Machine-readable and human-illegible forms. A binary response is devoid of meaning and complexity. 0 or 1. True or false, open or close, white or inexistent.
The use of facial recognition technology is controversial. The algorithms developed are mainly designed to recognize light skin, which contributes to the inability of the algorithm to be accurate in a more diverse population, particularly with dark skin.
I re-use Frantz Fanon's reference to the title of his book, "Black Skin White Masks", where the author explains concepts of the collective unconscious and how white power will always exercise a sense of inferiority upon the black population.
With this project, I intend to reflect on the passage of such unconscious bias into modern technologies. As computers can't read images, it depends on human input to understand what is presented to them, resulting in a supply of misrepresentations about black people as inferior or villains.
Like in Tina Camp's "Listening to Images" book, here I replace the subject's mug shot with ASCII code - a standard set of characters understood by all computers - that reduces their identity to a binary result, devoid of meaning and complexity and further dehumanise, over police and restrict black bodies.
