The Stories We Tell Our Machines

A conversation with Stephanie Dinkins
Sunday, Nov. 22 at 2pm
601Artspace
88 Eldridge Street, NYC

On the closing weekend of Leaking Collections, join exhibiting artist Stephanie Dinkins for a gathering exploring data gifting—the idea that sharing our stories, experiences, and knowledge can help shape technologies that better understand and support our communities.

On view in this exhibition is Dinkins' Cosmologies from the Bay: Gifts Between Us, an AI-voice audio recitation of texts gathered in early 2025 through conversations with Black communities across the Bay Area. The artist asked participants what AI should know about them in order to become more caring, culturally grounded, and accountable to people. The original stories gathered for the project arrive as plural constellations that resist Silicon Valley’s flattened logics of the future, where progress is measured by efficiency and human selfhood is broken into data points.

Beginning with the genesis of Cosmologies from the Bay, we’ll explore a series of questions that have informed Dinkins' project in order to to spark conversations about who we are, what matters to us, and what we want future technologies to know. Together, we’ll consider: What parts of our experiences are worth sharing? How might our stories help AI systems better serve the people and communities we care about? And what should remain undisclosed?

Come share your thoughts, listen to others, and imagine how the knowledge we choose to give might help build more caring and inclusive futures. No knowledge of AI is needed. Everyone has something valuable to contribute.