Interview with Amelia Winger-Bearskin

Transcript

0:00:00 - 0:03:04
Ana Tiquia
So hello and welcome to another SLV LAB conversation. My name is Ana Tiquia and I'm Head of Digital Strategy, Research & Insights at State Library Victoria. SLV LAB is a prototyping lab at the State Library. We experiment and test ideas using advanced technology to open enable access to library collections, data and spaces.We're recording today from the podcast studio at State Library Victoria, and I'd like to acknowledge that we are here on unceded Wurundjeri Woiwurring Lands. State Library Victoria acknowledges the traditional lands of the Victorian Aboriginal clans and their cultural practices and knowledge systems. We recognise that our collections hold traditional cultural knowledge belonging to Indigenous communities in Victoria and around the country.We support communities to protect the integrity of this information gathered from their ancestors in the colonial period. We pay our respects to their lders, past and present, who have handed down these systems of practice to each new generation for millennia. At SLV LAB, we bring people together to explore library and technology futures through conversation, collaboration, and code. And today, for one such conversation, we are so lucky to be joined by artist and technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin.Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She's also the founder of the AI Climate Justice Lab, The Talk To Me About Water Collective and the Stupid Hackathon. In 2022, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Award as part of the Sundance AOP fellowship cohort for her project CLOUD WORLD /SKYWORLD, which was a part of the Whitney's Sunrise/Sunset series. In 2021, she was a fellow at Stanford University as their artist and technologist-in-residence, made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honour of Roberta Bowman Denning. In 2020, she founded Wampum Codes, an award winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on Indigenous values of co-creation.While a Mozilla Fellow at the MIT Co-creation studio. In 2019, she was a delegate at the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion for His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama at his world headquarters in Dharamsala, India. In 2018, she was awarded the 100 K Alternative Realities Prize for her virtual reality project: Your Hands Are Your Feet from Engadget and Verizon Media. This was also the year that non-profit IDEA New Rochelle won the 1 million Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge for their VR / AR citizen toolkit to help the community co-design their city.Amelia, hello and thank you so much for joining us today. I was wondering if you could start by just sharing where you're joining us today from.0:03:04 - 0:03:54
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Thank you so much for having me. It's such a delight to be able to talk with you today and to be a part of your new, soundscape and interview and conversation initiative.I'm joining from Gainesville, Florida. Where... I'm not originally from here, I moved here to take this position at the University of Florida. I am Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma. And I grew up partially in Oklahoma, and also partially in upstate New York. We have Seneca reservations, in both areas. And so I got to grow up, in the basin of both, which was really beautiful and fun.I'm excited to go to Oklahoma next week. Again to go back and visit. And also there's a film festival called Dead Centre, where my new film is from. So it's always fun to go back to Oklahoma in the hot summer.0:03:54 - 0:04:03
Ana Tiquia
I was wondering, we could begin our conversation if you could just share a bit about yourself and how you came to your practice, however you describe it?0:04:03 - 0:10:07
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Thank you so much for that question. The first sort of artistic, like public facing work that I did, I started when I was about 7 or 8 with my mother, who is a storyteller.She is a storyteller, both of our tribal nation, but also just broadly, a storyteller who enjoys, you know, perfecting her craft and travelling around the world. Storytellers have their own, you know, networks and conferences and community. And she was part of the broader, more global storytelling sphere, as well as being, someone who is the official storyteller of our tribal nation.So, with, with Seneca-Cayuga Elders, when they give you a story and you become a storyteller, it's, you know, it's a long process. You you gain trust from the Elders. They they see you as a respectful person who is engaged with the community, is engaging with your language. You know, is a good steward of the the meanings and the stories and the truth that are within, some of our historical stories.And when an Elder gives you that story, it's your role not to tell it verbatim, as the Elder has told it to you, but to reinterpret it for the next generation, and to do so with each audience, so that if you maybe are presenting to an audience of children, you're going to slightly change the story to make it more relevant to them.Or or if you're with a group of people, who are facing a specific issue as storytellers may as they, their role in the community is, sometimes they may stand up in a meeting when there is disagreement with the tribal nation, or we're coming to consensus or decision making process and they'll say, well, let us remember this story and they'll tell it, you know, and maybe in that moment they'll tell a very short version.Maybe in other moments they'll tell an expanded one. So storytelling as a function is a part of our, you know, our confederate democracy as a part of our peacemaking process. So when my mom would tell stories, part of our storytelling can be music, it can be, crafts as well. So I would play flute and drum or sing while my mom told stories.And she