Sundance Institute's Story Forum: Exploring Art and Innovation is a space to learn, collaborate, and join the conversation; inviting thoughtful dialogue about the artist-first tools and technologies supporting visual storytelling today.


Director Valerie Veatch returns with her third film to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in competition with her new documentary, Ghost in the Machine. The provocative feature exposes the buried history of artificial intelligence and entrenched structures of power that have shaped the technology.

In the first of two Story Forum sessions on the film, Veatch presents a deep-dive into the making of her documentary as well as the technology’s implications with regards to racial discrimination and climate devastation. During this session, Veatch leads two panel discussions with five participants from the documentary: Thema Monroe-White, Tiera Tanksley, Johnathan Flowers, Alli Finn, and Alix Dunn. These conversations offer insight into finding and shaping your story with your documentary participants, and prove essential for those interested in the systems surrounding the development of AI.


Explore Sundance Institute's Story Forum: On Demand Collection

Alix Dunn
CEO, The Maybe
Alix Dunn is a trusted expert and advisor who has worked at the intersection of technology and society for over 15 years. She is the founder and CEO of The Maybe, a critical consultancy, collective, and media studio that challenges the power and politics of tech. Alix is also the host of the weekly COMPUTER SAYS MAYBE podcast, a senior advisor to AI Now, and serves on the boards of the strategic litigation firm Foxglove and the radical research network RealML. Previously, she served as a trustee of the Ada Lovelace Institute for AI & Society. Alix and her team at The Maybe have partnered with organizations including the Ford Foundation, Amnesty International, Open Society Foundations, International Fund for Public Interest Media, System, Human Rights Watch, DeepMind, and many others. more...
Alli Finn
Organizer & Policy Advocate
Alli Finn is an experienced organizer, policy advocate, and movement researcher rooted in NYC, focused on AI, data centers, and state and corporate surveillance. Alli leads the AI Now Institute's partnerships work, equipping communities, organizers, and policymakers to challenge the negative impacts of AI infrastructure and systems on our work, health, rights, and daily lives. Alli also helps steward a nationwide network of local and state groups resisting data center expansion. more...
Johnathan Flowers
Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge
Johnathan Flowers is currently an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University, Northridge. His primary research areas include African American intellectual history and philosophy, Japanese Aesthetics, American Pragmatism, Philosophy of Disability, and Philosophy of Technology. Flowers also works in the areas of Feminist Philosophy and affect theory, with a specific focus on the affective organization of identity. more...
Thema Monroe-White
Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Policy, George Mason University
Thema (Tay-mah) Monroe-White is an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Policy in the Schar School of Policy and Government and the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. She is particularly concerned with understanding the pathways to achieving social and economic empowerment for minoritized groups via AI education, and emancipatory data science, a justice-centered approach to computational and quantitative inquiry that challenges algorithmic biases, advances racial equity, and reimagines how data and AI can serve marginalized communities. She investigates the intersections of bias mitigation, critical computational methods, and racial equity across science and technology education. more...
Tiera Tanksley
Senior Researcher; Founder, Race, Abolition and Artificial Intelligence Program
Dr. Tiera Tanksley is a Senior Researcher whose work examines the socioemotional, mental health and academic impacts of digital and artificially intelligent technologies on Black youth. Her work examines anti-Blackness as the “default setting” of schools and school-based technologies, including GenAI chatbots, facial recognition systems, weapons detection systems, and more. Her work simultaneously recognizes Black youth as digital activists and civic agitators, and examines the complex ways they subvert, resist, and rewrite algorithmically biased technologies to produce more-just and joyous digital experiences for Communities of Color across the diaspora. more...
Valerie Veatch
Moderator | Director, GHOST IN THE MACHINE
Hailing from London by way of New York by way of Seattle, Valere Veatch is an acclaimed independent documentary filmmaker. Veatch is a writer, director, and producer of documentaries "Me @ The Zoo" (HBO), "Love Child" (HBO). Veatch is a graduate of the New School for Social Research with a degree in Culture and Media Studies. Her award-winning work deals with the intersection of technology and society. more...
Tags:Activism & Social Impact Emerging MediaEquity & Inclusion

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