Imaginator Start-Up

Binary Calculations — a project, app and workshop series — asks how we can make technological systems that control our relationships, governments, and institutions more caring.

The algorithmic ecologies surrounding us are increasingly complex, extractive, and embedded into every aspect of our lives. We empower companies, big tech, and governments to track us with the trail of information we leave behind with each encounter. Some of these systems are helpful, some of them are harmful, most are built atop data that incompletely describe most inhabitants on the planet.

For example, common datasets used for AI assisted medical diagnoses often under-represent people with darker skin. Data extracted and often augmented with biased historical information is used to assess, control, serve, appease and even titillate. Our needs, hopes, dreams, and desires, along with multitudes of cultural nuance, get averaged to uphold and serve the demands of the status quo. Binary Calculations aims to push algorithmic networks to become less reductive and encourage complexity, plurality, kindness, and generosity instead.

Transmedia artist Stephanie Dinkins and collaborators Surya Mattu and Neta Bomani explore remedies to the way inequities are encoded into digital civic systems that increasingly govern our lives. As a counterbalance, they are building data-centered systems that integrate alternative data sets and algorithms to support under-represented communities, bringing a much richer and diverse spectrum of ideas and beliefs.

Learn more about Dinkins’s work HERE.

About the Artist

Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who creates experiences that spark dialog about race, gender, aging, and our future histories. Her work in AI and other mediums uses emerging technologies and social collaboration to work toward technological ecosystems based on care and social equity. Dinkins' experiences with and explorations of artificial intelligence have led to a deep interest in how algorithmic systems impact communities of color in particular and all of our futures more generally.

As the name suggests, Datalogue Raisonné — a spin on “catalogue raisonne,” a comprehensive, annotated listing of all the known works of an artist (usually one of high reputation) — is a universal, blockchain, cloud-based, inventory tool that can house an exhaustive digital catalog of career-long production. The easy-to-access, app-based tool can make inventory management an integral part of studio practice.

Often, artworkers without the support of a major gallery face challenges cataloging their work; this is equally true of estates of artists who were under-recognized in their own time. The Datalogue Raisonné simplifies cataloging by capturing artwork in “real time,” as it is made. It eases legacy planning for artists, as well as allowing estate managers to process pre-existing inventory of many years more efficiently. It addresses common issues relating to intellectual property, authentification, secondary and tertiary sales records, potential royalties, and licensing.

Cultural producer Dena Muller and her collaborator, hacker, and filmmaker John Threat, are designing the Datalogue alongside partnered artists and their estates in order to identify challenges they currently face when managing their inventory. While it is meant to become a central repository for artists at any stage in their career, with its potential to catalog and analyze images, it also potentially provides a cultural “seed bank” for works everywhere, allowing us to better ensure a shared cultural record that is authentic and democratized to include all artists and makers in the future.

Learn more about Muller’s work HERE.

About the Artist

Dena Muller is a project management and strategic fundraising consultant for artists and non-profit organizations such as The Feminist Institute, Project for Empty Space, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, Faou Foundation (Mariko Mori Studio), For Freedoms (Hank Willis Thomas Studio), Slave Rebellion Reenactment (Dread Scott; Studio), Spiderwoman Theater, and The Laundromat Project. She was the Executive Director of the CUE Art Foundation and the Director of New Initiatives at the New York Foundation for the Arts. She previously served as the Executive Director of ArtTable where she led the organization through its 30th Anniversary celebration. Prior to ArtTable, Dena was the Executive Director of A.I.R. Gallery, a landmark artists’ collective.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, currently, only 2.2% of tech professionals are men of color. Artist Bayeté Ross Smith is creating an immersive environment geared towards students' STEM curriculum inspired by local hip-hop scenes from across the globe,including Dakar, Detroit, Rio de Janeiro and Paris among others.

Droppin’ Science, an immersive gaming experience, combines the spontaneous creativity of poetry and music with in-depth examination and analysis of scientific knowledge, drawing from the basic five pillars of hip-hop culture — MCing (oral); DJing (aural); dance (physical); graffiti (visual); and knowledge (intellectual) — Droppin’ Science helps teach science while building community. Using hip-hop to connect the dots between science and culture, Smith’s project is inspired by real-life scientists such as NASA aerospace engineer Lance Foster, atmospheric scientist Nathan Jovera, and more.

Building on the notion of a cypher — a gathering of rappers, beatboxers, and/or breakers extemporaneously making music together in a circle — players of Droppin’ Science will gain “clout’ from their peers just as they would in real life, while using the elements of hip-hop (art, performance, and technical knowledge) to rap, write, and perform science-themed hip-hop verses.

As part of the ISU, Smith was paired with Latoya Peterson, a creative technologist and cofounder at Glow Up Games. Droppin’ Science offers students opportunities to engage in the most consumed art form of our time — to learn about science and develop cognitive abilities. While gaming, another highly consumed art form, cultivates additional skill sets in speed, deductive reasoning, and mathematical intelligence.

Learn more about Smith’s work HERE

About the Artist

Bayeté Ross Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, filmmaker and education worker, working at the intersection of photography, film & video, visual journalism, 3D objects and new media.

He is Columbia Law School’s inaugural Artist-In-Residence, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a TED Resident, a Creative Capital Awardee, an Art For Justice Fund Fellow, a BPMPlus Grantee, a CatchLight Fellow, and a POV NY Times embedded mediamaker.

Conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll and technologist Meredith Finkelstein are using a blockchain ledger system as a pathmarking tool to develop a registry of actionable future-forward aspirational ideas. Referencing “the ethical imagination,” a term coined by Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor to describe a creative act that engages real world concerns of consequence, the two designers are prototyping an app that will allow tabulation of proposals of such ideas. The app will allow community members, first, to suggest and register aspirational goals, and then to use apportioned (or quadratic) voting for a selected group to collectively make decisions on the social/civic issues proposed.

In advance of Visions2030’s October Demo Day, a group of thinkers, doers, and creators from across the spectrum were invited to suggest an act of “ethical imagination.” They were rewarded with minted digital coins that helped them engage in quadratic voting, a collective decision-making procedure which involves individuals allocating votes to express the degree of their preferences, rather than just the direction of their preferences. This process introduced participants to entirely new modes of collective decision-making and to communicating and committing to action-steps. Thus, using the blockchain ledger as a digital “to-do” list, citizens can identify the issues they care about and, more importantly, “commit” to them in adding them to this indelible ledger.

Learn more about Ellen Carroll’s work HERE

About the Artist

Mary Ellen Carroll’s (MEC, studios) prolific career as a conceptual artist spans more than twenty years and occupies the disciplines of architecture/design, film, writing, performance and technology. The foundation of the practice is the investigation of a single, fundamental question: what do we consider a work of art? Carroll frequently collaborates with designers, architects, singer/songwriters and leading visionaries in other disciplines.

Open spaces are vanishing in our cities, while marginal neighborhoods, in terms of waste and resources, are treated inequitably. Since 1972, the Rights of Nature has been a concept parallel to human rights, bestowing “environmental personhood” on watersheds, rivers, and mountain ranges. In NATURESHIP, artist and filmmaker Nicole Mackinlay Hahn explores extending this notion to urban microhabitats. From backyards and stoops to balconies, rooftops, and flowerbeds (and notably in her own Harlem neighborhood), such microhabitats would be legally grouped together to form a new municipality — a novel, self-governing entity.

In a Declaration of Natureship, Mackinlay Hahn holds that nature requires its own municipality, as well as a fellowship of self-governance, also incorporating indigenous understandings and ecosystem literacy. Beyond conservation, this is a new kind of community movement, creating paradigms for Western culture in which nature and humans can co-evolve.

For this project Mackinlay Hahn was paired to work in collaboration with Grant Wilson, Executive Director & Directing Attorney at the Earth Law Center; Tecumseh Ceaser, an Indigenous artist and cultural consultant; local native knowledge keepers; and, the Harlem community. NATURESHIP creates a symbiosis where nature and humans evolve together, not separately.

Learn more about Mackinlay Hahn’s work HERE.

About the Artist

Nicole Mackinlay Hahn (lives in Harlem, NY) is a transmedia artist, filmmaker, and advocate whose work highlights sociopolitical ideas while amplifying stories of discovery and environmental futures.

Synch.Live takes inspiration from emergent systems in nature like flocks of birds or swarms of fireflies in which novel patterns emerge from collective non-verbal decisions. (Emergence refers to the idea that a system can exhibit behavior or properties that none of its individual parts possess.) Conceived as an IRL “game,” Synch.Live participants wear custom-designed player hats equipped with LED lights and mini-computers.

The idea is to see if a random group of people can spontaneously work out how to behave in an emergent way. Feedback from an algorithm dictating how random lights on player’s hats blink are measured by an overhead drone. Circumventing language, this is a fledgling exploration, whose potential is groundbreaking and unlimited. It explores modes of communication beyond language, while developing unorthodox modes of information transmission and collaborative decision-making.

Conceptual artist Hillary Leone's collaborator, cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Bor of Cambridge University, already has a functional prototype and working code. Bor and colleagues have recently published an algorithm that can quantify emergence, using information theory. They recently completed their first pre-pilot with users, with good success. Sync.Live has potential in brain research and with diseases in which language-centers of the brain are impaired.

Learn more about Leone’s work HERE.

About the Artist

Hillary Leone is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of art, science, technology and social impact. Right now, working with neuroscientists at Cambridge University and Imperial College London to develop Synch.Live, an art experience designed to mobilize our hard-wired human instinct to collaborate. Conceived in and for this time of isolation, division and uncertainty, Synch.Live exhorts us to play, tap into instinct, fall into rhythm, and experience the exhilaration of human connection.

Undulating just a few feet beneath the surface of the ocean, right at our toe tips, is seagrass — a flowering marine plant and a natural solution to environmental problems of our own creation. Seagrass’s ability to capture and store carbon provides benefits beyond combating climate change, such as protecting against storm surges and providing a habitat for aquatic species. It does this without any need for extraction of compounds or further manipulation.

Born of a desire to propagate and plant seagrass in New York City’s urban waterways, artist Kayla Weisdorf’s project combines fieldwork, simple landscape design, and video documentation. Paired with Willis Elkins, Executive Director at Newtown Creek Alliance, Tending the Marine Garden strives to create positive feedback loops between humans and subaquatic vegetation, opening up deep, haptic connections between New Yorkers and the estuary that surrounds them.

In doing so, seagrass becomes a touchstone through which to probe and redirect humanity’s often violent relationship with (non-human) nature. Scaled for use in other compromised water areas, this may not only open the door to a low-cost solution for local reclamation, it also has the potential to provide a visitor attraction to raise consciousness about ecological concerns and solutions.

Learn more about Weisdorf’s work HERE. About the Artist

Kayla Weisdor was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and currently living, working, writing, and arting in New York City.