is not musical, but loves to include the music. And a lot of, different types of music making are parts of the stories where you may have the flute play at a certain part, talking about birds the way that they sounded, or there are certain songs that go along with the type of songs that may be, you know, a character in the story is singing at a certain time.So I would be her musical accompaniment. And, from there, I, you know, I got very interested in music, and I auditioned to, to study at the Eastman School of Music when I was 12, and I became a student of Seth and Jane McCoy there, who were both incredible opera singers, and I studied, you know, primarily with them throughout my education at the Eastman School of Music and Vocal Performance.And I thought myself that I would be an opera singer, and that's what I do with my life and I what I had trained and ??? to do. And I went and worked in that field professionally at a very young age. And, but I, I was so, I was so interested in making things that maybe had never been made or were connected the Indigenous perspective with some of these Western traditions of singing.And, I started working with new opera festivals and, and creatives like artists and technologists to make new forms of opera. And I would find myself being one of the performers, one of the singers sometimes. Then the composer, I became a composer and sometimes a director. And as we started using more and more advanced technologies or really hacking together what we could at that time because this was kind of in the mid-nineties.You know, we were really hacking, like robotics and glass slides and a computer that could barely play a graphic in real time and all these kind of things. For, for live, exciting, immersive, opera experiences. We would maybe get a commission like, once every five years for a new opera festival. And I was very young and kind of impatient, and so I was like, ‘Great, I did this once,now when do we do this again?’. And everyone's like, ‘Well, it takes a really long time to get a commission, it's like a five year wait cycle,’ and I thought, ‘ what am I going to do in between this time?’ and people started to approach me and say, ‘Hey, could you do something at our art museum or at our gallery?’. And I found that the art world had a much sort of quicker development cycle where I maybe didn't need 100 people in my opera to produce something. I could do something that was the version, like the personal version, of having projections and music and live performance.I guess like a one woman show. And people started calling me a performance artist or a transmedia artist or new media artist, and I thought I was kind of doing new opera forms. Right? So I always say that I, I, I'm not really I haven't really changed in any way my practice, but the name for what it is that I do has changed throughout time. Sometimesit’s net art, transmedia art, performance art. Sometimes now, of course, people are talking more about AI as a placeholder for any type of computational algorithmic thinking or process, where as before it might have been, emergent, multi-agent theory with agents that are computational and real in real time, or audio art or sound art.Right? And now the shorthand is like AI, which is great. And I have worked, with artificial intelligence since about 2016, when I was a Researcher and Professor of Art at Vanderbilt University, and, and it's been exciting to see the way in which artificial intelligence has changed, but from my perspective, I've been working at that intersection of computation, hardware, and live performance and art for a long time.It's just sort of like what people are calling it. But at the end of the day, the curators, the friends, the people that I've been making this with haven't changed. Like we're all growing and learning new things, and the institutions that are supporting this work are still there and still supportive. But oftentimes the framing around what it is that we're doing changes, but we're still doing that thing of telling stories with the types of technologies that are emerging, that we find as humans, great containers for the values, ethics, and dreams that we hope will lead us forward, for the future generations.0:10:07 - 0:10:47
Ana Tiquia
Thank you so much, Amelia, for that really generous and beautiful telling of your story and how you came to your practice. I, really loved hearing about, the early days of creating with your mum, and it was really fascinating to hear you talk, to your mum's practice as a as a storyteller. I actually had a question for you around, whether you also would refer to yourself as a storyteller, because I'm aware that storytelling is a big part of your practice.And I guess, to sort of phrase that as a question, I was wondering what you see as the importance of story, and the importance of story in your work?0:10:47 - 0:12:56
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
I think that I have maybe a more abstract way of approaching storytelling, the way that a craftsman or an artist will approach the way that we have our stories, like in in my tribe, you know, the function of a storyteller is really somebody who's using oral traditions to tell live stories that have a specific, you know, beginning, middle and end. And then the role of the artist,you know, if you're weaving fabric, making clay pots, building masks or, you know, building homes or beading, you kind of take it and abstract that and you abstract the values into some, some of the patterns that we have are very traditional, but artists are always asked to kind of, you know, memorialise, think, dream about, new processes and bring those into the ways that we design.So I think of my process as different from my mother's in that way. Also, I don't have the official distinction as the storyteller, nor would I want to. I understand that that the our functions in the world are different. And, her role as a storyteller, mine was, using stories and