Artist Talk: Stephanie Dinkins

On Love, Data, and Technologies Rooted in Care

Join us to welcome award-winning artist Stephanie Dinkins, learn more about her work and how we can put love and care at the center of the technologically possible. Dinkins will discuss 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?

Image: Stephanie Dinkins. Photo by Jay Adams.