Arts + Tech: Artists Respond ft. Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Arts and Technology for Racial Justice Series
with Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Photo courtesy of artist.
Recorded February 8, 2023
Grantmakers in the Arts continues engaging in discussions centered around arts and technology. The unique intersection between arts and technology has proven to be influential for all people (whether patron, funder, artist, or other), as we navigate the quickly evolving mediums for sharing information and shaping culture. Technology is not neutral, so how should funders target their dollars in order to advance the growth of arts and culture towards justice?
We are glad to kick off a series of artist-led conversations around this topic. We asked artists the question, “how can the intersection of arts and technology contribute to a racially just future, and what do funders need to know?” and from our conversations, we share this series of artist talks.
Today, in our third episode of the series, we are joined by Amelia Winger-Bearskin, professor, artist, and founder of UF AI Climate Justice Lab , Talk To Me About Water Collective, and Wampum.Codes Podcast.
Amelia will not only discuss our artist respond question, but also will offer her thoughts on our 2022 conference keynote conversation around “10 Things Funders Need to Know About Arts and Tech.”
To listen to the full episode, click here.
Sherylynn Sealy: Welcome to a podcast by Grantmakers in the Arts, a national membership association of public and private arts and culture funders. I'm Sherylynn Sealy, GIA senior program manager. This podcast is part of a series on arts and technology and funding. At the 2020 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference, Grantmakers in the Arts opened a discussion about arts and technology with Ruha Benjamin, Salome Asega, and Sage Crump. We have been engaging in discussions centered around arts and technology, and the various entry points into the conversation, ever since. The unique intersection between arts and technology has proven to be influential for all people as we navigate the quickly evolving mediums for sharing information and shaping culture. Technology is not neutral, so how should funders target their dollars in order to advance the growth of arts and culture towards justice?
We are glad to kick off a series of artist-led conversations around this topic, and we look forward to the insights. Today, in our third episode of the series, we are joined by Amelia Winger-Bearskin, professor, artist, and founder of the University of Florida Artificial Intelligence Climate Justice Lab, Talk To Me About Water Collective, and the Wampum Codes podcast. Amelia will offer her thoughts on our 2022 conference keynote conversation around “10 Things Funders Need to Know about Arts and Technology,” but also respond to how she thinks arts and technology can contribute to a racially just future.
So thank you so much for joining us today, Amelia.
Amelia Winger-Bearskin: Hello, thank you so much for having me.
SS: Of course, so let's take a minute for folks to learn more about who you are and how you're showing up today.
AWB: Thank you so much for that invitation. Yeah, thank you so much for having me on your show and I am an enrolled member of Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, dear clan on my mother's side. And my father, my late father grew up Jewish and then became Bahai. So I've kind of come from a different background, as well as continuing to study between at the intersection of a couple different disciplines.
SS: Great!
AWB: Yeah!
SS: All right, awesome. So thank you for sharing that. You're coming with a rich background that I am excited to hear more about through the lens of some of these questions, and we're gonna dive right in. So, as you know, in 2022, we hosted our annual grant makers in the arts conference in New York, and one of our keynote conversations was centered on arts and technology. We had Hrag Vartanian and Kamal Sinclair discussing arts and technology, “10 Things Funders Need to Know about Arts and Technology.”
And for those listening, we'll include a link to the keynote conversation. But, there were quite a few things that came up in the conversation from the idea of having hybrid and blended realities, the trauma and emotional labor that comes with working at the intersection of arts and tech, the fact that - as I mentioned earlier - tech isn't neutral. There are quite a few more, but I wanted to ask you given your work, what stands out to you from the list, and what would you want funders to prioritize and why?
AWB: Thank you so much for those questions, and it was really exciting to reflect upon the keynote and to look at those 10, you know, best questions and thoughts that people should keep in their minds as they're deciding on funding and deciding on programming. I think it's really important to make sure that we're giving funding and we're giving support to artists in diverse locations and to not necessarily just center on major art market cities, but in other, you know, all places are where you find artists. You find artists in every town and city across North America, and it's really important to remember that.
