Stephanie Dinkins: Data Trust

The ICA San José is pleased to debut Data Trust, a participatory, AI-based, immersive experienc e considering notions of land, memory, storytelling, and our shared futures as they intersect with the potential of emergent technologies, as part of Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions . The ICA San José premieres Data Trust with a multimedia interactive experience in its galleries. Immersive projections, animated by real-time generative AI processing of collected oral histories, create a living narrative spanning around the walls of the gallery. Encapsulated Okra and California black oak trees grow in genetically modified soil enriched with the encoded DNA that houses shared stories into their own cellular makeup. Intentionally designed seating invites gathering, fosters intimacy, and promotes active engagement between visitors. While signaling interconnectedness and community ritual through their design, these architectural elements dissolve into the background, nurturing spontaneous dialogue and fostering an atmosphere of openness and vulnerability where participants can feel seen and that their stories are valued. As participants share stories through in-gallery recording and the artist-designed app thestorieswetellourmachines.app , the generated AI projections continuously evolve to reflect the gifted data. The collective experience works to cultivate trust, openness, and curiosity, amidst widespread public concern about the future of AI. The Data Trust experience emphasizes informed participation and transparency, enabling participants to understand algorithmic processes as potentially beneficial to their lives. Stephanie Dinkins questions the current paradigms of AI development and forges paths toward more equitable and inclusive technological futures. Data Trust fuses artificial intelligence, DNA, and social practice to pursue a simple goal: to honor and preserve multigenerational stories in ways that are poetic, enduring, and technologically bold. Self-composed stories collected from often-misinterpreted communities will be preserved within the soil and other natural materials via bacterial DNA. The process begins with oral storytelling, which is recorded, digitized, and processed computationally with AI to create a collective community archive. By centering oral traditions, creative storytelling, and community-led practices, Data Trust centers stories of communities that are historically undervalued and oversurveilled. Using technologies that employ DNA as data storage, these gifted stories are then encoded into soil as active, long-term keepers of community knowledge. This allows participants to stake an evolutionary claim of the land they inhabit, whether wanted or not. Ultimately, the data generated through this project will be made publicly accessible, potentially contributing to systemic change as the data employed to shape society privileges stories, myths, and cultural perspectives given deliberately, not just extracted systematically. In the long run, Data Trust envisions a future where narratives are preserved in groves of trees and microbial ecosystems that serve as permanent sites of memory, integrating ancestral knowledge into the land itself.