This lecture is made possible by the Sylvia and David Steiner Speaker Series and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.
Stephanie Dinkins
February 4, 2019 6:30 PM–8:00 PM
Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
CMU College of Fine Arts, Room CFA-111
Steiner Lecture in Creative Inquiry
Co-Presented with the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art
Stephanie Dinkins // Steiner Lecture in Creative Inquiry, 2/09/2019 from STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on Vimeo.
Stephanie Dinkins (@stephdink) is is a transdisciplinary artist who creates platforms for dialog about artificial intelligence as it intersects race, gender, and our future histories. Her art employs lens-based practices, the manipulation of space, and technology to grapple with notions of consciousness, agency, perception, and social equity. Dinkins is a 2018/19 Soros Equality Fellow, 2018/19 Data and Society Research Institute Fellow, 2018 Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab Fellow and 2018/2019 Artist in Residence at Nokia Bell Labs. She teaches time-based practices and emerging media at Stony Brook University.
Curated by Elizabeth Chodos
Oct. 5, 2018 – Feb. 3, 2019
Artists: Zach Blas, Brian Bress, Nick Cave, Kate Cooper, Stephanie Dinkins, Jes Fan, Claudia Hart, Eunsu Kang, Jillian Mayer, Sarah Oppenheimer, Siebren Versteeg
Additional events + public programming to be announced soon!
This exhibition explores the primacy of the human body as it’s poised on the precipice of a potential fusion with artificial intelligence. Inspired by the Moravec Paradox, the show looks deeper into the unconscious role the body’s sensorimotor habitat has in shaping our awareness, imagination, and socio-political structures. Society tends to privilege reason and logic because it is conscious and quantifiable. But beneath this thin “veneer of human thought” is a deeper, more complex knowledge system within the body. As technologists imagine the potentials of merging humans with AI, these artists consider the body’s elusive and underestimated power. Their various investigations across multiple media offer room to speculate about the exchange between the unconscious and conscious, and ask questions about what the body knows. Before we enter a generation where cyborgs are as ubiquitous as the internet, in a time when we still inhabit human bodies, the urgent questions to ask are what lessons can our mortal vessels teach us and what unknown paradox might we contain?
For more information on this and other Miller ICA exhibitions and events, visit http://miller-ica.cmu.edu/