taking the lessons from those stories. But there is this layer of abstraction that artists do as a way of taking something that maybe is time based – beginning, middle, end, and, and maybe looking at that moment at all different angles in time.Sometimes I still do. A lot of my work is durational, a lot of it is video art, but it's beginning and middle and end is almost in a looping fashion. Maybe more, quantum layering in that, in that respect, or even in photographic process where you have this ability to see many images at the same time through different types of processes.So, for myself, I am still inspired by a lot of our traditional stories, and I do think that the role of an artist is similar to that of a storyteller, where we are a part of our cultural conversation in our community, we're thinking about values and ethics. We're often pushing against cultural norms, expanding definitions. But the role of artists is slightly different than someone who is trying to bring something into a time-based narrative.We often push at the notions of what time is or what it could be, and I think that's important as a role for an artist.0:12:56 - 0:13:59
Ana Tiquia
That's brilliant. I really want to come back to you on that, conversation about time. But I also was resonating with, what you mentioned just earlier about feeling that computational technologies have become, in some ways, that AI has become a placeholder for discussing a lot of what we'd normally discuss as computational technologies as a whole.I was really enjoying when I was preparing for our conversation, listening a bit to a talk that you gave earlier at Stanford on on AI and Art and Creativity, and I was really interested by the, one of the central questions you were asking, really, as I understood it, to inquire around the cultural narratives, values and worldviews behind our understandings of AI.And you had this great prompt, which was, you know, what is the creation story of AI? And I was wondering if you might talk a little bit more to what you see as these sort of cultural norms and narratives behind the kind of dominant use of technologies, that we're encountering today?0:13:59 - 0:18:28
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Yeah. Thank you so much for that question.You know, we are maybe in some ways I'm living in real time, the creation story of AI, just for the singular reason that as an AI researcher, at a moment when maybe public discourse: news, journalists are very excited to talk about AI, they will reach out to me and ask me for quotes. And so I have these daily conversations with people around the world who are asking really interesting questions.Sometimes you think they're going to be the same, but they always, you know, they'll send me the questions ahead of time. And then when I actually get into the interview, we're, we're having a very unique and different conversation. And maybe it's specific to the countries that they're in or a news cycle or something that we're responding to.And I feel very privileged to be a part of that and feel as though I am watching and being a part of this creation story of AI. But there are certain, fears that I continue to hear reverberated or, misconceptions or even, consensus that shouldn't even be consensus. And I'll give you an example of that where, you know, maybe a couple, maybe like 7 or 8 months ago when I was either giving talks or speaking with journalists, they would often refer to AI is like ‘The AI’, like there was a singular AI, like, when is ‘The AI’ going to be smart enough to replace us?When is the AI going to be? So superintelligent that it's like the end of humanity? Like as if there was just like one company that was like running one AI, and this one AI was going to have a singular consciousness. And that was an odd, an oddity to me because I was like, that's interesting that you've already kind of laid down the quest to maybe regulate or talk about or integrate AI within our culture and just already assume that it's so at the bleeding edge, that it's its own sentient being, which is wild, since right now it's just a lot of different developers in a lot of different companies and research institutionsand, and, you know, coding groups who are all working on different aspects of, you know, machine learning technologies and deep learning technologies and, large language models. And we're all – it's just like any type of scientific research, really. Like we all have a piece of it. We all have our specialities and we are I mean, if you can get ten scientists to agree about anything, that would be incredible.But we do agree on certain standards, on certain norms. But that's why we have researchers because we'll say, okay, I understand what you're doing with your research, but I have a slightly different take and it's no different with AI. And so I was kind of shocked, you know, about eight months ago that suddenly people are thinking like, oh, we've already solved that somehow.And there's only one. And it's also, you know, about to take over.We've moved back from that I think as more people in the public are able to start playing with some of these AI as a service, API based interfaces like, oh, now, when I ask my class, ‘how many of you have used AI?’,and they're all freshmen, I teach a freshman class, and when I started teaching that class three years ago, you know, a couple of students would raise their hand and then, last year half the students would raise their hand, this year – all of them raised their hands. Like they have all used ChatGPT at some point in time. They've all used Midjourney at some point in time.The my students are primarily, you know, engineers, but also artists and creatives and people that work in game design or game development. So they've they've all played with it. Why not? They have a browser. They can play with it. So there's no longer this notion that there is the one AI they're like, ‘what do you mean when you say AI?,’When I'm like, ‘yes!’, this is wonderful. I'm glad that we're starting to get the discourse sort of away from that, that black box thinking. However, as soon as we have or grasp the concept of the research, again we start formulating notions that, like, for instance, AI is only based in something that is like a GAN or a Large Language Model.And that's also not true, right? So as soon as, and it's hard as science has always had this, difficulty that science is moving fast and it doesn't always bring the general public with it. And that's the very important work that science and art and creative educators do to help those bridges and to build those transitions, to prepare the next generation to be scientists and leaders, but also to just help everyone to understand this so that we can have good policies and protections and and a good civic society around our science.So it is really important that as we do research, we also make sure we are communicating the type of research with, the general public so that we can have more input, more voices, and people can understand what's at stake.0:18:28 - 0:19:13
Ana Tiquia
Such great points there. One of the other points you made in this, in the talk that I was really enjoying,you asked a really another really great prompt, which was around, the kind of current imaginaries that we have around AI or the current stories that we're telling around AI.And, and you really pointed to a lack of positive stories, that we seem to be telling about AI and then asked the question, ‘why are we investing so much in something that we can't tell a good story about, or can't imagine a good future for?’. And I was wondering whether you see, maybe the possibilities for different or alternative thinkings about AI or alternative imaginations for how AI might be?If we were to tell more positive stories about it.0:19:13 - 0:23:31
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Yeah. You know, I love to poll my students, I was like, just we have like, you know, I have a very large class where there's about 130 of them, but I do these kind of interactive pollings so we can really have a dialogue because I want to know what they're thinking and where they're starting.And every month it's going to be different because of, how quickly this field of AI is moving. And so I always want to know what their questions are, where they are at. And so when I first started teaching this class, three years ago, I would ask students ‘Tell me every single time you've ever heard a fictional mention of AI, whether it's a video game of a science fiction novel, you know, all the stories you've essentially heard, like the creation stories of AI’.And, we would put them all up on the board and we would look at them in word clouds, like how many, you know, people were interested in and get all of them out onto this, you know, like interactive video image on the screen and say, okay, these are all the stories. And then I would say, ‘how many of these do you code in a positive way, like where AI is the good guy, right?’.Or helpful in any way. And in the first year it was zero. And then the second year it was one, one, young woman said that she had read a book about an evil AI, but then these coders came together and like, we're able to recode it until it was helpful. So it started out evil, but then it transformed into something that was good.And then this year, when I asked my students that same question, it wasn't the case. I saw we had about maybe 7 or 8 of them that were positive. And I said, ‘okay great. Who put these? You know, please talk to me about what story this is.’ And, they are starting to see, I think, and understand, most of the 7 or 8 that were positive were from, recent, television shows or recent news articles.Even much more of them were okay, this isn't a story of fiction. This is a story that I read last week of how someone is doing, you know, genomic research or someone doing water filtration or identifying bird sounds or tracking, illegal poaching. Right. And so the positive ones tended to be, not fiction, but truth, but real news stories.And so that's an interesting evolution I've seen just in the last three years. And so I think one, people are finding positive ways of using AI. And so those stories are just real. And people will maybe make fiction about those true stories. But the true stories often happen first. Sometimes in science fiction they happen before, maybe we'll see a bit of a reversal where where truth will influence fiction rather than the other way around which has been sort of the story of AI in the past.But I see a great amount of use for AI anywhere where you have large amounts of data sets that are difficult for humans to, to process at any given time. So using you know, I think I've seen a lot of great scientific research and white papers, using AI for environmental sciences, for, modelling the way that water systems work or the ice caps and the ways in which they're melting or understanding, like multiple sensor arrays and comparing them or, or projecting the type of data that may happen in the future.So what all this means when it comes to positives is just, you know, the ways in which science moves forward can always move forward in a, in a positive or a negative way. And so imagining having an ability to process data in new ways or make predictions in new ways, AI can be of help. And the types of sciences that depend on data are all of them are in the single science right now.But it doesn't use data in some way, some of them just these larger data sets. We're seeing patient data that is, you know, being historically scanned and processed in ways that AI models can be used for medical research. We're looking at it, of course, for preventative medicine and for vaccines and for medications. But I am also very inspired by the ways in which AI, is used to model climate futures and to look at, you know, predictive modelling around our water systems; systems that are very complex.And, when I give a talk this year at GTC for Nvidia, they talked a lot about, a sort of digital twin they created of the Earth, with AI that is looking towards modelling weather patterns and weather systems. And that is a great use of AI to be able to imagine how, different storms that start in one part of the world will affect within hours or minutes or seconds other places in the world.That's really valuable, right?0:23:31 - 0:24:55
Ana Tiquia
I actually wanted to apologise a bit. I didn't really want to ask you too much about AI, because I feel like there's so many conversations and so much hype and even hyperbole around the topic at the moment. But you actually segway it into another kind of conversation I wanted to have with you, which was more, I guess, around your work in relationship to climate and environmental justice and environmental futures.You have a beautiful, artist statement on your website, and I would really encourage anyone to go and read it. And I'm struck by a number of things that you, that you articulate in your statement, but, in, in talking about how your area of your main focus of your research is water.You have the statement: ‘I stand with those who defy categorisation. We are prototyping just futures in places that do not exist for people they one day will be, for the liquid, the hybrid, the cyber and the unreal. I thought that was a beautiful statement. And I guess also, speaking here from SLV LAB, which is a prototyping lab, I was really interested in how you're thinking with or working with the idea of the prototype and what it means, for you to be in the act of prototyping just futures,Would you be able to talk a little bit more to the role that prototypes or the act that prototyping plays in your work?0:24:55 - 0:29:53
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Absolutely. You know, when it specifically comes to water, I started off by joining the Water Institute here at the University of Florida and just meeting and getting to know all the other types of researchers that use, water in their work.Many of them are using artificial intelligence in their water research. Some of them are looking at it from medical justice standpoint, like they have found contaminants in the water that are put there from pesticides that are causing Alzheimer's in patients and and trying to legislate and regulate and make people care about this and understand or stop using these pesticides and then others who are modelling, you know, future water systems for the ice caps.Other others, work with religious communities around the sacredness of water and making sure to include interfaith dialogue in the protection of waterways. So it's a very diverse, institute that I'm a part of at the University of Florida. And I wanted to just meet everyone, talk to everyone, because I was I created a project called Talk to Me About Water, where, where a group of science researchers like US Geological survey data, producers and designers, as well as, artists and machine learning scientists, and musicians, and we create artworks at museums, libraries, festivals, any place where we have a very large, diverse public audience.Part of it we will do immersive performances, video installations. But we always do workshops. And the reason we do workshops is because, you know, we're all obviously called Talk to Me About Water, and we want to talk to people about their water stories. We want to, bridge that gap between Indigenous people who are experiencing the water crisis most acutely globally, centering their voices, connecting water research and water scientist work.So that's that science storytelling part. And then bringing that into a way that is a plain conversation. We can have with diverse audiences. So we'll we'll create these workshops where we have they're open to the broad public, and we will talk about Indigenous voices and we'll talk about the scientific research. But most importantly, we we've we've turned into a conversation.And then from all of the conversations, we have ways of sourcing the types of questions and answers that people have, created in these workshops. And so because of that, we have this sort of data bank of about 500 conversations that we also use as part of our research to, further the ways in which we talk about water. Something that I'm interested with this, you know, collective, this group of, of, of amazing people called Talk To Me about Water, is how we might shift the tone or register.And again, these are kind of like musical thoughts, but the tone or the register of the conversation around our climate crisis. Because when you speak about climate grief and you speak about the climate crisis in a way that is turning up the fear, like like urgency is often what people have done historically. And I just mean in maybe the last ten years or even 20 years, I guess, you know, since maybe the climate activist work I’ve done in the 90s, it's been really around, like scaring people that this terrible thing is coming or is already here,or is just around the corner. And you must act in some way, even even though the way in which you might act, it really cannot be a solo act. It has to be something that's in connection, because something like the water system, it's not really just dependent on if everyone turns off their tap for six less seconds a day. It's actually like much more complicated than that, because contaminants, the way contamination works, the way our water system works, it's not just about an individual action of one person.And so changing the tone, changing the registry of the way in which we talk is important because we through my, you know, my great colleagues and science researchers, you know, in the consortiums around universities around the world have found out that by overwhelming people with fear and sort of climate catastrophe language, it actually does it it does not help them make an action, and it does not help them come into community that can make larger impacts.In fact, it usually overwhelms people and makes people feel as though they don't have a place within the movement and oftentimes can make them feel, like frozen or overwhelmed, which is the opposite of maybe what you're trying to do. If you're an educator and you want to, inform and educate people and then hope that they take an action by overwhelming them with fear and dread, you are making them paralysed for making, an action which is not helpful.So we're interested in thinking of other types of registers that we can have these conversations that could please people in a, in a place that they feel educated, informed and empowered to make action, or empowered to know what types of actions, fit within their lifestyle and that they can feel like honoured and proud of those types of actions rather than, ashamed or nervous that they're not doing enough.Does that make sense?0:29:53 - 0:30:15
Ana Tiquia
I absolutely, I think it's really fascinating, isn't it, because that yeah, as you mentioned, there is so much fascinating research that shows down how when we panic or, feel any sense of urgency, it really shuts down our sense of, appreciation or awareness of possibilities or shuts down those abilities to find pathways to act.0:30:15 - 0:31:22
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm just watching it within, these workshops. It's it's interesting. People usually have the same maybe 5 or 6 things they start with, and they sound as though, because they're the same, it's almost like everyone... it’s what maybe the public discourse is around water. They'll say things like, ‘Oh, you know, we shouldn't use plastic water bottles or I shouldn't use this much water’.And then we'll say, ‘Okay, great’. We'll talk to them after they get sort of that out of their system. Then we start talking about maybe their relationship to water. The first person who ever taught them to swim, how often they see water in a week. And as we establish like a personal relationship to water, people are able to start dreaming and thinking of ways in which they can participate, ways in which what they do is enough, how they can find a community and build a larger group that can have sustained movement, right, rather than an individual like one off action.They can be like, oh, I could become a part of a community where we would do this, you know, weekly or monthly, which is much more, like reasonable and expansive and, and inclusive for more people to join the movement if that makes sense. yeah,0:31:22 - 0:31:35
Ana Tiquia
I was curious about how working with water, whether that's shifted or transformed your approach to your own art and technology practice in any way, shape or form?0:31:35 - 0:35:43
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Absolutely. I think in two ways. One, the same way that all of us have like special interests and hobbies. Right? And so when you like, when you meet people who are into opera, they have like a certain way or certain other adjacent things that they're into, right? Maybe they're really into I don't like flowers. Right. And so you’ll find like, wow, that's kind of interesting that people who are really into operaalso know a lot about flowers or birding, right? That's just kind of a side adventure. But that's the same with water people. I’ll say that like the water scientists are hilarious and you go to these water conferences. My sister is, a water scientist for the US, and she and I will tell you that water people are my people.They are so funny. You go to a water conference and they'll be like, okay, everybody, we're starting the plenary session and they're all just like floating around, and you can't really herd them because you herd, like one and then all of them go into a different stream in the other direction. You're like very watery and it's amazing. And then the way they think, the way that they, they disagree, they're like incredibly hard to control.Like you can't tell all of them to think one way. They really are going to move their own way, like currents – it’s kind of beautiful and amazing. And I really love water people. And I love, you know, continuing research and being a researcher side by side with them. Yes. I'm a weirdo because I’m an artist and a musician and, you know, work in AI, right? .And so all those things might seem odd, but to water people, they are very – they go with it, they go with the flow, and they don't see categories in the same way. They're they're very focussed on their own specific part of the water story, but they know it's so interconnected. They are open in this beautiful way. So I love being part of the water science community, much in the way that I feel akin when I'm working with coders and, specifically people who do AI research.I felt like, oh, like, ‘these are my people’. I feel the same way with water people. And I was really happy to discover that. And so of course, that affects my work tremendously because I've learned how they are in the world, and it also has changed a lot, the way that I think about making my own work and collaborating with, larger and larger systems.I love to create artwork that's part of a larger projects. I'm working right now with the amazing Dr Zorana Pringle at the, Yale School of Medicine’s Emotional Intelligence Centre – Centre for Emotional Intelligence. And we're doing this long term study around of, you know, creativity in the arts and its impact on public health. But we also started dreaming and thinking of ways in which we could research how people are making art with AI and what that has to do with emotional intelligence.And I love having my work situated within these larger, spheres. Even though water is so large, I'm like continuing to be connected to even larger systems like healthcare for thinking of how, you know, cities or nation states aren't engaging with, with software systems. So that for me is exciting as an artist. And it it changes the time and the scope.There's work that