Meet Co-Creation Studio Mozilla Fellow, Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Renowned artist/technologist Amelia Winger-Bearskin (Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma) is the new Mozilla Fellow hosted at the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab.
Amelia Winger-Bearskin,
artist/technologist, is the 2019–2020 Mozilla fellow hosted at Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open
Documentary Lab.
It’s a first for the Studio — and the Open Doc Lab as a whole — to host a Mozilla Fellow as part of Mozilla’s global efforts to improve internet health. The 2019–2020 fellowship program supports 25 global fellows, including artists, technologists, lawyers, activists, and scientists, many hosted at international organizations dedicated to democracy, accountability, and models in technology that help rather than harm.
During her time at the Co-Creation Studio, Winger-Bearskin will develop a new project, Wampum.code, that brings greater accountability to tech with a new model for values-based dependencies in software projects. Her model is founded in Indigenous values and practices, specifically Hodenoshounee, or Iroquois, a confederacy of six Indigenous nations. (Winger-Bearskin previously wrote on this topic for Immerse.)
“Stories are the oldest technology we have as humans,” said Winger-Bearskin. “They help us to encode our values, technologies, teachings, survival strategies into various media. In Hodenoshounee culture, storytelling is a means of encoding the social values of the community. We believe contributions to the community should be made to last for seven generations. In my culture, ethics, technology, and storytelling are fused in a way that might seem foreign to the Western perspective. My goal in this project is to ask how my tribe’s way of sharing information could be applied to make software projects more ethically robust. The ethics in storytelling are pretty much the same as ethics we need for software development. The heart of the matter is: how to make explicit the values we are encoding into software?”
The Iroquoian Wampum belt, a
key inspiration for American democracy, had encoded principles of democracy of the Iroquois
Confederacy directly in the beading. With Wampum.code, Amelia Winger-Bearskin suggests that like
the wampum, our contemporary systems of computer coding have embedded our social values directly
in them. Rather than just “correcting for bias” in the algorithms, we need to rewrite and rewire
the code, on ethical principles.To develop the project, Winger-Bearskin will co-create with her community as well as other Indigenous Nations to shape the concept through workshops, and partnerships.
“There has never been a greater urgency to rewire and rebuild our technology systems from the code on up,” said Katerina Cizek, of Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. “We know that the answers to the world’s biggest emergencies, all profoundly interconnected with our current technologies — the Climate Crisis, the collapse of democracies, the global economic, and racial injustices — need to be aligned and driven with Indigenous-centred approaches. That’s why we are honoured to welcome Amelia Winger-Bearskin to bring her artistry, wisdom, experience, and energy to the studio and lab, with her remarkable project Wampum.code.”
Winger-Bearskin will also draw on her interdisciplinary experiences as a nonprofit founder and Executive Director of IDEA New Rochelle, professor, creative advisor to Sundance New Frontiers Lab, as well as her artistic endeavors, including VR/AR/XR and Video art permanently housed at Guggenheim Museum and the McCord Museum.
“The caliber of fellows across the Mozilla program is world-class, and we are privileged to welcome Amelia Winger-Bearskin to the studio, lab, and greater MIT community,” said William Uricchio, Principal Investigator of the Co-Creation Studio, MIT Open Doc Lab.
In addition to her own project, Winger-Bearskin will also contribute to the development of the studio. Her work embodies the many dimensions of co-creation: working within community, across disciplines, and with algorithms.
“Amelia Winger-Bearskin’s Wampum.code project is exactly the kind of work that we want to support in the studio and lab. It’s looking to indigenous storytelling practices to offer new models for technology development that are ethical and based on community values” said Sarah Wolozin, Director of Open Documentary Lab, and Co-PI of the Studio. “We welcome her into our community and look forward to supporting her work.”
Winger-Bearskin will also participate as an Open Documentary Lab fellow, joining the current cohort of 15 fellows who develop their projects in residency at MIT.
The Mozilla fellowships begin October 1, 2019, kicking off with the first gathering of the fellows and host organizations at Mozfest in London England later in the month. Winger-Bearskin will bring workshops, lectures, and mentorship to the MIT community throughout her tenure as fellow until June 2020.
This article is part of Collective Wisdom, an Immerse series created in collaboration with Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. Immerse’s series features excerpts from MIT Open Documentary Lab’s larger field study — Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media within Communities, across Disciplines and with Algorithms — as well as bonus interviews and exclusive content.
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