Another thing is, is that oftentimes a lot of the funding is based on projects and oftentimes those are short term. Maybe the longest term project that I have been funded for is for two years, which in the lifespan of making art is quite short. Oftentimes I'll hear people say, but that's how artists want it. They want to be flexible, they wanna be able to do different things. But for anyone who's had a career in maybe a more traditional job, which I have. I've worked in the tech world and I've worked in corporate America, you still have flexibility when you know that you can pay rent, right?
SS: That's right. You still have absolutely.
AWB: In fact, the ability and the hierarchy of needs - when you have the ability to take care of your family, to pay your medical bills, and to pay rent, and to get food - helps someone be incredibly creative, right? [laughs]
SS: Mhmm. For sure.
AWB: That's the space that you need also, if you're going to, as an artist, steward programs with marginal people or if you're in co-creation with vulnerable populations, you need to have a stability and not add more burden and chaos to your community, right?
SS: Yeah.
AWB: And so having those types of long-term connections, I think, is really important. And, you know, we do have the nonprofit model. Of course, many of us artists also have our own LLCs that we work from in order to spin up projects and work within that space. But it is a question as to why artists are only seen as receivers rather than maybe long-term employees or long-term having a different type of relationship with artists within your local community that allows them to be more a part of decisions that are made in the organizations and institutions. I think the popularization of decentralized autonomous organizations, aka DAOs, within the web three space, shows that there is interest in moving towards collectives of people who are interested in art and wanna support art in a more direct way and make decisions together, rather than allowing the few to rise to the top and receive project based or short term funding.
SS: That's great, that's great. Thank you so much for that, Amelia. And I wonder too, if you think there's anything more that should be added to the list. I'm just going to quickly go through some of the themes that were covered from one to 10. So for those listening, the conversation covered the nonprofit model, digital media and tech literacy, class and access, democratic versus autocratic, the idea that tech isn't neutral, the metaverse and digital escape, obsolescence and costs, hybrid or blended realities, distributed networks going more specifically into NFTs and blockchain, and again, trauma and emotional labor. So what else should be added on to this list, Amelia?
AWB: I would say long-term care networks. Seeing as though I have been noticing in a couple of grants I've applied to in the last few few years, people have a place where you can write on a line for medical care that you received that year, that you're allowed to spend some of the money on medical care or self-care. That has been a very new thing that I've seen, and yet it's very honorable I would say because many people no matter what age they are or what stage they are in their career, will have medical costs. And oftentimes people who are working in the nonprofit sector might be part-time at a couple different locations, plus doing art on the side, and they might not have healthcare that covers it or as we know, oftentimes what your insurance covers is not enough. And so I've been seeing a little bit more of that. So I'd say those kind of long-term care ideas.
I think what's interesting about this obsolescence and costs, you know, number seven is… there are a lot of costs on up keeping software and technology and deciding when an institution should hop from one technology to the next. But you know what doesn't change is the people. The community is the same. So you might meet somebody at one stage in their career and they're making augmented reality. You meet them again four years later and they're now working with artificial intelligence. You meet them a couple years later and they're looking at web three and DAOs, right? So the people don't change, but the outputs and the modalities may change. And I think if we're focused more on the people, who is who, at the end of the day, we are actually trying to support. We are not, and I hope we are not as nonprofits just trying to bolster whichever commercial product is most exciting at the moment.
SS: Right.
AWB: But really people's voices who are using those different types of technologies to be the cultural stewards of our communities. We have been making as, homo sapiens, art for the last 45,000 years. Oldest painting that has, you know, been documented was a cave painting in Indonesia, 45,000 years old. So humans have had this as part of our culture for a very long time, and it's not going anywhere. We're gonna continue to make art for whatever reason, and I love asking my students, why do you think we keep making art? If we didn't need to make art, wouldn't we at 45,000 years have a moment to just drop that and say, ah, we don't need that anymore.
