Amelia Winger-Bearskin

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Amelia Winger-Bearskin in an artist, technologist and researcher who specializes in working in and with artificial intelligence. She lives in Jacksonville, FL, where she is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida.

Her work, though incredibly varied, always focuses on finding ways to use AI to benefit communities and the environment. In 2017 she founded a nonprofit, IDEA New Rochelle, that created a VR/AR Citizen toolkit to engage the community as co-designers of their future city. The project, in partnership with the New Rochelle mayor’s office, won a highly competitive $1 million Bloomberg Mayors Challenge grant.

Amelia is Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan, part of the Haudenosaunee Confederation, and through much of her work she interrogates the supposed neutrality of technology and AI and strives to imbue new technology with the values of her Native culture. In 2019 she created Wampum.Codes, which is both an ethical framework for software development based on Indigenous values of co-creation and an award-winning podcast of the same name. In the podcast, Amelia interviews Indigenous artists and technologists about how they manifest their Native cultures’ values in their work.

In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Amelia draws a line between her youthful activities — providing music for her mother’s storytelling sessions and experimenting with her engineer father’s discarded prototypes — and her current mission to transform us all from mere consumers of technology to engaged participants creating a better world with new tools.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

Pier Carlo: I usually ask my guests this question at the end of the interviews, but given the intricacy and variety of your work, I’m going to start with it. What current project are you most jazzed about? Can you describe it?

Amelia: Oh, that’s such a great question. Well, I’m excited about a couple of projects. Usually, they happen as they’re coming towards me, as if I’m driving down a road that is life and whichever one’s right in front of me is the one I’m most excited about and then the next one that’s right in front of me I’m most excited about.

The one that is actually right in front of me is, I’m working with Nancy Baker Cahill for a project that we’re doing in Los Angeles as part of the Frieze Art Fair. She’s making really beautiful elemental animations, 3D environments, virtual reality, augmented-reality systems that are talking about climate justice and climate change, and I am doing the immersive sound.

It’s really fun to collaborate. I just love to collaborate with friends, and so whenever I get to do it, it’s such a gift. She sent me a proof last night of the animation. It was stunning, and just to hear my voice moving through that environment was really fun. So that’s probably the thing I’m most excited about because it’s happening really soon.

Pier Carlo: Were I able to attend, what would I experience?

Amelia: Well, I haven’t seen the final layout in the gallery, but there will be projections, objects in AR. The work that she does is primarily in AR, although she does work in VR. So you’d be able to see these pulsating wave forms that are in different elements. The first one I saw was fire, and it looked almost like an ocean of fire, if that makes sense, bobbing up and down. Then I have recorded these soundscapes that she’s then placing like stems throughout the experience, and then they bloom as you move closer to them or move farther away. They’re of me singing and me playing music. It gives you a grounded sense of the body while you’re exploring some of these environments.

Since she’s doing it in California, she’s really thinking about the fires and about issues that have been happening in the coastline and with the shore, so there’s a lot of water and fire-water and water-fire and all of that mixture of spaces. We wanted to raise awareness.

We’re also raising funds. With my own podcast, Wampum.Codes, I like to support my guests who are making positive impact in their community using new technologies. Which is all of them. So I’m trying to work my way through and raise different funds so that I can support projects from the guests that have been on my podcast, because I like to stay in touch with them and sync every year and see where their projects have gone and continue to support them, not just by amplifying their message but also through material support, if possible. So that is what I’m trying to do right now.

Pier Carlo: Were your artistry and technology always intertwined, or did one come before the other?

Amelia: They always have actually been entwined. When I was a child, my father worked at Kodak — he was the head of their innovation lab, where they invented the first digital camera — and my mother was a storyteller in our tribe. Being a storyteller is something like being a politician, historian, educator, writer, performer. And usually musician, although my mom’s not a musician. From a young age, she would have me play the flute and the drum and sing the songs that were part of our stories, because she’s like, “I don’t like doing any of those things.” So I did that as a child. I was performing with her and learning what was the bedrock of storytelling, why it was important to our culture, why it was important to share with new generations the wisdom of ancestral knowledge.

And then also my father would bring home any kind of outdated anything from his lab that they didn’t use or they were throwing out. It would be like a screen here, a laptop there, a digital camera, so I had ridiculously high-tech toys for a five and six-year-old because he’d be like, “Here!”

I had a really strong desire to code and to play around with these objects for art’s sake, and my dad was like, 'If you want to be an artist, these are the tools of the future. You’re not going to be drawing with paper and pen.'

