SAN JOSE, CALIF.- The Institute of Contemporary Art San José debuts Data Trust, a groundbreaking participatory, AI-based, immersive experience by acclaimed transmedia artist Stephanie Dinkins. This innovative exhibition marks Dinkins’ first major project in the Bay Area, bringing her critical examination of AI and community storytelling to the heart of Silicon Valley.
Part of the Hewlett 50 Arts Commissions, and curated by Elizabeth Thomas, Data Trust explores the intersection of land, memory, storytelling, and history through emergent technologies, challenging current paradigms of AI development while forging paths toward more equitable and inclusive technological futures.
While major tech companies have largely developed AI systems through extractive data practices, Dinkins proposes an alternative model centered on consent, community ownership, and the deliberate gifting of stories rather than their systematic extraction.
An Immersive Gallery Experience
The ICA San José premieres Data Trust with a multimedia interactive experience featuring immersive projections animated by real-time generative AI processing of collected oral histories. These living narratives span the gallery walls while encapsulated Okra and California black oak trees grow in genetically modified soil enriched with the encoded DNA that houses shared stories within their cellular makeup.
Intentionally designed seating invites gathering and fosters intimacy, promoting active engagement between visitors. As participants share stories through in-gallery recording and the artist-designed app thestorieswetellourmachines.app, the AI-generated projections continuously evolve to reflect the gifted data, creating a dynamic, ever-changing experience.
“The intention is to create an environment where you almost feel like you are walking into the internet, in a sense: engaging with the machine mind in a way that is welcoming and encouraging,” says ICA Executive Director James G. Leventhal. “More also, I am so moved by Dinkins’ concept of ‘The Gift’ – how our personal stories are some of our richest treasures, how they bind and define us, how ‘sharing’ is so fundamental to our humanity. Between the story-collecting stations, the plants, and the inviting approach, the hope is that we bring people together at the ICA to better understand our relationships to technology and each other.”
Revolutionary Approach to Community Storytelling
Data Trust represents a bold fusion of artificial intelligence, DNA technology, and social practice designed to honor and preserve multigenerational stories from historically undervalued and oversurveilled communities. The project centers oral traditions and community-led practices, beginning with recorded storytelling that is digitized and processed computationally with AI to create a collective community archive.
Using cutting-edge DNA data storage technology, these gifted stories are encoded into soil as active, long-term keepers of community knowledge. This process allows participants to stake an evolutionary claim of the land they inhabit, integrating ancestral knowledge directly into the landscape itself. “The goal is simple: 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 soil and via bacterial DNA. At the heart of Data Trust is a belief that everyone’s story matters—even, and especially, the ones often dismissed as ‘unruly,’ or too outside the mainstream,” notes Dinkins.
Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist whose work intersects emerging technologies with future histories, leveraging technology and storytelling to challenge and reimagine narratives surrounding underutilized communities, particularly those of Black and brown individuals. She holds the Kusama Endowed Chair in Art at Stony Brook University and 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, and RightClickSave.com. She exhibits and advocates for inclusive AI internationally at venues including Brooklyn Academy of Music, ZKM|Center for Art and Media, de Young Museum, Smithsonian Museum of Arts and Industry, and Ford Foundation Gallery.
