AI Artist Stephanie Dinkins Named Inaugural Recipient of the LG Guggenheim Award

“Stephanie Dinkins’s artistic range, engagement with socio-cultural values, and leading artificial intelligence explorations are crucial reflections of the evolving future of technology-based art. It’s the Guggenheim’s honor to support her extraordinary work through this award,” stated Naomi Beckwith, Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator at the Guggenheim.

“LG congratulates Stephanie Dinkins, and hopes this recognition will meaningfully advance her future endeavors,” said Seol Park, Head of Brand Management at LG Corp. “The $100,000 honorarium is accompanied by a physical award whose sculptural form represents the potential for technology to inspire new and unexpected artforms,” explained Park.

Dinkins’s participatory and immersive works aim to create equitable social and technological ecosystems through public engagement, storytelling, and a hands-on approach to technology. Her long-running experiments with AI center memory, intimacy, poetics, and playfulness as strategies to reconstruct AI models and their integrated tools—in particular natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), by which computers encode words into data for self-training, as well as deep learning

 

(DL), which takes inspiration from neural networks to better imitate human thought processes. By anchoring her practice in small data rather than vast quantities of information, Dinkins develops reparative models for AI centered not on instrumentalization but rather on socially driven and culturally sensitive values such as care and attentiveness.

“I am grateful to LG and the Guggenheim for their support of artists who are using technology to foster positive change. I believe that art has the power to inspire and provoke, and I am committed to using my work to raise awareness of important issues and to promote social justice,” said Stephanie Dinkins. Whether through chatbots, virtual and augmented reality, or gallery experiences, Dinkins addresses marginalized groups, such as people of color, LGBTQIA+ communities, women, and disabled people, who are excessively affected by poor code design. Her body of work advances transparent, redressable AI systems by cultivating digital literacy and online representation among these largely unprotected populations–foreshadowing the most urgent discussions about social justice and technology in the present day.