I had a really strong desire to code and to play around with these objects for art’s sake, and my dad was like, “If you want to be an artist, these are the tools of the future. You’re not going to be drawing with paper and pen.” He got me a KoalaPad and a Commodore 64 and said, “This is how you’re going to be designing. The future will be participatory and immersive.” He was a visionary in optics research and the way it would connect with computers. He could see how excited I was about art and was like, “This is an art tool. This computer is a notebook for drawing.”

I took him at his word, and I connected both with the artistic practice of my mother as a storyteller and performer and then the technological framework that my dad had. He thought of all of these new technologies very much as someone who was building them — he wasn’t just using them; he was innovating the future — but also he thought of them as creative tools and toys, not just like something you would crunch numbers on. So they’ve always been connected.

Pier Carlo: Your work is shaped by a very strong mission. Was there an aha moment when you knew that technology was going to help you achieve what you wanted to achieve?

Amelia: That’s a tough question. I think there’s lots of different types of aha moments, right? I think I believed my dad in some ways and then resisted it in others because I really was so drawn to art and at that time there weren’t artists that I saw reflected in my community or in the teachers that I was taking art classes from who used technology.

Pier Carlo: What kind of art were you making then?

Amelia: Well, I became an opera singer when I was 15, and I studied at the Eastman Conservatory under Seth and Jane McCoy. They’re very traditional opera singers, both of them. My world began to really open up from opera, and I began to tour the world and be in different opera productions. I was always still connecting with people on computers, but I thought that was a hobby, [laughing] like the opera was the profession and the computers were the hobby, which maybe slipped a little bit over the years. As I began to explore more in the area of opera, I would meet people who were doing new technology for live performance, and they would say, “Oh, I’d love to cast you in this opera.”

I used to always star as Despina in “Così fan tutte” because I was a lyrical soprano and coloratura, and so I was playing this role again. It’s one of those things in opera where you play the same role a lot of times. It’s like, “Oh, you’re known as that thing; OK, you get cast as that thing.” I saw that my whole life I might actually be these couple of comedic Mozart roles, because that’s what my voice was, that’s the way maybe I looked or things like that, a little bit typecasting. I was 15 when I started; I was very young. I looked out at the future, and I thought, “OK, maybe I could become the best Despina of my generation, but I will still play the same role.” I’m a very creative person. I’m, for sure, born with the soul of an artist. And I would experiment and look for other things that I could do.

And while I was playing Despina, I auditioned for another opera in D.C. that was with a group called the Digital Poetry Theater. They did a lot of what now we would call projection mapping, although at that time it was like glass slides on robotic arms. There wasn’t the computation strong enough to project this stuff in real time because graphics even for video games were so rudimentary. But with glass slides and robotic arms, you could almost fake high-definition rendering of animation in real time.

I joined this group, and I starred in one of their plays. They would be doing this and that with the robotics, and I would say, “Actually, I can help you fix these robotics. I can help you with the coding. I can do the Photoshop.” I started doing more of the backend because they would say, “Oh well, this student that was going to do that didn’t do that, and if we need to make this change ... .” I was like, “Well, I can do all this. I know how to code and I can make this stuff.”

So I started doing the backend as well as performing onstage, and then I was doing more composing and composing algorithmically and using digital technologies to do more of the music. I finally found myself directing, starring, writing, composing, all these things with technology for this opera company, and I was just supposed to be the talent, right? Like I’m just supposed to wear the costumes on stage.

Pier Carlo: A coloratura with tech chops! That doesn’t happen every day.

Amelia: Right, right. Well, back then it was even weirder, I guess.

Then I wanted to start doing my own things. I was like, “Oh, OK, I’ve had this experience of doing that whole pipeline of director, actor, performer, tech. Maybe I can do some one-woman shows here.” I started doing them and got success at the Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center, these places that would show new forms of opera.

Those new-forms-of-opera festivals happen like once every five years or something, so in between the five years, I was like, “What am I going to do?” Museums would come to me and say, “Hey, that thing you did at that festival, would you do that at this museum?” And I was like, “Sure.” And before I knew it, people started saying, “Oh, you’re a performance artist.” I was like, “Huh, OK. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know. Right, sure.” And so I had a career as a performance artist doing this interactive-media-technology live performance and became a professor of performance art.

