It’s the Last episode of our segment on Art, AI, and Technology, with Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan artist and technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin. We talk about Amelia's podcasts Wampum.codes, a podcast which features Indigenous people working with tech in a multitude of ways, and Dreamstacks, the developer podcast by Contentful + Algolia which Amelia hosts. We also discuss her former life as an early-internet hacker and simultaneous opera singer, her Mozilla Fellowship on "trustworthy AI" and using Indigenous value-systems in tech, and much more.
“Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist/technologist who helps communities leverage emerging technologies to effect positive change in the world. She is a Senior Technical Training Specialist at Contentful in the SF Bay Area. In 2019 she was an invited presenter to His Holiness Dalai Lama’s World Headquarters in Dharamsala for the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion. She founded IDEA New Rochelle, which partnered with the NR Mayor’s office to develop citizen-focused VR/AR tools and was awarded the 2018 Bloomberg Mayors Challenge $1 million dollar grant to prototype their AR Citizen toolkit. She is a Google VR JUMP Start creator, co-directing with Wendy Red Star a 360 video story about Native American Monsters which was selected for a McArthur Grant through the Sundance Institute Native New Frontiers Story Lab 2018. It is on display at Newark Museum beginning February 2019.
Amelia was a professor of time-based media art and performance art at Vanderbilt University for five years before returning to her roots in NYC creative technology, graduating from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in 2015. In 2016 she went on to found and direct the DBRS Innovation Lab, an applied research lab that specialized in developing creative uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. Amelia is the founder of the Stupid Hackathon, which now holds events around the world. She is a fellow of the Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab , a Sundance Institute Time Warner Fellow, in 2018 she was awarded Engadget Alternative Realities Prize for her VR experience Your Hands Are Feet. She was a member of the 2017-2018 cohort at NEW INC, the incubator of the New Museum in NYC. In 2016 she was an Oculus Launch Pad Fellow and an Artist in Residence at Pioneer Works 2016, Her art is part of the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the McCord Museum. Amelia is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.
Amelia is the founder and host of wampum.codes podcast and the host of Contentful + Algolia's Developer Podcast DreamStacks.”