SS: Right, exactly!
AWB: But, we haven’t. So, it must be important to being a homo sapien, to being a human being. So if it's that important, I think it serves a function to be a cultural steward, to be someone who's reflecting the values of our community. Therefore, it is not about the medium. And we've seen how different mediums change, how we respond to them, how we use them. When I talk about AI in my classroom, and I often like to remind students of the history of photography.
When George Eastman first invented a very portable camera, up until that point, only, you know, maybe it was the tech nerds of that generation who are photographers, people who could afford all the expensive equipment and time and charge a lot of money to do portraits. And therefore there were mostly photographs of just very wealthy people who had commissioned them. But once George Eastman created this very inexpensive portable camera with this mechanism to have it, you know, dropped off, developed, get your prints back it, everyone said, okay, this is gonna be the end of painting. No one's ever gonna paint again. Well, it's 2023 people obviously are still painting.
SS: Oh, that’s right.
AWB: Painting has not ended, but it did change. And now a lot of painters will use photography in their practice or will will sometimes be a, a photographer, sometimes make lithographs, sometimes prints, sometimes painting, right? So, the mediums change, but there are still artists and there's still community of artists that I believe deserve support. If what they do is so unimportant and unvalued, then why have you been doing it for 45,000 years?
SS: That's right, that’s right. That was a powerful statement, and I appreciate that Amelia and I feel like I'm gonna be thinking about that after this podcast. Like, wow, it's 45,000 years, that's like, quite a long time. So that's great, thank you for that.
So I kind of wanna stay on the, the subject of artificial intelligence for this next question. So your work specifically is very much tapped into the quickly growing and changing space of artificial intelligence or AI. And that's a space that people are starting to become more and more familiar with. Whether or not they're becoming more and more comfortable with it is another conversation. But given that this is kind of the direction that we're going, how can funders leverage this new mode of connecting and relating to the world?
AWB: Thank you for that question. And I would say that we haven't gotten to a place yet where AI is a singular thing. It's kind of like saying, can you believe all of these hammers that people are using in sculpture, right? Well, there's a lot of different hammers and a lot of different sculptures, right? So there's a lot of different ways that people are deploying this tool. There are a lot of different ways people are building these tools. And it has only been within the last year that when my students talk about AI, they are beginning to use a homogenized language where they're really talking about Midjourney, Dolly, Stable Diffusion, GANs, right?
Whereas before AI was kind of like, yeah, how are people using AI? And I would teach them, okay, some people are using AI in this way and that way. And it was very broad and diverse and it's really only been this past, you know, year and a half that suddenly saying AI just means a generative antagonistic neural network. Again, Dolly, you know, Midjourney, any of those kind of things where you may type in a phrase and it generates a very interesting looking image. Not always my favorite images, but you know, just that, that is how it works. And it is true that those, those models were trained on some image sets that were free and available to the public. Some of them were trained on specific data sets that were created by computer scientists who owned those images. You know, they like took an image of a flower, took an image of a building, owned the rights to those images and, and they were not thefted, right? But others are now reinforcing their learning through scraping and taking images from the web.
And so, when people say, you know, also, I guess I should say it was only, ooh, five months ago that I was on my alumni, you know, everyone has like an alumni email list where you just like to talk about random things.
SS: Yes, of course.
AWB: And we all, we go so hard at my alumni, I'm an NYU ITP alumni, I love ITP so much!
SS: Oh yay, shout out to NYU!
AWB: Oh, shout out. I love and I love that list so much cause we get heated, you know, and in a really wonderful way. you know, some people leave the list, some people come back, but I'm a mainstay because they really appreciate the debate. People never agree on it. And I love that.