I always like to say I’ve been doing the same thing for my whole career, which is just this combination of art and technology and storytelling. It’s come by many different names. People have said I am a net artist or interactive artist or a VR director or a performance artist ... I’m still making things and showing them to whatever audience is excited by them.

I always like to say I’ve been doing the same thing for my whole career, which is just this combination of art and technology and storytelling. It’s come by many different names. People have said I am a net artist or interactive artist or a VR director or a performance artist, all these different names, and I’m always like, “OK.” Or transmedia art, all the different titles that come. And I’m like, “Actually, I’m not doing that much different things now than I did when I was 15. I’m still making things and showing them to whatever audience is excited by them.”

Pier Carlo: You just have even more tools in your toolbox, I presume.

Amelia: Yeah. Yeah. And AI is the natural progression of what happens when our GPUs are faster and our graphic cards are faster and suddenly we can have these deeper collaborations with machines, whereas before we needed to do a lot of that pre-processing or pre-chopping-up systems. Now we can do so much in real time, which is just amazing.

Pier Carlo: As a professor of AI in the arts, what do you impart to your student artists of all stripes about how they might think of engaging with AI, even if they don’t yet know how it might interweave with their art?

Amelia: Right now I’m teaching them p5.js, which is a great creative coding language based on processing. It has an IDE in the browser so that they can begin to start learning the building blocks of, “How do I do this?” And the most important thing is to learn “Why do I do this?” But it takes time. In the beginning you’re like, “OK, great, I can make an animation or I can make a face or I can do a filter on a webcam, but I don’t know, I’ve seen lots of things that can do this before. What happens when I am able to create it?”

I think it’s super-important for me to show them what other artists have done historically with computation and how we are collaborating with machines and how machines can help us collaborate with human and non-human systems, not just machine systems, but environmental systems. We really can think of the data that is inherent in different science fields and incorporate that in different ways rather than just being interpretive. We actually can have it maybe representational or maybe have our audience engage directly with that data or understand how data is manipulated or used to form a story almost without our consent in a lot of ways.

A lot of times as an artist you’re demystifying that technology to say, “Hey, this has an angle; it’s not neutral.” I think it’s very important for my students to know how to do it so that that becomes demystified: why they should do it and what is at stake. How are these systems being used, and why are there all these assumptions?

I think there are a lot of assumptions around AI being neutral, being true, being more true than opinions, being more distanced from the petty arguments of mortals or whatnot, when in fact it’s totally biased, it has an immense amount of problems and it’s leaving out enormous amounts of very vital data in our planet in a lot of these systems. In many ways it’s consolidating power and consolidating avenues of harm for certain communities and for things like our planet.

I think that’s really important. If you don’t know how something works or how to enact change in it, as in, “I don’t know how to code a database or pull that information so that I can manipulate it,” it’s very hard to see how other people are doing it. I think I see that a lot, and sometimes I let my students debate things in class — which is like always a bad idea — and I see how easy it is for these assumptions about the world that they’ve never criticized to immediately come into play in how they talk about and define technology.

It takes a lot of effort to pull that back and be like, “Why do you think it works that way? I can’t actually teach you how it works unless we maybe pull back the bias of why you think it works that way. Because it doesn’t work that way, but you think it does and there are certain groups who are in power who love that you think that. They love that you think it’s really neutral or that it’s 'Just the facts, ma’am.'” All those kind of things.

But it doesn’t work that way. It’s actually very biased, and it’s created by humans, and it is a container and a reflection of our beliefs and our values, good and bad.

I think we have to dethrone and destabilize that notion that tech is more true than any other opinion or so powerful that it can’t be stopped or rolled back or like a Pandora’s box that can’t be put back together again. Otherwise we just are going to be consumers of it.

I think we have to dethrone and destabilize that notion that tech is more true than any other opinion or so powerful that it can’t be stopped or rolled back or like a Pandora’s box that can’t be put back together again. Otherwise we just are going to be consumers of it.

Pier Carlo: You are passionate about ensuring that a code of values is woven into the creation of technologies, but technologies currently sit at the top of the capitalist food chain where they’re mining us for all the data we’re literally worth. So it seems like a very difficult task to encode values in new technology.

Can you talk about what role you think artists in particular can and should play in the development of technologies to achieve that goal?

Amelia: That’s such a wonderful question. As you know, I’m very passionate about this subject and I think about this a lot because I don’t have the same power as the richest man or the richest 17 people in the world have in order to enact incredible radical change. But at the same time I’m very confused as to why the richest 17 people in the world who now hold a higher consolidation of power and wealth than has ever been seen in human history — this is incredible; this 0.01% has more money, more consolidation, more power than we’ve ever seen in human history — looking at those people, I’m shocked at their lack of imagination.

