People

Stephanie Dinkins

Stephanie Dinkins

ToftH Artist Fellow

Biography

Stephanie Dinkins is a transdisciplinary artist interested in creating platforms for ongoing dialogue about artificial intelligence as it intersects race, gender, aging and our future histories. Her most recent project is a collaboration with Bina 48, an intelligent computer built by Terasem Movement Foundation that is said to be capable of independent thought and emotion. Through Conversations with Bina48, Dinkins develops a long-term relationship between a person and an autonomous robot, in the process exploring the bounds of human consciousness, what it means to be human, mortality and our ability to exist beyond the life of our bodies (transhumanism). Her work has been exhibited at venues including Herning Kunstmuseum, Spellman College Museum of Fine Art, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Wave Hill, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Spedition Bremen, and the corner of Putnam and Malcolm X Boulevard in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Her work has been written about in media outlets such as Art In America, New York Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun and SLEEK Magazine. She is a 2017 A Blade of Grass Fellow and a 2018 Truth Resident at Eyebeam, NY.

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE