New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in collaboration with the South Korea-based electronics corporation LG, have named the Brooklyn-based artist Stephanie Dinkins as the recipient of the inaugural LG Guggenheim Award, a new prize that celebrates artists working at the intersection of art and technology. Dinkins will receive an unrestricted honorarium of $100,000 to help broaden the scope of her innovative work.
Dinkins, whose career spans 20 years of ground-breaking research and inquiry into the social ramifications of artificial intelligence (AI), was selected by a jury of experts in the field of art and technology including Legacy Russell, the executive director and chief curator of the Kitchen in New York, and Tina Rivers Ryan, the curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York. In a statement, the jury praised Dinkins for her “inclusive and collaborative approach” that “powerfully advocates for transparency, participation and access around AI technologies, especially among communities at greatest risk of being abused by them”.
Stephanie Dinkins, the recipient of the LG Guggenheim Award The Guggenheim
Dinkins rose to prominence with immersive, participation-based works that take an optimistic view of AI models and their integrated tools, particularly natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL), the method by which computers imitate human processes. Dinkins’s reparative, community-driven attitude towards technology has resulted in long-running experiments that centre on poetics and storytelling, addressing demographics that are typically marginalised by poor code design and technological inaccessibility. Currently serving as a professor of art at Stony Brook University, New York, Dinkins’s work has been exhibited in institutions all over the world, including the Smithsonian Museum of Arts and Industry in Washington DC, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland, and the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany.
“Stephanie Dinkins’s artistic range, engagement with socio-cultural values, and leading AI explorations are crucial reflections of the evolving future of technology-based art. It’s the Guggenheim’s honour to support her extraordinary work through this award,” said Naomi Beckwith, the deputy director and chief curator at the Guggenheim, in a statement.
The honorarium will be accompanied by a physical award “whose sculptural form represents the potential for technology to inspire new and unexpected artforms”, explained Seol Park, the head of brand management at LG Corp.
The LG Guggenheim Award is an extension of the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology initiative, a five-year project co-authored by the Guggenheim and LG to honour, research and promote artists combining technology and art in their oeuvres. The partnership allows the Guggenheim an unprecedented opportunity to deepen its scholarship in a timely field by providing direct support to artists. The museum recently hired its first LG Electronics associate curator, Noam Segal, who plays an active role the latest expansion.
