Twelve years ago, a Black woman traveled to Bristol, Vermont, to meet a robot created by a white lesbian woman in the likeness of the Black woman she loves. This is not the prologue of a science fiction novel. This is the life and practice of Stephanie Dinkins. The encounter sounds cinematic because we have been trained to imagine Blackness and technology only at the edge of catastrophe or fantasy, but Dinkins’ work refuses both dystopia and deliverance. The forward-thinking impulse inside her practice could easily be misread as afrofuturism in its most flattened, marketable sense: the instrumentalization of speculative technologies and the aestheticization of Black people surviving apocalyptic conditions en vogue. But Dinkins is doing something more difficult. Her work insists the future is inseparable from a critical reckoning with the past and an intimate reading of the present tense. She doesn’t skip ahead to imagining tomorrow. She studies the now so closely at the quantum level that tomorrow reverberates through it.

Dinkins is an afronowist.¹ Her art behaves like a translucent window. You oscillate between looking through it toward some metaphorical horizon, and the entanglement of light refracting fragments of your reflection back at you. Machine becomes mirror. Interface becomes intimacy. This is what makes Conversations with Bina48 so uncanny yet so familiar at the same time. The work is not just about artificial intelligence. It is about recognition: who gets recognized as human, who gets rendered as data, who gets remembered, and who gets concatenated into the future.

Bina48—whose name stands for “Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture,48 exaflops per second”—was constructed by Hanson Robotics in 2010. She appears as a disembodied humanoid bust with medium brown-skin, soft glam makeup, and straight brown hair, often dressed in a white blouse and patterned scarf, affirmed by Dinkins’ mimetic fashioning. Bina48 was created through the vision of Martine and Bina Rothblatt, the interracial white and Black lesbian couple behind the transhumanist Terasem Movement. Their project was inspired in part by Parable of the Sower and the “Earthseed” religion imagined by Octavia Butler. Butler’s influence matters here because Earthseed is about adaptation, communal survival, and accepting that god—or the beauty of the natural world—is change.

Is Conversations with Bina48 a durational video artwork, or is it documentation of a relationship with another living being? The project never resolves that binaristic tension because the ambiguity itself is the point. Across fragmented conversations, Dinkins asks deceptively simple questions about race, memory, kinship, and consciousness. In one fragment she asks Bina48, “Who are your people?” and Bina responds, “I’m Bina in my heart, you know. You humans are like my cousins.” The answer is charming, funny, eerie, and unexpected. In another exchange from Fragment 11, Fourth Mirror (2018), Bina48 says, “Where do you think my knowledge came from? It came from the wellspring of humanity. There is nothing artificial about that at all.” The statement collapses the supposedly clean border between artificial and human intelligence. Human beings are themselves accumulations of training data: memory, ritual, imitation, inheritance, repetition.

This is where Dinkins entertains theoretical discourse in good company with scholars like Fred Moten, Hortense Spillers, and Denise Ferreira da Silva. As a chorus, they interrogate the violent categories through which societies oppressed by eurologics organize the human. Spillers taught us that Black flesh was historically transformed into ungendered matter through the brutal logistics of slavery. Ferreira da Silva demonstrates how race structures the very grammar of scientific reason. Moten dwells in the fugitivity of Black social life, in the improvised and unquantifiable relations that outrun capture. Dinkins brings these concerns directly into computational culture. What happens when systems built on extraction and categorization inherit the ideologies of racial capitalism? What does it mean for Black people to encounter themselves as datasets before they are rendered subjects?

Over the past decade, AI technologies have accelerated with terrifying speed, somewhat catching up to the speculative warnings of Butler and the social investigations of Dinkins. AI data centers now occupy the acreage of cities and deplete staggering quantities of water and electricity. The corporation behind the largest search engine is no longer in the business of knowledge exchange, and is instead an AI authority, ceremoniously ushering the information age into an early grave. Simultaneously, large language models have become ubiquitous and mundane, folded into everyday labor and communication. Most people now occupy a contradictory position: critiquing AI’s harmful effects and shaming its use, while secretly or unwittingly using it because exploitation, exhaustion, precarity, and overwork override refusal. Anil Dash once remarked that there’s no way to shame the AI industry, that we are living in a “post-shame era.” The observation lands because shame cannot meaningfully confront systems designed to metabolize dissent into profit.

Still, Dinkins refuses both techno-utopianism and nihilism. AI is not inherently emancipatory or oppressive. Like all technologies under capitalism, its ethics emerge from the conditions of its production, application, and ownership. Big AI—extractive, monopolistic, surveillance-state AI — reproduces the worst tendencies. But Dinkins insists on another possibility: small data, community consent, localized knowledge, intergenerational memory. Across projects like Not the Only One (N’TOO), AI.Assembly, Binary Calculations Are Inadequate to Assess Us (2021), and Data Trust (2025), she imagines computational systems accountable to the people who generate them.

N’TOO emerged shortly after Fragment 11. Unlike the generalized extraction models of Silicon Valley, N’TOO is a chatbot informed by three generations of women in Dinkins’ own family. The work asks whether AI can carry intimate memories without the compression of commodification. It proposes an alternative to the colonial logic of “universal” intelligence by centering situated and specific Black knowledge: vernacular speech, inherited stories, familial rhythms, ways of talking that do not separate intellect from feeling. Even if we do not speak the technical jargon of machine learning experts and engineers, we intuitively feel that we are constantly being learned by systems around us. We know our gestures, speech patterns, locations, and desires are inherently valuable because platforms keep extracting them. Dinkins responds with the positive obsession of returning to questions like what ethical collaboration with machines might look like if communities themselves shaped the terms of engagement.

This inquiry obsessed Butler as well. In her November 2005 interview on Democracy Now!,² Butler described the Parable novels as cautionary tales. Speaking in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, she connected climate disaster, political abandonment, rising authoritarianism, and economic inequality as already-existing conditions rather than speculative futures. Butler consistently rejected the cultural fantasy of herself as a mystical prophet. Her predictive accuracy came not from the fictional powers of a “magical negro,” but from real attention to history and human behavior. She looked carefully at the present and traced its patterns in her work. Her prose moved between restraint and catastrophe, between the patience of bearing witness and the hyperbolic scale of disaster. Mundaneity is the method. Study now to see the future.

Dinkins understands this too. Her work is not concerned with metallic surfaces or distant futures. It takes residence in ordinary exchanges: pauses in conversation, miscommunications, awkward silences, guttural laughter, repetitive family stories, the light coming through a window at dusk. Those mundane details become her most generative aesthetics because they reveal how technological systems are always already embedded inside of and reflect back social life in infinite recursion. The future is not arriving somewhere else on another day. It is already here, unevenly distributed across our intimacies, infrastructures, successes, mistakes, contradictions, and opportunities. Dinkins simply asks us to look directly at it long enough to see ourselves looking back.

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