And it was only four months ago that, that someone said, well, I don't think people should be able to say that that is their image if they're using a GAN that they didn't train and they didn't create. And then I wrote back, yeah, but didn't it steal like my images throughout my 20-year career of all of the images that I put on the internet since I was, you know, a teenager and making art when it was really, really bad back in the day I believe me, you don't wanna find it exactly. Way back machine, but didn't it take my images and train off of that? So in some way aren't, isn't it, if it's not theirs and it's not mine, is it all of ours, right?
And the first emails that came back to me were very, how dare you say that? Like, you didn't make these GANs, you're not Google, how dare you say that? And then within one week the tone totally shifted. And so I was pretty surprised that at first when I said that I thought, wow, that, I thought that would be a very kind of common thought process of like, wait a minute, I mean, think about it, it's scraped all of our, from the web that we've been uploading freely thinking that we're sharing it with each other. We didn't realize we were productizing it back in the day, right.
SS: Mm-hmm!
AWB: But now the tone is kind of flipped totally the other direction where people, you know, there are lawsuits that are happening.
SS: Yes, I've seen that.
AWB: Yeah, many NFT groups have been minting just the phrase "No AI, No AI", and flooding the sort of the NFT space with just the image of those words, various words around being anti-AI because of obviously how easy it is, to automate the system of generating an image and minting it on the blockchain and then just flooding the market with that. People are pushing back and saying, wait a minute, we didn't become NFT artists to have a community to just be overwhelmed by, you know, literally millions of images that we can't, we couldn't possibly make them as fast, right?
So, and all of these things are part of this one specific modality of using AI, which is to use, you know, text-based GANs to generate images that have been trained upon all of these different images that a lot of people did not opt-into, did not opt-into having their editorial images being used for generating other things. And then maybe people are thinking are we gonna become obsolete? Are our jobs gonna be replaced by these tools? And, I always like to go back to that, that moment in time when George Eastman, you know, flooded the market with this ability to anyone can have a portrait taken for a very low cost and it did not end art, and it did not end artists. Again, 45,000 years, right?
SS: Yeah, right! [laughter]
AWB: But I don't know the answer to what artists will make in response. And I asked my students that, I said, well maybe there will be. And you know, my students come from very diverse backgrounds when it comes to where they are located in the world, where some of them came from computer science and some came from chemistry, some came from policy, you know, studies. So they're not all, they haven't all come from like BFA background or my undergraduates haven't all, they aren't all art majors, right. And so I say, well do you know, in the 1960s there were people who were making conceptual art where you could just say an idea and that was art? Or you could have a happening where everything was made and then uncreated within 24 hours and there was no, nothing that was left tangibly, but maybe some photographs and a description of that moment that happened. Will art move more towards the sensorial where it's about touch and feel and experiencing something in a hyper-local place? Or, and I said, but you know, all of us in this room, we're all studying AI in the arts, so it might not be us that does that, right? We, might take AI, and I hope, open the hood a bit and understand how it works so that we can build tools that have and contain our own values and that we make work that stands in opposition to the technology that we believe doesn't contain our values. And we'll use technology to do that, cause that's why, you know, that's what my class studying is like, how do we use these things, right? So we can also use those things to stand up for our values in the systems that we believe in.
SS: That's great. Thank you so much for that, and I wanna go just a little bit deeper for a funder who is going to listen to this and, and say, “okay, I wanna make a change today, right now as I think about how quickly things are changing in terms of arts and technology, or I wanna make sure that I'm intentional about funding at this intersection supporting artist,” would, you tell them, well when you're talking to an artist who is creating artwork that is at that intersection, pay close attention to their values and what they say to you about how you can be supportive and upholding that? Is that what you would direct a funder to do like today? Or would you say something slightly different, just for those who are looking for that, “what do I do now response?”
AWB: Yeah, well no, I appreciate it and I think everything you said is really beautiful. I would say this type of work, the work that we're doing in collaboration together with emerging technologies is not often done alone. It's usually done in a co-creation format. Because of the scope and different abilities that are necessary for say, making a virtual reality game or anything that has multiple users and is working in real time, usually has the team of people.
