Stephanie Dinkins on Art, AI, and the Stories We Tell Our Machines

At 300 Ashland Place in downtown Brooklyn, a bright yellow shipping container glows at all hours, its windows alive with shifting holographic images. Step closer and you'll see faces, fragments, and dreamlike scenes taking shape in real time - stories from passersby transformed by artificial intelligence. Inside, the space feels more like a living lab than an art installation. Visitors are invited to sit, speak with an artist, and share their own stories through a custom app called The Stories We Tell Our Machines.

This is If We Don't, Who Will?, the latest public project by Stephanie Dinkins, professor of art at Stony Brook University and a 2023 TIME100 Innovator in AI. The installation, presented by More Art, is part of a larger body of work exploring what happens when the technologies shaping our world begin to know, and care, differently.

For Dinkins, the project began with a simple question: how can people who are often underrepresented in data actively teach machines who they are? In If We Don't, Who Will?, every story shared, whether through text, voice, or conversation, feeds a live AI system that generates visual interpretations on the container's outer screens.

Inside the container, the conversation continues. Artists host informal discussions about AI and identity, drawing people in from the busy Brooklyn sidewalks. The app is multilingual (English, Spanish, French Creole, Swahili, Tagalog, Amharic, and more), and the translations are first done with ChatGPT, before being refined with help from native speakers. "It's better to offer the option, even imperfectly, than not at all," Dinkins said. "That, to me, honors people."

Its companion work, Data Trust, which premiered this fall at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, extends the idea into biology itself. For the project, Dinkins collaborated with scientists and community members to create a "Cosmology of the Bay," a collection of Black and brown community narratives that were then encoded into DNA and embedded in living plants.

In Data Trust, those community stories are stored in bacteria that grow alongside okra and California black oak trees - a poetic, literal merging of culture, memory, and environment. The text encoded into DNA can already be decoded back, imperfectly, into fragments of math, memory, and philosophy, or what Dinkins calls "a weird poem."

Read the full story about Dinkins' projects on the AI Innovation Institute website.