On Love, Data, and Technologies Rooted in Care

Award-winning artist Stephanie Dinkins speaks about her work and how we can put love and care at the center of the technologically possible. Dinkins discusses the ways in which many algorithmic technologies are rooted in methods that limit and cajole information from the first human and computational assumptions. We assess ourselves using false dichotomies that force inadequate choices, building a world bereft of complexity and nuance. The disclinations of our systems to cope with the unseen, unknown, difference, and change limit possibilities for everyone.

Through intelligent technologies—the ones that look like us, the ones that serve us, and the ones that do neither—we have the ability to understand and organize human activity with complexity and broadly principled care. So, why aren’t these the goals of our algorithmic doppelgängers, assistance, and technological ecosystems?

Often envisioned outside the realm of the technologically possible within artificial intelligence, care is an essential aspect of human information and resource-sharing networks that aid our survival. Recognition of this idea raises questions such as how can we infuse—cooperatively, adversarially, and fugitively—the ecosystems we depend on as well as the people and institutions that currently hold power with ways of being, values, ethics, and knowledges they are blind to or don't understand?


Stephanie Dinkins teaches at Stony Brook University, New York, where she founded the Future Histories Studio and holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art. She exhibits and publicly advocates for inclusive AI internationally at a broad spectrum of community, private, and institutional venues. Her practice has been generously supported by United States Artist, Knight Foundation, Berggruen Institute, Onassis Foundation, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Creative Capital, Soros Foundation, Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, NEW INC, Nokia Bell Labs, Blue Mountain Center; The Laundromat Project; Santa Fe Art Institute, and ArtOmi.

This artist talk is presented by Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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