Four large screens in a dark room, each show a different image; two face left and two face right

Science and Technology

Technological innovation has always been a driving factor for human societies, but its influence has increased with the rise of capitalism and globalization during the last few centuries. Science and technology can provide great benefits, such as eradicating diseases and exploring space, while simultaneously wielding destructive power. ARI’s inquiries into physical science and technology seek to better understand and visualize technologies that have shaped our collective past and shared present and will be the building blocks of the not-so-distant future. 

Blockchain commission

A woman wearing a backpack walks toward a large classic style building; “Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art” is displayed above the entrance

2020-present

The blockchain and the metaverse are two technologies with the potential to profoundly transform the economy and virtual reality. ARI commissioned artists Simon Denny and Stephanie Dinkins and Professor Perry Alexander to collaborate on a blockchain project to be featured in a future exhibition. Together they identified a real estate property “irl” (in real life) and purchased the corresponding property in the metaverse. The property is the Sandy Ground Historical Society in Staten Island, where Dinkins grew up. It is the oldest free Black settlement in the United States with the descendants of the founding settlers still living in the community and served as a stop on the underground railroad. 

Stephanie Dinkins, Black Writing

A black gourd-shaped sculpture with two female faces on it sits on a wooden platform in a gallery space

Stephanie Dinkins, Not The Only One V1. Beta (N'TOO), 2018

2023

Using interviews of herself, her aunt, and her niece, artist Stephanie Dinkins created a multigenerational memoir of a Black American family using artificial intelligence (AI). Not the Only One (N’TOO) is a voice-interactive AI with motion detectors that allows visitors to ask it questions and engage in conversation. N’TOO is built on a small data set to avoid cultural bias, which means it doesn’t always respond. The work was featured in the Spencer’s exhibition Black Writing, which celebrated the 40th anniversary of the History of Black Writing, a research project that specializes in the recovery and preservation of texts by Black writers. 

Selected publications and media

Collective Entanglements

Four large screens in a dark room, each show a different colorful image; two face left and two face right

2020–2022

In the physical sciences, “entanglement” refers to sets of data that cannot be described independently of one another. In a more general sense, it refers to a complicated relationship or complex situation. It can be useful in describing interdisciplinary inquiry as well. Artist Janet Biggs, mathematician Agnieszka Międlar, and physicist Daniel Tapia Takaki collaborated on a project that used time-based media to explore questions in high-energy physics and applied novel mathematical techniques to the production of video and performance. 

Selected publications and media 

 

Assaf Evron, knowledges

Three tables in a wooden-floored gallery space hold four different abstract sculptures that look like large rocks

2019

Artist Assaf Evron makes abstract representations of colors that live in the digital world into physical objects. Because data visualization is a human invention, Evron’s work questions why some shapes and forms are recognizable and meaningful and how, displaced from their original context, these shapes take on new meaning. For the exhibition knowledges, Evron paired digitized color space models with sculptural objects based on those models to better visualize how color is represented spatially. 

Selected publications and media