BEHIND THE CLOUD: INTERROGATING DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES
BEHIND THE CLOUD: INTERROGATING DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES
Dennis Delgado
ARTWORKS
Through an analysis of contemporary pop culture, specifically Hollywood films depicting Black figures and people of color, Dennis Delgado’s work underscores the role of facial recognition, corporate surveillance apparatus, and predictive policing as it broadly affects Black people, people of color, and activist groups. Their artworks consider how these technologies routinely mine and sell our information to the highest bidder, abstracted as terabytes of data hosted on offshore server farms, mirroring other architectures of incarceration. The Dark Database originated between 2019 and 2020 as a set of portraits composed from “the median pixel value of all of the faces detected by an Open Computer Vision algorithm when executed on a feature-length film.” In this presentation of the Dark Database, the works are displayed on four iPads with composite portraits pulled from films like Spike Lee’s 1989 “Do the Right Thing,” Franc. Reyes’ 2002 “Empire,” Leon Ichaso’s 2001 “Piñero,” and Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney’s 2016 “Moonlight.” The displayed portraits are “centered, enlarged, and layered” into a single composite using a facial template guide that appears almost unrecognizable. Due to facial recognition systems favoring and privileging white skin tones over darker skin tones, in addition to these databases lacking the range and diversity of skin tone appearances, many faces with darker skin are often undetectable, misconstrued, or inaccurate. Delgado notes that the Dark Database asks: What does this face mean? What does this face evoke? Delgado ultimately interrogates how surveillance and facial recognition technology target racialized bodies through their inability to properly “capture,” further reinforcing the standards of white supremacy and racism codified within the United States, and the violences they enact.
Further Reading
Dennis Delgado The Dark Database: Facial Recognition and its “Failure” to Enroll
Vimeo talk with Prof. Calvin John Smiley
Artist Bio
Dennis Delgado was born in the South Bronx, and received a BA in Film Studies from the University of Rochester as well as an MFA in Sculpture from the City College of New York (CUNY). His work examines the forms through which ideologies of colonialism persist and re-inscribe themselves, revealing a historical presence in the current moment. He is interested in how technologies of vision reproduce the scopic regimes of expansionism and neo-liberal governance. His work has been exhibited at the Palo Alto Center for the Arts, Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, El Museo del Barrio, and at the Cooper Union.