Stephanie Dinkins: Data Trust
September 19, 2025 - March 22, 2026

What if memory was not simply archived but planted, nurtured like kin, growing in the places we call home?

Data Trust reimagines the relationship between community, technology, and the living world. The data we share with machines shapes how they understand us — and in turn, how they shape our futures. When our stories are self-determined, culturally specific, and grounded in our ways of knowing, they seed AI ecosystems capable of recognizing us — all of us — on our own terms.

Community memory, machine learning, and microbial life converge: multi-generational oral histories are encoded into bacterial DNA, preserved in soil, and carried in okra plants and California black oaks. Generative AI projections transform these offerings into shifting visual landscapes, while seating encourages visitors to add their voices to the archive.

Historically excluded communities — Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled, and queer individuals — are invited not just to be represented in these systems but to shape them, guiding technology toward care, reciprocity, and justice. Memory becomes living, adapting, and resistant to erasure. The stories we tell ourselves and our machines form our future.

Stephanie Dinkins: Data Trust is curated by Elizabeth Thomas, organized by Zoë Latzer, produced through Future Histories Studio (FHS) with support from Creative Time and the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Fund. Sculpture and furniture in Data Trust were produced in collaboration with the San José State University Art & Art History Department.

We are grateful to all who shared their stories and to our collaborators: Antioch Baptist Church, African American Service Association, DOT DOT, Ziye Zhang, Saketh Krishna Dumpuru, Jeff Nivala, Alvarro Azcarraga, Sam Marks, Gervais Marsh, Lauren Ruiz, We Start Gardens, and Anthony Remick.