At 300 Ashland Place in Brooklyn, a yellow shipping container features shifting holographic images generated by artificial intelligence. The public art project, titled If We Don’t, Who Will?, is the work of Stephanie Dinkins, a professor of art at Stony Brook University and recognized as a 2023 TIME100 Innovator in AI. Presented by More Art, the installation explores the relationship between technology and identity.
The installation invites visitors to share their stories through a custom app called The Stories We Tell Our Machines. These stories, submitted in various languages including English, Spanish, French Creole, Swahili, Tagalog, and Amharic, are first translated by ChatGPT before being refined with the help of native speakers. “It’s better to offer the option, even imperfectly, than not at all,” Dinkins said. “That, to me, honors people.”
Inside the container, artists facilitate informal discussions about artificial intelligence and identity. The project aims to give underrepresented groups a chance to influence how AI systems understand and represent them. Every story shared becomes part of a live AI system that produces visual interpretations displayed on the container’s exterior.
Dinkins’ companion work, Data Trust, premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. In this project, she collaborated with scientists and community members to encode narratives from Black and brown communities into DNA, which was then embedded in living plants. The encoded text can be retrieved as fragments reflecting memory and philosophy, or as Dinkins describes it, “a weird poem.”
More information about these projects can be found on the AI Innovation Institute website.