Amelia Winger-Bearskin

This unique art uses film to take the viewer on a journey through AI-altered landscapes. Amelia questions ownership of the sky, blending traditional wisdom with modern technology to reveal a world without borders.

The Film

I WOULD LIKE TO BE MIDNIGHT / I WOULD LIKE TO BE SKY

2023

Video: 10 minutes, 23 seconds

Who determines the protocol for looking at the sky? Like moss and fungi, animals and plants, and indeed most living beings, the sky doesn't have borders. It moves and is part of a larger system that includes the moon, the sun, and the stars.

Amelia was inspired to make this piece when she heard a politician lay claim to the “universal ethical protocol” for looking at the sky. This led Amelia to contemplate various notions of owning the sky—the laws that treat airspace as territory or an extension of the land, the regulations governing what kinds of frequencies we can emit across the open air, and the geographic information systems whose satellites we can see if the night is clear enough. Ultimately, it’s Amelia's ancestors that she hopes to connect to through these tools—old and new.

This video work is part of SKYWORLD/CLOUDWORLD, a larger series of her work, and continues to explore themes of a communication network throughout the skies.

Amelia is a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma.

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The Process

The raw dataset is composed of photos that the director took while driving across the country. These images are actual landscapes (not AI-generated) moving from the west coast to the east coast of the USA.

The algorithms assist the animations in this short film, which uses digital image interpolation when an image is resized or distorted from one-pixel grid to another. This gives the film a liquid morphing process, which Amelia finds hypnotic and out of time.

The primary AI models used are for image inpainting and pixel morphing. Inpainting is an AI technique historically used to reconstruct missing regions in an image (e.g., object removal and image restoration). Amelia uses this technique subversively by inpainting to erase the prominent human architecture of the videos she took, reminding us that a backward-looking prediction erases a possible future.

I WOULD LIKE TO BE MIDNIGHT / I WOULD LIKE TO BE SKY (short film)

This film has won awards in a number of festivals, including Official Selection, imagineNATIVE Film and Media Arts Festival 2023; Best Experimental Film, Montreal Women Film Festival 2023; Best Artificial Intelligence Film, Cannes World Film Festival 2023; Best Artist Film (short), Brussels Capital Film Festival 2023; and Best Artist Film (short), Green and Environment, Berlin Indie Film Festival 2023.

It has also been featured in venues like the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, USA 2023 and the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media at Yale: Research Gallery, New Haven, CT USA 2023

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About Amelia Winger-Bearskin

Amelia is an artist who innovates with artificial intelligence in ways that positively impact our community and the environment. She’s a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She’s also the founder of the UF AI Climate Justice Lab and the Talk To Me About Water Collective. In addition, Amelia founded Wampum.Codes, which is both an award-winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation. Wampum.codes was awarded a Mozilla Fellowship embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio from 2019-2020 and was featured at the 2021 imagineNative festival. She continued her research in 2021 at Stanford University as their artist and technologist in residence, made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF) .

In 2022, Amelia was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Award as part of the Sundance AOP Fellowship cohort for her project CLOUD WORLD/SKYWORLD, which will be part of the Whitney’s Sunrise/Sunset series in late fall 2022.

Instagram | X | studioamelia.com | climatejusticelab.com | talktomeaboutwater.com

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