Welcome to no.60 in our series Poignant Pics where our editor, Diana Nicholette Jeon, writes about Amy Leibrand’s image, “Catalyst”

“By far, the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.”

—Eliezer Yudkowsky

Amy Leibrand has been a distant acquaintance of mine since the early days of iPhone photography. It's hard to recall now, but I imagine we'd met in one of the Facebook groups that sprung up around mobile photography. When I first saw some of her images, I said, "Wow, that is cool! I wish I made that." Over the ensuing years, we haven't interacted all that much, as often happens with those tenuous connection threads controlled by Facebook's infamous algorithms. I realized a few months back that I hadn't seen much from her of late, and I went looking for her FB page, half afraid that something might have happened that left her not making art. (It was a pandemic, after all.) I didn't find much on her FB page, so I went to IG, where I found a link to her website. And that is where I saw this image entitled Catalyst. 

I found it intriguing, both from a conceptual standpoint and considering how Leibrand might have made it. The hands are covered in digital data, yet the eggs bear the appearance of being photographed rather than individually composited and shadowed using digital tools. I wondered how she made it. So, of course, I had to ask! 

Amy told me that she created this work for the 2018 exhibition Futures for the Rest of Us. She began the work with a tri-color selection of eggs. After removing the whites and yolks of the eggs, leaving her with the shell, Amy suspended them from the ceiling with thread in a three-dimensional grid, which she harshly lit to create dark shadows. She shot with a digital camera, followed by post-processing to remove visible thread lines and add digitally created hands comprised of jumbled computer code intended to represent data-driven health care.

Leibrand is employed as a research scientist who works on developing an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven tool for health care quality measurement in Medicaid populations. This image reflects her concerns about how scientific data is sometimes used and manipulated. Most of this is out of my realm to speak of with intelligence or authority, so I will instead leave you with Amy's statement for this image: "The infant mortality rate in the U.S. is more than twice as high in African American infants than in white infants. Along with disparities in care access and socioeconomic inequality, poor outcomes are vastly aggravated by institutional racism and unconscious bias. Research shows that the physiologic wear and tear from a lifetime of racism stress negatively impacts maternal health, even in studies that strictly control for differences in socioeconomic status. These impacts contribute to low birth weight and premature delivery, affecting infant mortality. AI is transforming health care by enabling data-driven decision-making. But, it is only as good as the data used to train it to "learn." Often, this data is riddled with racial and gender bias. Data scientists must be mindful to use training data that represents the concerns of minorities. Doing so will facilitate AI-informed benchmarks for care that are appropriate for diverse populations. 'Catalyst' explores the use of AI developed to account for research bias. Such tools could analytically reduce decision bias and better inform providers about the broader individualistic needs of pregnant women by providing an AI-informed benchmark for care that is appropriate for diverse populations."

Bravo, Amy! It is so awesome to find someone doing serious work addressing these issues. I look forward to seeing what you do next!

Artist Bio

Amy Leibrand is a conceptual artist working in digital and physical mediums, often combining the two. Her work is rooted in a deep interest in science, society, and exploration; she examines diverse themes, such as inequity, gender roles, and conflict through the manipulation and assemblage of original photographs, natural materials, and found or rescued objects. Her approach is explorative—she never stays still, often abandoning mediums on a whim and adopting others without reasoning. As such, her breadth of experience includes painting, film and digital photography, paper art, natural material sculpture, found object assemblage, and embroidery art. 

Her professional career began in 2011 when, on a whim, she responded to a call for artists, was accepted, and won the juror’s award for a photograph of a woman she shot and edited on her iPhone. Since then, Amy has participated in more than 50 juried and invitational exhibitions throughout the U.S. and internationally and has been featured by the New York Times, LensCulture, VICE magazine, and the Emmy award-winning public media program Broad & High. 

Amy is also a curator and arts administrator, having served on the steering committee for CAW: Creative Arts of Women, a female collective of 100+ creatives, and as co-director of Columbus Open Studio & Stage, a two-day city-wide tour of artist studios and performance stages. She is currently developing a program to facilitate rotating art installations in the windows of commercial buildings to help sustain and promote public art in her community. Amy is fiercely passionate about equality and diversity in the arts and is an outspoken advocate for women. 

Amy is a research scientist by profession and an artist by obsession. She currently resides in Columbus, Ohio. To learn more, visit www.thisspaceisrented.com.  

Author Bio

Diana Nicholette Jeon is an award-winning artist based in Honolulu, HI, who works primarily with lens-based media. Her work has been seen both internationally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Jeon holds an MFA from UMBC.