“We can choose to use technology to build a more equitable world”

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a multimedia artist and professor of AI and the Arts, whose award-winning work uses artificial intelligence to make a positive impact on communities and the environment. Her work explores Indigenous storytelling to place intergenerational ethics at the core of innovation.

Winger-Bearskin’s extensive experience as an artist and technologist has led to a wide range of accomplishments. She is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts at the University of Florida, and the founder of several organisations, including the AI Climate Justice Lab and the Talk To Me About Water Collective.

Her work challenges us to consider the world around us from fresh perspectives. In her project TO BODY on show at Realtime, she uses AI to erase all human-made structures from urban landscapes, exposing the flaws in our visible and invisible visual infrastructures. Through a poetic narrative and AI animation, she encourages us to explore new ways of perceiving, beyond the given norms we have internalised.

Realtime curator and Scholar-in-Residence Charlotte Kent says, “She introduces the possibility of thinking about how we see as much as what we see.”

Similarly, her work Midnight, also on show at Realtime, asks the question, ‘Who determines the protocol for looking at the sky?’ This video work is part of SKYWORLD/CLOUDWORLD, a larger series and continues to explore themes of a communication network throughout the skies. The artist was inspired to make this piece when she heard a politician lay claim to the “universal ethical protocol” for looking at the sky. This led Winger-Bearskin to contemplate various notions of owning the sky: the laws that treat airspace as territory or an extension of the land, or the geographic information systems whose satellites we can see if the night is clear enough.

Inspiring critical thought at the intersection of art, technology, and the environment, Amelia Winger-Bearskin’s work sheds light on our relationship with our world, using tech as a tool to imagine new possibilities for the future.

— Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist whose award-winning work uses artificial intelligence to make a positive impact on communities and the environment. Combining animations and poetic text, Winger-Bearskin’s work explores Indigenous storytelling to place intergenerational ethics at the core of innovation. She is Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida and Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair. She is 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 part of The Whitney’s Sunrise/Sunset series.