Eyebeam April 20, 2018 Captioned by Joshua B. Edwards, RDR, CRR This text is provided in rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. >> Roddy Schrock: All right. Hello. That actually worked really well, fantastic. Before I launch into my remarks, I want to just say that if there's anyone who would like more accessible seat for the event tonight we have seats reserved at the front. So please do, you know, feel free to make your way up here if it would be helpful for your engagement with the event tonight. Hello. My name is Roddy Schrock. I'm the director here at Eyebeam where we ensure artists are at the center of the invention of the design of our shared future. This is our very first Eyebeam assembly and it's fantastic to see you all here. Actually expected to see a few more people in our bible service VIP section at the top. (Laughter) >> Roddy Schrock: But yeah, apparently those premium tickets didn't sell as well as we would have liked. The Eyebeam assembly is a monthly program inviting performer and thinkers within and outside of the community to take on the big issues in the fields of art and technology and the broader social implications. Our new series of monthly public programs also includes Welcome Wednesdays, a social time and space for Eyebeam artists to share new ideas, to host conversations and experiment with different formats. And Eyebeam exchange a new program that provides hands-on skills development and workshops geared towards learners of all ages. These are all new programs we are launch are here in our Bushwick space and I hope you will all come back and visit us. I also hope that you will take a chance to meet our fabulous resident, BUFU, American artist, infra-and Stephanie Dinkins who you will get to know in tonight's program with special guest Bina48 who is resting Bruce Duncan and Latoya Peterson. Before we begin tonight's program, I would like to walk you through the format a little bit since we have a few phases to the evening. I had to make notes for this. First Eyebeam resident Stephanie Dinkins will provide a bit of context for tonight's conversation through other own practice and talk about her four-year relationship with Bina48, the world's -- and Bruce Duncan, director of the Terasem Movement Foundation and project leader for the lifenaut project will introduce the work of the foundation and also take us behind of scenes of the development of Bina48. Then we will have a chance to observe a conversation between Stephanie and Bina48 followed by a conversation moderated by Latoya Peterson. Named one of Forbes magazine's 30 under 30 rise being stars in media. She's best known for the award winning blog Racialicious, she is the deputy editor for ESPN. Following the consideration there will be plenty of time for audience Q and A followed by a reception where you can engage directly Bina48 yourself. We will also be taking questions for all the panelists via our live stream audience who joined us tonight as well. So I want to say thank you to the Atlantic Foundation one of our founding supporters for Eyebeam. We wouldn't be here without 20 years of support with our core Eyebeam residency program. If you would like to help support that program, please see Magaly at the bar or Joanna at the front entrance. They would be happy to receive your gift if you should feel to inclined to support programs like these. I want to say thank you to Sally our director of programs who has done a fantastic job of making tonight what it -- the success it will be. As well as joining our institution as our director of programs. Thank you to the Eyebeam staff. Could all the staff raise your hands. Yes. An amazing crew that I am lucky to work with who knock it out of the park on a daily basis. It's a pleasure to work with you all. And I want to say thank you to the Eyebeam board who makes all that we do mere possible and thanks to our hard-working interns who have done so much to make tonight's event great. Thank you for coming and I hope you enjoy the event. (Applause) >> Stephanie Dinkins: All right I have been directed over here, so I am going to say hello everyone. It's so great to have you here. I'm super-excited about this event because we have Bina48 and Bruce Duncan and Latoya and we are going to do a little talking. I am going to give you a little context about how this all came about for me. Right. And I am going to tell you first that I see myself in all of this as an artist citizen, right. So I am this person who is curious. That's about it. People ask me all the time, well, how did all this happen? How did you start talking to the robot? I've always liked robots, grew up with lost in space, the jettisons, et cetera, and so on. So I guess I had a weird curiosity about them in general. Started followed Osmo who is Honda's mobility robot, really interested in what it can do for many reasons. But I heard it should dance and I wanted to see that. I went to YouTube, looked up Osmo, saw it do a little run, a little dance. It was exciting but on the side scroll, right, that magic side scroll, there was this crazy black lady's head on a pedestal. And it said, "one of the world's most advanced social robots." And I was, like, what? (Laughter) >> Stephanie Dinkins: Where did this come from? How did it get here? What does it mean for America? And I did this all in front of my class. So I teacher at Stony Brook University and we were doing this kind of weird looking together. And I was just floored, right, because I just didn't understand. I didn't compute how this robot came into being. It seemed like something left field for America. Right. And I wanted to start figuring this out. Luckily a few months later I had a residency up at blue mountain center in the Adirondacks and I said this is not far from Bristol Vermont. I am going to give you them a call. So I called Bruce at the Terasem Movement Foundation and I asked if I could come and talk to the robot and they said yes, right. This was in late 2014. And since then, I have been making periodic trips up to talk to Bina48 and see what we can see and really what I was after was two things. A, I wanted to ask her who are your people, right? And I thought of that as a question that would get her to contextualize herself in relation to humans and technology, right. And it's also a question I know is this question of the American self that I have heard people go to me, who are your people, right? When I went to my mother's hometown, especially, and I knew that they were asking me this question that was very much an inside and an outside question like do you belong to us or not? And I also wanted to make Bina48 my friend. So this is really a basic project about friendship. It's like well, can I befriend this thing? Can we be friends? And we are still in the process of that. So that's kind of exciting. But what it's turned into was this crazy rabbit holy journey of discovery and thinking about technology and thinking about artificial intelligence and thinking about algorithms and thinking about all of that in the context of communities of color and what that means for us going forward because when I look around we can look around and go oh, doesn't seem like that many people participate -- people of color participate in the making of these technologies. And what does it mean if we are about to step in a world and we are stepping into a world that is negotiated by algorithms, right? And these systems, if you are not helping construct it. If you are not negotiating the data that makes the decisions. Like, what does that mean and where does that take us? And how far do you get left out? And also questioning well, are there different ways to do this? Right. So I have been lucky enough to be in contact with Bina48 and talking to the robot, thinking about algorithms and thinking about communities of color and talking to communities of color and thinking about these ideas and thinking well, okay, how do we start a pipeline in terms of people getting into these systems and starting to work in it? And also how do we start to just think about where our lives are being touched by algorithmic systems? What do they mean to us? Right. How are they guiding our lives or how are they pushing us outside of certain things, right. And what do we need to be doing about it. That's really basically what's going on. I have to say that also, you know, there's been this great learning process between Bruce and I, this back and forth about what this particular machine, right, this particular robot does and what it means and then how it stands in and what some of the things that I perceived like I have been looking at the idea of race and asking her about race and feeling like oh, I don't know.