While the idea of extended reality (XR) may evoke traditions of cyberpunk dystopias, at this year’s Sundance New Frontiers, five Black storytellers were leading a shift to place cultural memory and ancestral knowledge at the center of designing collective futures. “Secret Garden” and “Traveling the Intertitium with Octavia Butler” are exemplary pieces that leverage interactive, browser-based media (WebXR) to challenge our current notions of futurity while also demonstrating the potential for XR when led by Black creators.
“Our stories are algorithms,” artist Stephanie Dinkins suggests in the descriptive text for “Secret Garden, an interactive web experience (available here) and in-person installation that pairs a vibrant 3D landscape with oral histories spanning generations of African American women, including one that is “artificially intelligent.” The piece is an extension of Dinkins’ body of work that creates AI systems programmed and trained by Black and brown voices otherwise underrepresented in our technologies.
Dinkins’ critical interventions come at a much-needed point in the current crisis of racial bias in technology, part of which was publicly exposed last December when leading researcher in AI ethics was fired from Google after the tech giant blocked her research on this very topic.
