Stephanie Dinkins on "Afro-now-ism"

10/06/20 • 54 min

Elvia Wilk talks to artist Stephanie Dinkins about her ongoing projects involving AI, and recent text, “Afro-now-ism,” published in Noema magazine.

Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist and professor at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art. She creates platforms for dialog about artificial intelligence (AI) as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to co-create more equitable, values grounded artificial intelligent ecosystems. Dinkins’ art practice employs lens-based practices, emerging technologies, and community engagement to confront questions of bias in AI, data sovereignty and social equity. Investigations into the contradictory histories, traditions, knowledge bases, and philosophies that form/in-form society at large underpin her thought and art production.

Elvia Wilk talks to artist Stephanie Dinkins about her ongoing projects involving AI, and recent text, “Afro-now-ism,” published in Noema magazine.

Previous Episode

Luis Camnitzer on One Number Is Worth One Word

Luis Camnitzer and editor Ben Eastham have a conversation following the June 2020 publication of One Number Is Worth One Word, the latest in the e-flux journal book series with Sternberg Press.

For nearly 60 years, Luis Camnitzer has been obsessing about the same things. As an art student in Uruguay in 1960, Camnitzer was part of a collective of artists, students, and educators who reformed the School of Fine Arts in Montevideo. Today, he is still an “ethical anarchist” preoccupied with the role of education in redistributing power in society. “If we keep digging,” he writes, “it becomes clear that these ideas existed way before us, will persist long after we are gone, and will do so regardless of who speaks or writes of them... The important question is whether they will ever be absorbed.”

At the vanguard of 1960s Conceptualism, Camnitzer has worked primarily in printmaking, sculpture, and installations. His humorous, biting, and often politically charged use of language as an art medium has distinguished his practice, influencing generations of socially engaged artists. Though based in New York since 1964, his practice remains intrinsically connected to Uruguay and Latin America, and he represented Uruguay in the 43rd Venice Biennale in 1988. As well as many solo exhibitions, his work has featured in biennials including the Bienal de la Habana, Cuba; Whitney Biennial, New York; and documenta 11, Kassel. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Tate, London; the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo; and the Museo de Arte Latino Americano de Buenos Aires, among others.

Edited by Ben Eastham, One Number Is Worth One Word spans over half a century of the artist’s radical engagement with art education and its institutions, and includes many texts published for the first time. This is a singularly authoritative, antiauthoritarian gathering of a life’s work in art, education, and activism. With mischievous wit and wisdom, Camnitzer’s writings summon an inherent utopianism in egalitarian, participatory models of art education to identify how meaning is made.

Available from Sternberg Press (distributed by MIT Press).

Next Episode

Letters Against Separation

Furqat Palvan-Zade, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Carol Yinghua Lu, Keti Chukhrov, and Kasia Wolinska read excerpts from their Letters Against Separation correspondence. The letters were published in series on e-flux conversations as the Covid-19 pandemic spread around the world. Other contributors included Claire Fontaine in Italy, Bahar Noorizadeh in London, Hanmin Kim in Seoul, Oxana Timofeeva in rural Russia, and Pelin Tan on an Island.

The idea for the project was initiated by Hito Steyerl and developed by e-flux conversations editor Mike Andrews. The following announcement concluded the project:

Dear friends,

Our correspondence project “Letters against Separation,” hosted on e-flux conversations, was launched as the Covid-19 pandemic forced most of the world to retreat into isolation. The aim was to have writers from different parts of the globe, who were facing different phases and manifestations of the pandemic, reflect on what was going on around them, in the hope of creating connections amidst the new conditions of separation. From places like Guangzhou and Tashkent, Mexico City and Moscow, our writers have posted a series of open letters describing the acute anxieties and unexpected delights of self-isolation, the structural injustices revealed by the pandemic, and the slow, fraught return to something resembling “normal” life. We hope these letters have brought some measure of relief from your own extended confinement—or at least some distraction from the constant nagging of your dog wanting to play (...)

Excerpts in this episode from:Furqat Palvan-Zade in Tashkent—August 17, 2020Nikita Yingqian Cai in Guangzhou—July 6Irmgard Emmelhainz in Mexico City—June 18Liu Ding, Liu Qingshuo, and Carol Yinghua Lu as a family in Beijing—June 7Keti Chukhrov in Moscow—May 1 Kasia Wolinska in Berlin—April 13