Wall picture:
600 passport (size) photographs, 4 x 1 m
Video:
600 passport (size) photographs, morphed, 17'
Original footage:
The photographs were taken by an Indian street photographer with a camera obscura. He works everyday in the streets of Varanasi and offers a portrait for 10 INR. During her stay in India, the artist ordered one extra copy per portrait from the photographer. Over a period of five months she bought 1000 copies from him.
For the video film, these photographs have been scanned, cropped and transformed into each other by a computer program. In doing so, the computer tries to detect the eyes of the faces on the photographs in order to morph them into each other. Because of the extremely diverse quality of the pictures, the morphing processus is doomed.
The wall picture consits of the original material processed in the video. The gray scale value of the photographs has been calculated digitally by a script, as to arrange them according to a binary search tree. This data structure is used as a model for the wall picture.
About:
Own race bias is a term used in theories of cognition to describe mistakes when interpreting faces of alien races. The appearance of members from a foreign cultural background is significantly less differentiatedly perceived than the one of members from a familiar cultural background.
Programming:
Johnny Nia (Script) / Philipp Suter (Morph)
Movie from the installation of the same title
Own race bias is a term used in theories of cognition to describe mistakes when interpreting faces of alien races.
Photographs are transformed into each other by an application. In doing so, the application tries to detect the eyes of the faces on the photographs in order to morph them into each other. Because of the extremely diverse quality of the pictures, the morphing processus is doomed.
http://brigittedaetwyler.ch/mixed_media/own_race_bias
© Brigitte Dätwyler 2009