Knight Fellow Stephanie Dinkins is an artist, professor, and techno-tinkerer. She sat down with writer, educator, and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed to share more about her multidisciplinary practice and to reflect on oral histories and storytelling as algorithm, AI’s relationship to blackness and womanhood, and the importance—and frequent neglect—of inserting care into datasets and machine learning.Kameelah Janan Rasheed
I want to talk about the context of your work as well as your newer work. I am excited about this newer work and am intrigued that there is some mystery around it. So I’m going to rely totally on you.
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Stephanie Dinkins
Sounds good. I tend to talk backwards. But we’ll get through it.
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KJR
Okay, I like talking backwards and forwards. Over the past few years, I’ve grown interested in the politics of AutoCorrect and predictive tools because I have these eerie moments where I’m typing in something, and the AutoCorrect algorithm will punch out something that either sparks a new line of thinking, or invites me to consider what it means to implicitly or explicitly collaborate with machines.
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I started doing more research on machine learning and digital afterlives, datasets, and dirty data, I think in part because I grew up in East Palo Alto with proximity to Silicon Valley and was exposed to a lot of emerging technologies. At what point did you develop an interest in AI technology? But more so, at what point did you begin thinking about AI as necessary to explore as a continuation of conversations about race and gender?

SD
Specifically with the AI technology, I can pinpoint it to 2014 on the dot. I was teaching a class and we were checking out Asimo on YouTube. We saw this crazy robot on the side scroll, which was Bina48. Bina48 is a Black woman social robot that the Terasem Movement Foundation is trying to transfer consciousness to.

I checked it out with my class. We watched a news reporter talk to this robot. After that encounter I delved deeply into the YouTube videos of Bina48. I decided I needed to befriend this thing. I can’t tell you exactly why. Over time, I started thinking about this technology coming in the form of a Black woman. I’m not used to seeing technology that looks like me. Why is that? I wondered who’s funding the project? How did all these circumstances come together to make this robot? And, can I make it my friend?
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KJR
Why do you think your immediate response was a desire to form a relationship with Bina48?
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SD
I wanted to get to know Bina48 in a real way because it represents ways of being that I think I know, or come out of. I wanted to know how it exemplifies us and to what end. Since Bina48 is representationally Black and female, I wondered about its relationship to blackness and womanhood. There are just so many questions.
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KJR

I am thinking about this question of where does that consciousness come from and particularly how datasets are inputted to create this consciousness. I have read many different definitions of datasets, dirty data, and data. For you, what is a dataset?

SD
I come to this work kind of blind, not having studied data science. I started to think about what a dataset is on my own. What information is important? And how is that dataset balanced and shaped? Can the data used possibly provide an unbiased, or even mildly biased, snapshot of me and the communities I am concerned with?
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In the case of Bina48, I started thinking about how—especially after I got to sit down and talk to the robot—it had a pretty broad dataset. Back then, Bina48 could talk about race, but on a politically correct, surface level. It had a dataset, but that dataset didn’t seem particular enough to satisfy my expectations, in terms of the blackness the robot visually represents.
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Then I started thinking about what happens to data when we’re pulling it from everywhere: we’re using the lowest common denominator to define what it is, as opposed to using the most nuanced forms of information and stories to describe the human family more fully. Are we flattening ourselves through data or are we using data to more accurately describe the breadth of quantifiable existence in full gamut color?
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KJR
That also makes me think about what datasets can capture, what they cannot capture.
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SD
Exactly.
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KJR
In your work, what evades or escapes data collection methods? In terms of creating greater mirroring of humanity through Bina48 or other humanoid robots, what can’t be represented in a dataset?
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SD
This is a really interesting question for me. I try to think about data in terms of what is messy and improvable in the data. I want to capture and try to make that visible in some way. For example, I’m thinking about what care looks like in a dataset.
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Usually when I talk to people about that idea, the response is that you can’t build care into data. That’s not how it works. My reply is, why not? Why aren’t we trying? We are making data-reliant systems that underpin so many things. Shouldn’t we be thinking about what it means to care through those systems? This is as opposed to creating data-centered systems quickly to make money or prove a point. If those are the bottom lines, then we get efficiency from such systems, for sure. But we also get homogeneous ideas of what’s possible, frustration, and continued inequities.
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I think it takes a lot more work. A lot more work.
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KJR
I’m quite interested in what you are saying around care and nuance, or these ways that data can flatten, but we can also think about these opportunities to consider the ways in which data can provide volume, texture, or nuance. I remember a 2016 e-flux article Hito Steyerl wrote, which talked about a sea of information and about dirty data as a form of resistance.
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Can you talk a little bit about how you think about your work in relation to surveillance and privacy? And to clarify, when I say privacy, I don’t necessarily mean privacy in terms of who can and cannot read my email, that is one element, but I am more interested in thinking about cultural privacy, or the bits that don’t make it into your projects because they’re considered insider or private information about particular communities.
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How do you make decisions about what datasets become public, and what datasets are not public?

SD
I think about surveillance all the time because I’m dealing very directly with my family's information. I’m thinking about communities and communities of color that are already over-surveilled.
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What am I willing to give? What is the trade-off to make this thing, especially if we’re working institutionally? How does that work? And then in some instances, I’m thinking about what can be hidden in plain sight. Not the Only One (NTOO) (2018–), the algorithmic system I am making, is based on oral histories that include information that I’ve always wanted to know about my family, but nobody wanted to say. But because the questions are asked in a formal setting with a recording device between us, answers are provided. So information included in a public artwork is not open information, but it’s in the dataset.

