About
"The most interesting thing about AI is what it teaches us about being human."
— Helen Starr
Helen Starr is a Trinidadian decolonial curator, producer and writer of Indigenous Carib and Yoruba African descent. Her work explores how emerging technologies shape the realities through which people understand themselves, each other and the world. Through contemporary art, immersive media and worldbuilding practices, she supports artists who imagine and rehearse new possibilities for being human.
In 2010, Starr founded The Mechatronic Library to support underrepresented artists working at the intersection of art and emerging technologies such as: AR, VR, AI and game engines. At the time, many of these practices sat outside mainstream contemporary art discourse. Over the past fifteen years, the Library has commissioned, produced and presented projects that explore new relationships between technology, culture, memory, identity and belonging.
Through her curatorial practice, Starr returns repeatedly to the stories, values and ways of knowing passed between generations of Carib women in her family. What began as an effort to understand emerging technologies gradually evolved into a broader exploration of Indigenous cosmotechnics, decolonial technologies and the processes through which othered worlds are enacted, inhabited and sustained.
For Starr, contemporary art is a form of reality practice: a space in which worlds can be experienced, tested and rehearsed.
Alongside her curatorial work, Starr is a published writer and researcher whose academic publications explore two interconnected themes. The first concerns how humans construct and inhabit subjective realities through touch, movement and co-presence. The second examines Indigenous cosmotechnics, decolonial technologies and the cultural implications of artificial intelligence. Together, these strands of research inform her wider interest in worldbuilding, perception and the relationship between technology and reality.
The work of visionary Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter provides crucial insights for Starr's her practice. Wynter understands the Caribbean not as peripheral to modernity but as its defining site of creation: a space-time where Indigenous, African and European worlds met and transformed one another, reshaping the Earth and all its inhabitants. Starr's practice extends this legacy into the present, treating contemporary art as another site of world-making.
Contemporary art is often understood as a space for critique. Starr's work begins from a different proposition: that media technologies can expand one of art's most important functions, allowing artists to create the conditions through which new realities can be practised into existence.
"The most interesting thing about AI is what it teaches us about being human."
— Helen Starr
Helen Starr is a Trinidadian decolonial curator, producer and writer of Indigenous Carib and Yoruba African descent. Her work explores how emerging technologies shape the realities through which people understand themselves, each other and the world. Through contemporary art, immersive media and worldbuilding practices, she supports artists who imagine and rehearse new possibilities for being human.
In 2010, Starr founded The Mechatronic Library to support underrepresented artists working at the intersection of art and emerging technologies such as: AR, VR, AI and game engines. At the time, many of these practices sat outside mainstream contemporary art discourse. Over the past fifteen years, the Library has commissioned, produced and presented projects that explore new relationships between technology, culture, memory, identity and belonging.
Through her curatorial practice, Starr returns repeatedly to the stories, values and ways of knowing passed between generations of Carib women in her family. What began as an effort to understand emerging technologies gradually evolved into a broader exploration of Indigenous cosmotechnics, decolonial technologies and the processes through which othered worlds are enacted, inhabited and sustained.
For Starr, contemporary art is a form of reality practice: a space in which worlds can be experienced, tested and rehearsed.
Alongside her curatorial work, Starr is a published writer and researcher whose academic publications explore two interconnected themes. The first concerns how humans construct and inhabit subjective realities through touch, movement and co-presence. The second examines Indigenous cosmotechnics, decolonial technologies and the cultural implications of artificial intelligence. Together, these strands of research inform her wider interest in worldbuilding, perception and the relationship between technology and reality.
The work of visionary Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter provides crucial insights for Starr's her practice. Wynter understands the Caribbean not as peripheral to modernity but as its defining site of creation: a space-time where Indigenous, African and European worlds met and transformed one another, reshaping the Earth and all its inhabitants. Starr's practice extends this legacy into the present, treating contemporary art as another site of world-making.
Contemporary art is often understood as a space for critique. Starr's work begins from a different proposition: that media technologies can expand one of art's most important functions, allowing artists to create the conditions through which new realities can be practised into existence.