The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and LG, a company based in South Korea, have named Stephanie Dinkins, an artist from Brooklyn, as the first winner of the LG Guggenheim Award. This is a new award that honors artists who work at the crossroads of art and technology. Dinkins will get an honorarium of $100,000 that can be used in any way she wants. This will help her unique work reach more people. Dinkins was chosen by a group of experts in art and technology, such as 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. Dinkins' career spans 20 years of groundbreaking research and investigation into the social effects of artificial intelligence (AI). 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 that are most likely to be abused by them."
Dinkins became well-known for his interactive, engaging works that have a positive view of AI models and the tools they use, especially natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL), which is how computers learn to do things like humans do. Dinkins's fixative, community-focused approach to technology has led to long-running experiments that focus on poetry and stories and reach out to groups that are often left out by bad code design and inaccessible technology. Dinkins is an art professor at Stony Brook University in New York. His work has been shown all over the world, including at 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.
The honorarium will come with a physical award "whose sculptural form represents the potential for technology to inspire new and unexpected art forms," said 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. This is a five-year project that the Guggenheim and LG worked on together to honor, study, and support artists whose works combine art and technology. The partnership gives the Guggenheim a chance it has never had before to strengthen its research in an important area by directly helping artists. Noam Segal, who works for LG Electronics and is the museum's first LG Electronics assistant curator, is an important part of the latest expansion.
Selena Mattei