They have more power than anyone’s ever had, right? And yet they don’t believe that they can end world hunger; they don’t believe that they could end bias; they don’t believe they could end war. Why don’t they believe that? Or haven’t publicly committed to it? I mean, we see a lot of Twitter conversations back and forth where people are goading them into this, and they respond with, “I don’t believe that this is possible.” And I’m like, “How has their imagination grown so small?”

My job as an artist is to think of a world and imagine a world, prototype a world, dream the world, story-tell about this world, make music about this world, pull the hearts of people towards the center where we believe — not that the world could be a better place — where we believe that the world is a beautiful place that’s deeply deserving of our honor and our protection and our love and our joy.

If the people who actually are the only ones on the planet that have the power to do the biggest amount of change can’t even imagine a world in which they are the ones that could change the world, then I think my job as an artist is to help all of our collective imaginations become bigger. My job as an artist is to think of a world and imagine a world, prototype a world, dream the world, story-tell about this world, make music about this world, pull the hearts of people towards the center where we believe — not that the world could be a better place — where we believe that the world is a beautiful place that’s deeply deserving of our honor and our protection and our love and our joy. This belief can pull us to a realization that we are not just the sum of dollars that we make in our lifetime or the data or the ads that we click on.

All of that can be destabilized by the 99%. We can say, “Yeah, I don’t buy this paradigm anymore.” Maybe we could help that tiny group of people that are in control have a bigger imagination as well by seeing it through our eyes, because humans at the end of the day are very social and we’re very deeply connected to one another in so many levels, scientific and spiritual and ideological. The imagination is not coming from them. We are not seeing them bring about a more beautiful and a more just world.

Pier Carlo: You’re thinking that artists with their imaginations are a key part of this potential transformation?

Amelia: Absolutely. It’s our responsibility to take the knowledge of the generations of our ancestors and to continue this message of, “We see the world in cycles. We see the world moving in turns and in time.” And we’re able to prototype these ideas. Oftentimes we’ve seen artists meet technology right at the beginning as prototypers because we like to see that crack in rules and look at something new.

Our culture right now is very obsessed and fascinated by new as if new always equals better or new always equals progress, but I think artists are interested in the new for a different reason. I think it’s because the new has just enough element of chaos that our skills are very useful. We have very useful skills of being able to say: “OK, there’s something that’s chaotic. I can tell you a story about this and it will make sense. It’ll make sense in the timeline that we like to hear stories or like to experience information. I don’t have a lot of skills to do everything. I have a very particular skillset, and so I have to work with my skillset. My skillset is, I can take a moment of chaos and I can explain it to a very broad group of people in a way that makes their heart sing and gives them energy to continue to explore this. But I can’t do a lot of other things. There are a lot of things that are very important for building a world that is safe and just and that protects our planet. I’m not good at all of those skills, but I do have these particular skills, and I have to figure out how I can be of value to the community that I care about.”

Pier Carlo: Do you think there’s a demand in the tech world for the realignment of values you’re talking about? In capitalist terms, for instance, is there financial value to this kind of change in ethical values? And if not, how could tech companies and makers be convinced?

Amelia: Well, I have not actually had to convince them. People have sought me out and said, “Can you talk to my developers?” Like big blockchain corporations. Even Kickstarter invited me to speak to their entire company. There are a lot of people that find me and say: “Great! Our employees are really excited about this, and there’s a reason they don’t want to work for these companies that don’t embody their values. They’re actually working here because they think this company does embody their values, but they want to continue to move the needle and push that. They don’t want to just say, ‘OK, I joined this place because it’s not terrible.’ They want to feel really positive about the place they work and that it really has their values.” It’s been proven over and over and over for recruitment and to retain talent that if people feel as though their values are at odds with what the company is doing, they’re not happy.

I think you asked a slightly different question about a material interest, but there already is this interest of, “We want to be the company that people are proud to work at. We want to be the place that people are clamoring to work for.” Because actually we found out that people do care about values more than just dollars. Or if all the dollars are the same, what is the differentiator? In that case, it really is that “I believe in this company.” That’s always been the case with Silicon Valley. People really do believe in the places where they work there.

