Amelia Winger-Bearskin: I WOULD LIKE TO BE MIDNIGHT / I WOULD LIKE TO BE SKY

I WOULD LIKE TO BE MIDNIGHT / I WOULD LIKE TO BE SKY (2023) is an experimental AI art film by Amelia Winger-Bearskin, part of her larger SKYWORLD/CLOUDWORLD series exploring themes of a communication network throughout the skies.

The artwork was inspired by a politician’s claim to a “universal ethical protocol” for observing the sky, which led the artist 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.

The film documents a journey across the United States, challenging the notion of airspace as a mere extension of terrestrial boundaries. Using AI image inpainting, a technique traditionally employed to reconstruct missing regions in an image, the artist subversively erases human-made structures from her landscape photographs and morphs hand-drawn animations.

About the Artist

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a Brooklyn-based artist, technologist, educator, and enrolled member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma. She has worked with AI since 2011, exploring how creative practice, technical systems, and collective knowledge can shape more responsible futures.

She is an associate professor of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College and a Housing and AI Fellow with New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Her work spans film, immersive media, software, civic technology, and Indigenous approaches to ethical AI. She created Wampum.Codes and co-authored Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice, published by MIT Press.

Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kadist, and the McCord Stewart Museum. She has been a Stanford HAI Fellow, Mozilla Fellow, and Sundance/MacArthur Art of Practice Fellow. She earned her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin.