A Living Archive of Memory, AI, and Organic Matter
The ICA San José is pleased to debut Data Trust, a participatory, AI-based, immersive experience 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.
About the Artist:
Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist whose work intersects emerging technologies and our future histories, leveraging technology and storytelling to challenge and reimagine the narratives surrounding underutilized communities, particularly those of Black and brown individuals. Her work centers on creating care-driven, equitable tech ecosystems by valuing and intentionally sharing our personal and community narratives as the data and algorithms they are and have always been. Dinkins, who holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art at Stony Brook University, has received numerous accolades, including the inaugural LG Guggenheim Award, Mozilla Rise25 Award, Schmidt AI 2050 Senior Fellowship, and recognition as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in AI. Her groundbreaking work has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, BBC, RightClickSave.com and more. She exhibits and publicly advocates for inclusive AI internationally at a broad spectrum of community, private, and institutional venues, including a related public art commission with More Art, Brooklyn (2025). Others include Brooklyn Academy of Music, ZKM|Center for Art and Media, Stamps Gallery at the University of Michigan; de Young Museum; Smithsonian Museum of Arts and Industry; Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland; and the Ford Foundation Gallery.
Data Trust by artist Stephanie Dinkins at the ICA San José is curated by Elizabeth Thomas, guest curator. Data Trust is made possible thanks to lead sponsorship from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as part of Hewlett50; and Alan Burgess, in memory of Doris Burgess, along with support from Wanda Kownacki and Rachel Masters and Dan Mosedale. Programs and exhibitions at the ICA are made possible with thanks to generous support from the City of San José’s Office of Cultural Affairs, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the San Francisco Foundation; with significant support from Applied Materials, the Lipman Family Foundation, and Yvonne and Mike Nevens; along with additional support from SVCreates. In-kind support has been provided by Benjamin Moore paints, Nationwide Video, and Panasonic.
The ICA San José is profoundly grateful to Stephanie Dinkins and the work of Future Histories Studio, founded by Stephanie Dinkins. Future Histories Studio (FHS) is a laboratory that explores emerging modes of arts-centered research, production, and presentation. It is an exploratory hub for those interested in hybrid inquiry and developing practice-based research at the intersections of art, technology, race, storytelling, and social justice. The FHS is situated in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University. Data Trust research and production have been made possible through additional support from Creative Time, and the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fund.
Special thanks are due to our many collaborators: Art and Art History Department at San José State University, especially Chair Rhonda Holberton, Esteban Garcia Bravo, Steve Davis, and their students for their support and work in fabrication for sculptural elements of the project; Antioch Baptist Church and the African American Service Association for their facilitation of storytelling sessions; DOT DOT for their collaborative efforts in the backend development of the project; Ziye Zhang and Saketh Krishna Dumpuru for lending their technical expertise, Jeff Nivala, Assistant Professor in the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, for collaborating on technical aspects of the project related to synthetic biology and data storage; artist and researcher Alvarro Azcarraga for his assistance in biological engineering; Sam Marks, for his invaluable work building all of the seating for the exhibition; Gervais Marsh for connecting us with many of our wonderful collaborators; Lauren Ruiz for managing logistics and coordination throughout the process; We Start Gardens for growing our plants; Anthony Remick of Puget Sound Glassblowing Studio for his support in glass fabrication.