At 300 Ashland Place in Brooklyn, a public art installation by Stephanie Dinkins invites people to share personal stories that are transformed in real time by artificial intelligence. The project, titled If We Don’t, Who Will?, is presented by More Art and explores the interaction between technology and underrepresented communities.
Dinkins, a professor of art at Stony Brook University and a 2023 TIME100 Innovator in AI, developed the installation as part of her ongoing work examining how technologies learn from the data provided to them. The project allows visitors to contribute stories through a custom app, which are then visually interpreted by a live AI system displayed on the installation’s exterior screens.
Inside the installation, artists engage visitors in conversations about AI and identity. The app supports multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French Creole, Swahili, Tagalog, and Amharic. Translations are initially handled by ChatGPT and then refined by native speakers. Dinkins stated, “It’s better to offer the option, even imperfectly, than not at all. That, to me, honors people.”
A related work by Dinkins, Data Trust, premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José this fall. This project encodes community narratives into DNA and incorporates them into living plants such as okra and California black oak trees. The encoded stories can be decoded back into fragments of text, reflecting the intersection of culture and biology. Dinkins describes the outcome as “a weird poem.”
The full story about these projects can be found on the AI Innovation Institute website.
