Artist Stephanie Dinkins Has Launched An Interactive AI Public Art Installation In Brooklyn That Invites The Community To Share Their Stories

Stephanie Dinkins is merging AI and art for an exhibition in Brooklyn, NY.

An “artist by birth,” Dinkins began with a display of her photography from a trip to Central America — a trip prompted by her interest in learning Spanish. This exhibit, held in Staten Island, would become her first. Fast forward to 2025, and she has launched an exhibit that is merging art and AI with the goal of creating a more equitable future.

Dinkins told AFROTECH™ in an interview that she’s always been drawn to technology, and in 2014 a pivotal moment pushed her to deeply explore how the future is being shaped. She witnessed a humanoid robot on YouTube, called Bina48, being interviewed by reporters. The technology was launched by Hanson Robotics four years earlier based primarily on the personality and appearance of Bina Aspen Rothblatt, a Black woman, the company website mentioned. Dinkins reached out to the company, which permitted her to talk to the robot that was being trained through conversations with individuals.

“I would find these holes in Bina48 training or development that felt like it was a flattening of humans for me, especially a flattening of Blackness for me. And I wanted to question what that meant. Over time, I talked to that robot, had conversations with it, talked to its developers, talked to other people who would ask me, ‘Well, when are you going to build your own thing?’ And my answer was, ‘I’m not a coder, I’m not a technologist. How am I going to build this thing?’ Well, if I were going to bring something that was a technology into the world, it’s clear that this technology is going to be really impactful, and that I have to keep the attention span to work on it, so what would that be?”

This inspired her to develop an AI chatbot that captured three generations of her family’s history. Through this process, she gained deeper insight into how technology often misrepresents Black individuals and, just as importantly, how Black people can actively shape and inform these systems to make them more accurate and inclusive.

‘If We Don’t, Who Will?’

Dinkins most recent project is titled “If We Don’t, Who Will?” and introduces the public to a series of works by the artist, titled “The Stories We Tell Our Machines,” per More Art. According to information shared with AFROTECH™, it is an interactive AI laboratory and sculptural installation, commissioned by More Art and designed in collaboration with architects LOT-EK, that will be located at 300 Ashland Place in Downtown Brooklyn’s BAM Cultural District from June 25 – Sept. 28, 2025.

Visitors are encouraged to stop by the lab, which is housed in a shipping container, to contribute their personal stories or reflections through the technology or with each other. This can be done through a representative on site or by using a QR code, which will direct attendees to an app. These conversations, some being sparked by a series of questions, will then be recorded and processed by an AI system that will generate visual responses in real time.

“Right now, we’re told often that, we have this AI. It has things that are harmful in it. It is biased in many ways. We should fear it, and it’s taking our information,” Dinkins expressed. “And one of the things that I’m thinking about is, ‘How do we survive this technology if it doesn’t have some of our information, especially from the ways that we know ourselves vs. the ways that people try to paint us, because I think they’re often two very different things.’ I want any system that is working around me, my family, my loved ones, and really anyone, to have that knowledge, to be able to serve us better, to care for us, and support us.”