AMELIA WINGER-BEARSKIN (B. 1979)
Nearest Neighbor
acrylic print on canvas
30 x 40 in. (76.2 x 101.6 cm.)
Executed in 2025

The artist

Amelia Winger-Bearskin's Nearest Neighbor is a digital acrylic print on canvas. The image is derived from an upscaled detail of the artist's hand-rendered sketch using a nearest neighbor interpolation algorithm and modern AI upscaling techniques. Rooted in early computational methods, nearest neighbor interpolation algorithms approximate values by their closest data points, embodying the principle that the whole is the sum of its parts. In this work of art, the algorithm is not just a tool to upscale a drawing detail but a metaphor for how we might use AI technology to solve one of humanity's most significant challenges: homelessness.

The artist invites audiences to consider AI and homelessness by connecting the artwork to her AI work with Community Solutions and their Built For Zero program. Through her work, the artist demystifies the algorithmic processes underlying AI and reveals their broader implications across social, political, natural, and economic systems. Proceeds from the sale of this piece will support Community Solution’s Built for Zero mission to make homelessness rare and brief, demonstrating how focused, collective action—like the algorithm itself—can create transformative change.

The artist is Indigenous, an enrolled member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, with mixed European heritage. Her father, a digital optical innovator at Kodak, and her mother, a Seneca-Cayuga traditional storyteller, encouraged her to explore new forms of storytelling— expanding narratives to speak to new generations. Her work bridges ancestral knowledge with contemporary technology, learning from the antecedent technology of her ancestors to reimagine Indigenous pasts as pathways to scientific futures. Her artistic methodology challenges the notion of AI as a purely modern construct, instead positioning it within a continuum of intelligence that has long existed in Indigenous knowledge systems—offering a vision where technology is not at odds with tradition but an extension of it.