Stephanie Dinkins: On Love and Data

Artificial intelligence isn't as neutral as you may think—artist Stephanie Dinkins in her exhibit at Queens Museum takes a look at how humans' biases have been ingrained in AI, what that literally means for the BIPOC community and challenges viewers to imagine "Afro-now-ism," which means "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 freeand expansive thought and acting from a critically integrated space, allowing for more community-sustaining," according to Dinkins. In her show, are three sections: "Secret Garden" set within the museum’s famous The Panorama of the City of New York uses video-recorded oral histories to immerse visitors into the power of receiving and sharing stories as an act of resistance through the narratives of an enslaved woman, Black-owned farmers in the early-20th century, and an avatar powered by Black women; "Binary Calculations," which gives visitors a series of survey questions on an iPad inside voting booths to generate possibilities for more equitable datasets; and "Say It Aloud" in which visitors record themselves in a sound booth to generate new content that alters a video installation in real-time, demonstrating what it means to take agency over entrenched supremacist systems.