Week 14 reflections

With more readings and critical thought given to the role of technology and algorithms within our world, and specially within the arts, I’ve spent the last few weeks ruminating over my research proposal for my history class. As I’m also learning more programming and the applications of manipulating data or images with code, I want to combine these two new lines of thought and practice to investigate a topic I am truly invested in: tackling racial bias in machine learning and algorithms, and also utilizing technology to tackle identity politics and racism within the United States, particularly as an immigrant and a child of the diaspora.

In a previous blog post I highlighted an idea for a project involving “yellowness” often labeled to East Asians that I am still interested in developing further. Originally, I had taken references from Image Processing projects using openFrameworks and Processing 3 and also from contemporary artists who work with issues of Asian identity politics such as Byron Kim. I wanted to extract pixels from photographs from individual members of the East Asian community to see what the average “skin” color was. In reflecting back on this idea, with its merits it was still too vague — what did I want to capture using this technology that speaks to the urgent times around me?

I want to compare the implicit biases in identifying individuals by their skin tones, first stemming into an area that is personal to me: my purportedly “yellow” skin. I want to create a poll showing a range of hues and ask individuals to pick the hue they most associate with Asian skin. I then hope to take photographs of members of the East Asian community and find the average hue of their skin — namely from their face. I want to then average these tones into one singular hue, or a range of hues grouped together by nationality, and compare it to the wider perceived ideas of our surrounding society.