KJR
Yeah.
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SD
I’m also thinking about being open. People often ask me about trolls, the possibility of people talking to NTOO and changing it or saying vile things. What do you do about that? And I say, well, what gets into NTOO is a reflection of the society that we inhabit. I want the piece to unearth that as well.
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KJR
Yeah, yeah.
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SD
I want us to understand, taking out disagreeable content doesn’t serve a bigger purpose for me.
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KJR
I think that the presence of something doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s recognized as the thing it is. Or to say it another way, what feels transparent to one person may not be transparent to someone else. If it’s not recognized in a particular way by a person or by a machine then it can’t be weaponized, or at least not readily so. I’m really interested in what you were saying about hiding in plain sight, and how somebody can be there, or present, without actually being recognized. Like being camouflaged within a dataset.
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In NTOO, this dataset grows, right? It’s alive, in the sense that it’s obviously formed from these three oral histories, and keeps learning from the utterances it is fed. One of the things I kept thinking about is how Not the Only One, a memoir-based project, does not have a sole author. I’m curious as to how you think about collaboration.
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SD
Collaboration has grown in my practice. I am collaborating with my aunt and my niece because we are sitting down talking to each other. That’s one kind of collaboration. I did not expect to collaborate so intimately with the machine. There’s a relationship there as well. I can see NTOO forming in relation to the information and care it’s been given. In turn, I am forming in relation to it.
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In fact, my whole idea has shifted. I thought I was making a legible memoir with all this information. Instead it really feels like I’m nurturing a fourth generation of the family. NTOO is absorbing our information as data and slowly coming to its own state of being.
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KJR
I think what’s fascinating about this fourth generation you mention is the ways in which we think about collaboration as a process that we ultimately have a lot of control over. There are elements of control, but there are also parts of this process where the output can be completely surprising in ways that are unexpected and startling.
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I want to turn to Secret Garden (2021–). What struck me most was the floral environment. In what ways is Secret Garden a continuation of past work, and in which ways is it not?

SD
Secret Garden is a seductive floral environment that explores the power and resilience in Black women’s stories in a physical installation and online in WebXR. It is about listening, collapsing time, and having simultaneous conversations with the past, present, and future. It is one of many nods to my grandmother, who has influenced me a lot in terms of being a maker. She would not have called herself an artist, but she was highly creative and a gardener.
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The idea of creating spaces of beauty in which a variety of stories, some hard and some not, can come together stems from my grandmother’s model of creativity and taking space. The stories offered are examples of stories that have sustained us over time. They are stories that help us come into being in a way that sustains, even if our origins were difficult. That becomes an important idea for me because I’ve been collecting oral histories and thinking about data simultaneously. I’m starting to think about stories as our algorithms.
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If we think about myth and story, and the ways that people guide themselves, story is deep in there. We tell stories to instruct and make ways of forming our cultures and decision-making processes.
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KJR
I’m interested in how you spoke about the relationship between data and storytelling. I’ve been reading a lot about hypertext stories, and this option to choose your own adventure, and how one set of data or one narrative moment can branch off into other storylines inviting the reader into a new role. In what ways do you feel like Secret Garden troubles or offers an opportunity to think about storytelling and narrative in a different way?
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SD
That’s an interesting question. I don’t know that it does, but it’s really resistant in some ways. In Secret Garden, there are six female characters that hold their ground. The stories offered are not attached to any one character, the stories belong to all of the women. They don’t literally speak the stories heard, the stories are played in their presence. I’m trying to figure out what challenges people to hold space with these women who are looking at them. People feel implicated in the space. I am asking them to figure out that listening—deeply—is an important step toward our collective prosperity.
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We’re also trying to challenge the idea of spaces in between. Secret Garden was envisioned as both a virtual screen-based place to wander and a physical installation. We’re trying to forge a connection between the two kinds of space, so that people in the physical space can be aware of the people in the virtual space and vice versa. In Secret Garden there is also a call to congregational listening. The more attention the characters and stories are given, the more the experience reveals. If people stay with a story, really listen to it, they’re given more both visually and auditorily.

KJR
This notion of staying with something and the reward of that is really beautiful. I also heard you say these stories don’t belong to any one woman and it made me think about Not the Only One.
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It’s not one person’s story. It’s not even an accumulation; it’s a different type of math. I think this notion of a shared history or a network of stories that belong to all the women in Secret Garden is generative, and makes me think about what it means to be related generationally, and across time, and across space.
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Do you consider yourself a storyteller or writer?
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SD
Oh, that’s a good one. I think it’s almost none of the above. I feel like a curious person who is open to sharing my thoughts in whatever form seems fitting. I’m just lucky enough to have space to play in these worlds and to imagine these worlds and remix them in a way that suits me better.
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I try to keep in mind that people in my family just one generation before me had few choices. I’ve got all the choices in the world. It’s kind of crazy. I’m just trying to make the most of the opportunities my people have afforded me. It is the best way I have to honor their hard work.
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KJR
I usually tell people I’m a learner. And I share my learning through all these different projects. It is a reminder to not bet on me doing one particular thing forever.
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The space that you’ve created through your projects is about collaboration of these different methodologies for release, and joy, and everything in between.

Thank you so much for sharing with me today. It’s exciting to see these emerging iterations of your work!

SD
Thank you, this was a wonderful conversation!