I talk about, you know, about this for me is what I call like, quick and slow. And the quick work is something that I'm making on my own that is expressing, like processing the ways that I'm understanding some of the scientific research. And then the slower work is where I'm working with hundreds of people or even five peoplebut we're working with really large, you know, organisations or nation states or large policy initiatives around some of these ideas of AI or climate justice or... or, the ways in which computations affecting our public health healthcare system. And those things are slower because we're writing grants and we're meeting with experts and we're moving at the pace of, clinical studies.And, you know, there's an immune system around those type of processes that they're slow for a good reason because we have to make sure we aren't doing any harm and that we're, you know, able to reproduce our work. And when at the end of it, we say that we've discovered something, it's it's based in, you know, a really solid grounding of science.And I like the quick and the slow, and I think I will continue to work within that framework.0:35:43 - 0:37:36
Ana Tiquia
Thanks for introducing slowness. I agree as well. You know, there's it's very easy to to chart these things as a binary, and, and put the quickness into the I think technology particularly sort of advanced technology fields have often had these cultural biases towards fastness and quickness.But as you’ve pointed out, there's reasons why we go slow for so many good reasons, when we're dealing with things that are of value or are precious, or need to be kept safe.I'm always interested to ask technologists about what they consider to be technology. There's an Ursula K. LeGuin essay as that I, just a little essay of hers that I really love called A Rant on Technology, where she describes technology in, through her eyes as being, ‘the active human interface with the material world,’ and then goes on to sort of say, you know, that, I think I've got a quote here.‘We've been so desensitised by 150 years of ceaselessly expanding technological prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called technology at all. As if linen were the same things as flax, as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills were natural objects born with us, like our teeth and our fingers, as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grow on treesand we just picked them when they were ripe.’I was just thinking, you know, with such a focus that we currently have on AI, and AI development and as you said, you know, sometimes it's a very narrow definition of what AI is or could be. I was wondering if there's any other technologies that pique your interest or whether you think there's a risk of with this big focus that we have at this particular cultural moment in focusing on AI, whether there might be any other technologies, we run the risk of overlooking completely?0:37:36 - 0:41:49
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Yeah. Thank you so much for that question. And I loved the examples in the essay, I would add to it another technology that I feel like has become somewhat invisible is our way of forming consensus, peacemaking and government. Our, our democracy, all of those are technologies, right? Like there's a moment when they were built and then there was a moment, when they're perfected and changed and, and revitalised and reinvigorated or remade.And for me, I think the most exciting part of the story of AI that I want to be a part of, is deciding what the system is for using AI in an ethical way. So that and that was the technology, right? It maybe will not include an algorithm, but it will include the the borders around how we define the role of algorithms within our dailyrights. Maybe it's part of our digital human rights, maybe it's part of lines that we decide where and when a machine does not go, much in the same way we saw with nuclear proliferation agreements that as soon as the technology was invented, we needed to invent the ways in which we decided we would not use this technology or we would not, you know, there was designed ways in which, nation states came into accords of agreement and economies based on the ideas of when we would not use the technology and not just when we would.And that doesn't mean that I'm anti AI, but I believe that we are also now designing that technology. And I think of it as AI and human thriving. So in the past, maybe those fields, that are most similar or adjacent would be like human centred computing or user experience design, but the limitations of those fields were such that we're studying human behavioural models, the way in which they interact and engage with software, and the determining the ways in which they can engage with software and technology in the most seamless way.It takes out the question of should that technology be used at all? And there are certain instances when we're seeing a drop in patient care or a drop in health outcomes because of the use of a technology. And so that question actually has to be a part of that process. It has to be like, okay, what is the health outcome or what is the human thriving outcome that we want to see?And is this technology, aiding them or distracting them or making people believe there's a system in place where there actually is not one. And so it's obscuring the problem. And in that case, how do we get the technology out of it and then find a human solution and then decide, okay, maybe AI within this pipeline begins after the patient has done X, Y or Z, or the user has done X, Y or Z.And then at this phase is when it can begin and, and or this is the type of data that we want to use, not this type of data. And those boundaries are as important as, the invention is also the borders and the boundaries. And where we find that its use is not helpful. We see that all the time in medicine.I always use that, as you know, my stock