Her film documents a journey across the United States inspired by a politician’s assertion of a universal protocol for observing the sky, challenging the traditional notions of airspace as mere extensions of terrestrial boundaries.

Who determines the protocol for looking at the sky? Like moss and fungi, animals and plants, and indeed most living beings, the sky does not have borders. It moves and is part of a larger system that includes the moon, the sun, and the stars. This video work is part of SKYWORLD/CLOUDWORLD, a larger series by Amelia Winger-Bearskin, and continues to explore themes of a communication network throughout the skies. The artist 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, the geographic information systems whose satellites we can see if the night is clear enough. Ultimately it is Amelia’s ancestors, that she hopes to connect to through these tools old and new.

Amelia is an enrolled member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma.

Note on the Artificial Intelligence the film uses:

Amelia’s short film uses Image Inpainting, a technique from the field of AI that is 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 backward-looking prediction erases a possible future. The short film also uses digital image interpolation when an image is resized or distorted from the one-pixel grid to another. This gives the film a liquid morphing process, which Amelia finds hypnotic and out of time.

The algorithms assist the animations; the images are photographs (not AI-generated) taken by the director while driving across the country, moving from the west coast to the east coast of the USA).

“I  USE NEW KINDS OF TECHNOLOGY TO TELL NEW KINDS OF STORIES. SPECIFICALLY, I’M INTERESTED IN SCIENCE STORYTELLING AROUND ENVIRONMENTAL FUTURES. MY MAIN AREA OF ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH IS WATER. I STAND WITH THOSE WHO DEFY CATEGORIZATION. WE ARE PROTOTYPING JUST FUTURES, IN PLACES THAT DO NOT EXIST. FOR PEOPLE THEY WILL ONE DAY BE, FOR THE LIQUID, THE HYBRID, THE CYBER, THE UNREAL.”

-Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Artist Statement 2023

About the Artist

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is 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 is also the founder of the AI Climate Justice Lab, the Talk To Me About Water Collective, and the Stupid Hackathon.

In 2023-2024, she created the Virtual Reality experience for the feature film Fancy Dance. Directed and produced by Erica Tremblay, a fellow Seneca-Cayuga woman and friend, the film was the first Cayuga Language Feature Film and the first to be filmed on Amelia and Erica’s reservation in Grove, Oklahoma. The film stars Lily Gladstone, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, has won numerous awards, is currently in theaters, and is streaming on Apple. She also created a short experimental film, I WOULD LIKE TO BE MIDNIGHT / I WOULD LIKE TO BE SKY, which premiered at film festivals including ImagineNATIVE, DeadCenter Film, Maoriland, and is on display at the Columbus Museum of Art and the NVIDIA GTC Art Gallery.

In 2022 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Award as part of the Sundance AOP Fellowship cohort for her project CLOUD WORLD / SKYWORLD which was part of The Whitney’s Sunrise/Sunset series.

In 2021, she was a fellow at Stanford University as their artist and technologist in residence, which was made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF).

In 2020 she founded Wampum Codes, an award-winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation, while a Mozilla Fellow at the MIT Co-Creation Studio.

In 2019 she was a delegate at the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion for His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama,  at his World  Headquarters in Dharmsala, India.

In 2018 she was awarded the 100k Alternative Realities Prize for her Virtual Reality Project: Your Hands Are Feet from Engadget and Verizon Media. This was also the year that nonprofit IDEA New Rochelle won the $1 Million Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge for their VR/AR Citizen toolkit to help the community co-design their city.

In years prior:

Her video art was selected as a part of Storytelling : La biennale d’art contemporain autochtone, 2e édition (Art Biennale of Contemporary Native Art) at Art Mur (Montreal, Canada). She has been a featured artist at numerous international performance art festivals since 2008 in cities not limited to: Beijing, China, Manila, Philippines, Seoul, South Korea, Sao Paulo, Brazil, New York, NY, and Washington, DC. She presented her performance art at the 2012 Gwangju Art Biennial and created an interactive portion of The Exchange Archive at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2013.  Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim Museum, the Kadist Collection, and the McCord Museum.

Amelia is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma.