thanks for joining me at Informer, and I hope that you'll join us again.