example, because no one would think it's crazy if I said, yeah, I don't think we should have chemotherapy pills at the, you know, grocery store that any child could buy. I don't think anyone would think that was crazy. They're like, yeah, of course you go to a doctor and if you have been diagnosed with cancer and they determined that the treatment is chemotherapy pills and they'll give them to your pharmacy, it will take them or you will take them under their supervision within the hospital.No one thinks that's weird. And yet oftentimes when you talk about the borders or boundaries around artificial intelligence, people say, oh, so you're just against it. And you're like, well no, come on. You know, obviously I wouldn't be against chemotherapy if someone had cancer that their doctor had worked with them. If they got a second opinion, they determined that this is the best way towardssaving their life and having a healthy life and positive health outcomes. No one would think that's weird. So we do actually need to know when and where AI can be used for positive human thriving. That is not crazy to me. And I think many people in the world are seeing that that is the case and seeing the the places where an unbridled sense that it just belongs everywhere can cause a type of erosion of civic trust, which is very dangerous to our society.0:41:49 - 0:42:16
Ana Tiquia
Amazing points.I know we're coming up just up to time, and I wanted to ask you one last question. I really love asking the question of what ‘good futures’ look like to our interviewees and, those we're... in conversation with and, thinking about your work with artificial intelligence and art, I was wondering what you'd say a good future for artificial intelligence and artlooks like, feels like, sounds like to you?0:42:16 - 0:43:41
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Yeah. I mean, a lot of different of metaphors have been used of how people are engaging and using AI and art, and often people use phrases like a collaborator or a tool. I think of it a lot more like a protocol or a system so that, you know, working within a system often times artists will push and pull against it, I think a good system to compare it to would be money.There are artists who use money to make their art, and there's artists who use money as the topic of their art. They create work that help us think about different economies. They they have work that makes us question inequalities within the economy and money. And it becomes a sort of lightning rod or controversial take. I love when I’m teaching art to students that often ask me things like, ‘why is this painting worth so much money and this painting, isn't?’Those questions are really interesting and exciting to help them learn about what is art and what is value and what is culture. And so I think in the future AI will be very similar: some people will use it to make their work. Some people will use it as a thing to push against or talk about in their work, and others will ask questions as to why is this, you know, AI so expensive and why is this one not?Or why is this so available or computationally complex and this one isn't? And so I feel like in that way it will be a protocol, a system and an economy.0:43:41 - 0:44:06
Ana Tiquia
Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time in joining in talking with me today, Amelia. I feel like we've just sort of scratched the surface and we could keep talking for ages.But just before we wrap up, I was wondering if there's anything else that you'd love to talk about or if there's anything coming up in your work that you'd love to share.0:44:06 - 0:45:34
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Well, I'm just so thrilled to be a part of this, and I, I went to Melbourne about, 15 years ago to be a artist in residence at the University of Tasmania in Launceston and I'm very sad I didn't come in person this time, and I really do hope that I get to return to Melbourne again soon.I met so many creative, incredible, artists and technologists and thinkers there, it's, it's just a wonderful place. So thank you so much for having me be a part of this. Upcoming work that I have right now, I'm still kind of at the end of showing, a new film called I Would Like to Be the Night,I Would Like To Be Sky. And it's the first time I've made a more traditional, only it’s not very traditional, it’s a ten minute, experimental short. But it's traditional in the sense that it's like 16:9 and it goes on to a, a film screen at film festivals. And so it's been very fun this, this spring and summer going through the film festival circuit and going it's very different than art museums and art contexts that I'm used to.So next week I'll be at Dead Centre in Oklahoma, and I'm very excited to go and sit in, in a theatre, which is really funny. And then seeing the film projected on a big projector with a live audience, and that it's been very fun this past spring and summer. So for those of you who are at film festivals, I think the closest that my film got to Melbourne was, in Māori Land in New Zealand, which was a couple, like a month ago.Very fun. So film festivals are new for me, but they're really fun and tremendous and I'm having a great time with it.0:45:34 - 0:46:13
Ana Tiquia
Oh that's amazing. All the best for your upcoming screening and yeah, enjoy that film festival. Similarly, if you do come to Naarm or to Melbourne, we would love to have you here at State Library Victoria. And yeah, thank you so much.It's been such a joy to speak with you today. SLV LAB conversations are hosted by State Library Victoria. And this conversation with Amelia Winger-Bearskin is in partnership with Frame Documentary. Frame is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, Vic Screen and the State Library. And Amelia's participation in Frame Documentary has been made possible through the support of the US consulate in Melbourne.

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