TECHNE | "Secret Garden" @ BAM
“Secret Garden” by Stephanie Dinkins On show at TECHNE from January 16-19
WHERE: BAM Fisher, Fishman Space 321 Ashland Pl Brooklyn, NY 11217
DATES: Jan 16 - 19, 2025
HOURS: Thursday + Friday from 7-10pm, Saturday + Sunday from 2-10pm
Step into a garden and encounter oral histories spanning generations of Black women. As you wander this spatialized floral estate, you will encounter African-American women with stories to tell: surviving a slave boat, growing up on a 1920s Black-owned farm, surviving 9/11, and an AI powered by Black women. Secret Garden reminds us that sharing and receiving stories is an act of resistance.
Secret Garden is an immersive web experience and installation illuminating the power and resilience in black women's stories. Interactive audio vignettes generate a multi-generational narrative that collapses past, present, and future.
The vision of award-winning international artist Stephanie Dinkins, Secret Garden is a three-dimensional environment where people encounter oral histories spanning generations of Black women. As they wander this spatialized tract, guests meet women with stories to tell: surviving a slave boat, growing up on a 1920s Black-owned farm, surviving 9/11, and embodying an AI-powered by African American women.
Secret Garden illuminates the power of stories shared and withheld. It is an immersive experience that combines narrative and dynamic visual feedback to story reception. It seeks to guide toward greater compassion and understanding by surfacing responses to the stories of black women told from their intrinsic point of view.
They are stories of making a way, survival, and subtle resistance. Meant to be evocative rather than coherent, they are loosely woven episodes that illuminate a multi-generational historic trajectory. Though they do not have to be heard in order. Each story stands on the shoulders of the previous story. Each imaged character has elements of the past, present, and future. People who experience this piece should walk away thinking about resilience, survival, complicity, and a shared future.
Secret Garden reminds us to find ways to recognize ourselves in each other, grow, and adapt forms the fabric of our collective power.
Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who creates experiences that spark dialog about race, gender, aging, and our future histories. Her work in AI and other mediums uses emerging technologies and social collaboration to work toward technological ecosystems based on care and social equity. Dinkins' experiences with and explorations of artificial intelligence have led to a deep interest in how algorithmic systems impact communities of color in particular and all of our futures more generally. Dinkins' experiments with AI have led full circle to recognize the stories, myths, and cultural perspectives, aka data, that we hold and share form and inform society and have done so for millennia. She has concluded that our stories are our algorithms. We must value, grow, respect, and collaborate with each other's stories (data) to build care and broadly compassionate values into the technological ecosystems that increasingly support our future.
Dinkins teaches at Stony Brook University where she holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art. Dinkins earned an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Studies Program. She exhibits and publicly advocates for inclusive AI internationally at a broad spectrum of community, private, and institutional venues. Dinkins is a 2021 United States Artist Fellow and Knight Arts & Tech Fellow. Previous fellowships, residencies and support include the Artist Fellow of the Berggruen Institute and Lucas Artists Fellow in Visual Arts at Montalvo Art Center, CA, Onassis Foundation, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Creative Capital, Soros Equality Fellowship, Data and Society Research Institute Fellowship, Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works Tech Lab, NEW INC, Blue Mountain Center; The Laundromat Project; Santa Fe Art Institute and Art/Omi.
TECHNE is curated by Onassis ONX, an initiative by Onassis Culture dedicated to the development of new media art and digital experiences. Presented in partnership with Under the Radar and BAM, January 4 through 19, a part of BAM’s Next Wave 2024 and Emerging Visions, as well as Under the Radar ‘25. Visit utrfest.org and bam.org for more information.
Bloomberg Philanthropies is BAM’s Season Sponsor. Leadership support for BAM’s strategic initiatives provided by the Mellon Foundation. Leadership support for BAM Access Programs provided by the Jerome L. Greene Foundation. Leadership support for Next Wave 2024 provided by Ford Foundation. Leadership support for BAM’s strategic initiatives provided by Altman Foundation.