And it might be more helpful to think of it in the similar way to the ways in which the performing arts are funded where you have a company of people and you trust them to work well together, you trust them to work well together over a period of time. It's very rare in, I've come from a performing arts background, that's sort of the very first way that I got started in my career was first as an opera singer and then later as a dancer and choreographer.
SS: Awesome!
AWB: And so, you know, we couldn't have someone say, okay, apply to this grant and then over the next six months make an opera and perform it in 10 cities. That's just kind of impossible. No one would expect an opera company to be able to hire people, go in rehearsal, commission a new opera, perform it in seven city. It's just in that short amount time or even a year, right. That's just wild, right?
SS: Yeah, that would be impossible.
AWB: It's impossible, because you don't make opera alone. And it's very weird that we imagine that people work in art and tech alone when if you look at its commercial analogs, like maybe if opera is something in the nonprofit sphere, it's commercial analog would be, you know, a television show or something, right? Like we don't imagine either of those are A) people doing it alone, and I would say the analog or the commercial analog that we have to a AI and the arts or technology and the arts would be, you know, video games or people who are making apps, they also aren't making them alone, right?
SS: Right, right.
AWB: So there isn't a place you can point to that you say, well I know that, you know, the Triple A Games Studios, they fund games but, and they need thousands of people. But you know, an artist could do it just by themselves, it's just not true. Even the indie developers have, you know, teams of at least five to 50 and are funded in multi-year steps. I think the film board of Canada is doing a really good job of funding games and understanding that the life cycle on that is longer. It takes longer to fund, it takes a larger amount of money and there's larger teams.
So I think thinking of the art and tech models as more similar to the way in which you'd fund performing arts even differently than the way you'd fund film. Cause I think film is, I think it's closer to the way that you would fund performing arts because it's people that are producing with that type of complexity. I think film has a different type of market when it comes to the expectation. I mean, it's not a reality, but the expectation of being able to sell it for distribution, and that's not what you would imagine with a local dance company. You're not imagining that, “okay, we can give them $50,000, but they'll make that back in their international tour.” We kind of accept that it's a different format for, how much you're expecting the income to be. And I think it's more similar to performing arts to fund art and technology projects.
SS: Yeah, all right, great. Thanks for that clarification. I think that'll be really helpful to our listeners. So kind of going, and also, I want to acknowledge that you mentioned much earlier in our conversation that there's this kind of like long-term, long-term way of support and funding. And I feel like in this particular question you kind of brought us back to that. So that seems to be something that's really important in the way that funders can, can approach supporting arts and technology. So I appreciate you kind of bringing us full circle there.
So kind of looking more at all of these ideas and themes from a racial equity lens, how can the intersection of arts and technology contribute to a racially just future? And what do funders need to know about how to best support such a future?
AWB: Thank you so much for that question. During the, you know, very working-remote moments of our global pandemic, I noticed that a lot of my friends were able to, because of the ability to work remote at their job, were able to move back onto Indigenous territory. So either to their own reservation that they grew up on or that they had family members on, or a close reservation that was near to where their work was in case they needed to commute at some time. I just, it was a really beautiful moment to just see, I would say a majority of my friends be able to move back on territory, which is…
SS: That’s awesome!
AWB: …an incredible, right?!
SS: Yeah!
AWB: But it also means that they moved out of art market cities, which is probably why I started in the beginning by saying, hey, you know, if we only focus on funding in art market cities, which are places where people might be able to even sell their work, you know, commercially, and so they do. And, obviously those places are more expensive to live, so I understand that, being able to sell your work at a higher amount, but also having a higher overhead. But I hope we don't backslide into a place where we're not supporting artists in remote ways. If you're allowed to move on territory because of your job, but you no longer are able to apply for grants because they're all based in, you know, art market cities, that becomes a problem, right? And so having, recognizing that people are moving and changing their ability and relationship to work and to artistic communities thinking about those type of restrictions or in making them inclusive of rural areas, Indigenous spaces, territories and reservations is really important.