I haven’t had to really convince many tech companies. People are very excited to begin to have these kinds of conversations. The workshops that I do are not just talking about the philosophy of ethics. There are really practical things that developers can start to implement within their sprint systems. Because I’m a developer, right? I’m a technologist. So I will say to them, “Hey, look, we can embed valuable insights into our package .JSON. We can make explicit the values and ethics that we have, and then we can tell that to our community and have our community hold us responsible. And we can have protocols.”

That is a lot of times where the rubber meets the road when it comes to ethics in software development or ethics in AI. There’s a lot of disconnect. The people who are assumed to be the experts and therefore the only people who are allowed to talk about the philosophy of ethics and software are not the same people who are actually writing lines of code. So it’s up to the coder to decide how you can take this lofty complicated philosophical concept and then make it into my line of code. That’s difficult. That’s actually a lot to expect of someone who’s like, “I don’t know; I studied computer science, so now I have to interpret.”

I think we need some help there. Maybe those people are artists who can be the translators or the prototypers of that experience.

Pier Carlo: One of the many projects in which you’re involved is No-Funding.com, a project that asks, I’m going to quote here, “What would happen if artists were liberated from money and the self-censorship imposed by its pursuit?” Can you talk a little bit how the project works and what you’ve learned so far?

Amelia: Well, anyone can join. It’s No-Funding.com, or if you’re on my website, you can go in there. It’s just a Google form. You fill it out, and then I invite you to a weekly Zoom conversation. All of the topics that we talk about are generated by the people who are present.

The impetus is really during the pandemic I personally am not able to go to so many forums and talk with so many people about what is going on in the world, and I’m unfortunately reliant more and more on centralized media to tell me what’s happening. And that makes me feel very disconnected and lacking hope. No-Funding for me was really a way of asking, “What is actually going on where you are? And what things can we try out that could support each other as artists?

I think all of us are very tired of clamoring for these tiny grants that could be like one out of 900 or 9,000 or sometimes 900,000 [she laughs].

Pier Carlo: And that take five days to complete, right?

Amelia: Of course! And all of us are worn out, and we’re starting to realize that we are really ... . I mean, at least I realized I didn’t become an artist so that I could apply for grants and do better than my friend; I became an artist because I love working with other artists. I was joining a lot of arts groups on Zoom because of the pandemic, and all of them were formed around, “How can we give you funds? This is how you apply to this emergency COVID grant, or this is how you apply to that emergency COVID grant.” All of us were spending all of our time only talking about how to get funds and then applying and then not getting it because there’s too many of us that need it to get it.

And I thought, “What if we just stopped and we talked to each other and said, ‘What do you need? What do we need? How do we just direct-action this and directly help one another? How do we make our own mutual-aid network? We know how to use technology; can we use it for this?'” I’m very fascinated by DAOs [Decentralized Autonomous Organizations]. I love them and I respect them. I also think there are ways in which we just radically need to rethink orgs. The nonprofit system is broken, obviously. If I were a millionaire and I gave $4 million to a nonprofit to help artists, I know that it would probably filter down to two artists who would get an incredibly tiny amount of that.

I want to try to think of what’s next, how can we actually help each other and can we just pull resources and then vote on who uses this? ... What does that mean in a world where we are all separated all over the world and we don’t maybe have physical spaces anymore? How do we continue that legacy into these new spaces?

I don’t want to support that anymore. I want to try to think of what’s next, how can we actually help each other and can we just pull resources and then vote on who uses this? We’re very inspired in No-Funding by all of the movements that have preceded us, whether it’s Black Mountain College or different artists’ collectives or artist-run galleries or spaces. What does that mean in a world where we are all separated all over the world and we don’t maybe have physical spaces anymore? How do we continue that legacy into these new spaces?

Pier Carlo: I’m stealing my last question from you. It’s one you often ask your guests on Wampum.Codes. What’s made you laugh really hard recently?

Amelia: [Laughing] Oh, that’s a great question!

Pier Carlo: It’s yours!

Amelia: My son is a Zillennial; he’s 20 years old. He can tell whenever I’m stressed out, and he just forces me to watch meme comps with him, and we just watch memes and laugh hysterically. Luckily, I get a dose of that every day. When I’m not laughing at one of my two incredibly dopey dogs, I’m definitely laughing at memes.

I have to say this generation of my son — I guess they’re probably like 15 to 25 right now — they are hilarious. Their sense of humor is so meta; it’s so deep. I am so glad that we have a generation that is funny. Oh my God, we need that! [She laughs.]

February 28, 2022