SS: That's great, thanks Amelia for that. And I wanna open it up and ask if you have final words that you would want listeners to hear or just anything you'd wanna elaborate on a little bit more before we go.
AWB: Oh, thank you for that invitation. I have been talking with a lot of different nonprofit leaders around the nonprofit model and how that functions and also how, you know, LLCs function or cooperatives or just in general, the older forms of small business models that we have here in America and what could be learned from this idea of DAOs in that space? I don't believe that DAOs necessitate the blockchain or any cryptocurrency. A DAO is just that it's a decentralized, autonomous organization. Some DAOs have millions of people in them and they're able to raise funds to support artists that are part of their group to make work. Oftentimes they give those artists funds first, and then once the artist produces the work, they also purchase it from them. So, it's sort of an end-to-end cycle of support for artists. And there isn't anything about the idea of a DAO that needs to be on the blockchain or on a specific blockchain. It really is the idea of how do we have - to put it in LLC terminology - articles of incorporation that have the values of the group, right? And there are complex articles of incorporation you can write where you can say, okay, these million people are part of this company. You know, these people are voted to be the board who make the decision on x, y, z function, that they put it to a vote, right? You can make those rules in small businesses, large businesses in the US. And so it could be a series of text messages and a spreadsheet. It doesn't necessarily have to be on the blockchain, but the idea that so many people are excited by this, by being able to be part of funding art and part of supporting artists, and they're doing it in a different way than nonprofits have done it historically. And I think there's something that we can learn there. It doesn't mean that we have to put all of our non-profits onto the blockchain, but it does mean, that we're learning about new ways of organizing to support artists and we can invite those voices in to say, you know, why are you interested in supporting this DAO and being part of this DAO? And, you're not choosing to be you know, a gold circle member of your local museum, like what is the thought process and understanding how and why people want to organize in that way.
SS: Yeah, that's great, thank you. And I'm gonna just go a little bit deeper on that for our folks who are very, very fresh and new to arts and tech. New to tech in general, there were a lot of exciting terms that we used in this conversation. We meaning you - DAO, GAN, AI, and we know that AI comes in so many different shapes and sizes. Is there a place that you might direct funders to go to, to just kind of learn some of the differences so that when they begin to fund at this intersection, they'll have a little bit more background knowledge on what they're getting into? Of course, this podcast is a great start, but any other places that you might recommend?
AWB: I'm definitely happy to give you some links to post in the RSS information of this podcast so it can go out amazing and metadata to all of the distribution of the podcast. And my website is studioamelia.com. I have there a YouTube playlist of all my talks and there are talks on each of these subjects. So, that's could be a place if you like to, you know, I imagine if you're on a podcast you might like to just listen to to something rather than read it.
SS: Of course.
AWB: So, if you're like, me and you like kind of watching videos and listening to podcasts, go there. Otherwise, there are just a lot of amazing artists that are working in this space and I'm sure if you look at the keynote as well, but I do wish that I had just one single compendium of identification of terms, but I do write a weekly series on AI and the arts at Medium. You can also find that on my website at studioamelia.com. So, hopefully that can be helpful too.
SS: Of course!
AWB: I write towards a general, intelligent audience and so a lot of different terms are explained within my articles there as well.
SS: Awesome! Thank you so much, Amelia. You brought so much richness to this conversation. You have such an extensive background from your performance, from working corporate, from teaching, just all of it, and I'm so glad that we were able to touch on so much of it in this conversation.
AWB: Thank you so much for inviting me.
SS: Of course, and for those who are listening, if you have any questions about this podcast or upcoming programming, feel free to reach out to me, sherylynnsealy@giarts.org, or visit our website at giarts.org. Be sure to follow Grantmakers in the Arts on Twitter and Facebook @GIArts, as well as Instagram @grantmakersinthearts for exciting new updates. Thanks so much for listening everyone.
