In Dark Matters, Browne argues that while race has been a decisive parameter in being subject to surveillance, the issue of blackness has left unnoticed in the surveillance studies. To fill this gap, she defines “racializing surveillance” as “a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place’”(16). Related to my last week’s blog post on racial bias in sample data used for training facial recognition software. Joy Buolamwini, a computer scientist at MIT Media Lab, whom I linked to her article last week, explains how she noticed this racial bias when working with a generic facial recognition program on a webcam. The program wouldn’t recognize her unless she wore a white mask. In other words, the program was not letting her to enter digital space, to be coded. We usually understand the surveillance as a form of detection and profiling, yet, in this case, the act of not profiling is an instance of racializing surveillance that Browne explains as “moments when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines” (16).
VJ Um Amel’s 10-Year Manifesto resonates with me, more emotionally than emotionally, in various layers. As an Iranian who is currently living in the U.S., as a genderqueer who realize their gender every day, as an hope to be artist/scholar/activist, my identities reject stasis the same way she understand hers “as a convergence of historical experiences, rather than a set of cultural identities, because ‘convergence’ and ‘experience’ embody the notion of movement and phenomenology of action.” Um Amel’s addressing of transnational Arab people brings forth the issue of the audience. Who is the audience of my work, whom I’m addressing? A white middle-class liberal American? A pro-monarchy Iranian exile in the US? Those Iranian who are fighting against the regime in the streets? The disparate Iranian diaspora? I infer the answer to this urgent question of mine from the manifest as well. If one’s identities are in motion, if one’s space is “in-between”, then the work itself, in any form it may take, can be in flux, and the audience too doesn’t need to be predefined, static, and singular.
The plurality of the audience leads me to two other articles of this week, “Prismatic Interfaces” and “30. Personas”. When my work takes the form of an interactive digital media project, then in the designing of it, I have to take into account the heterogeneity of the users and their unique lived experiences and needs, which means, in Lynn’s words, “[t]o describe users as personas helps designers to engage in the users during the entire design process. It enables the design team to engage in the user and to focus the design on the user.” And within developing personas, I have to consider those that are not mainstream users, minorities. However, as same as mine, the identities of the users are neither singular nor immobile, their identities are in motion and they do always exist at intersections. Therefore, my interface has to be “prismatic”, as Duarte argues. Prismatic interfaces “can be analyzed in terms of everyday user experience and then, over time and place, layered against the user experiences of others to reveal the complex social, economic, and political impacts of these interfaces for raced and gendered social groups” (3). Through such a digital interface, I envision a prismatic real interface, plural realities.
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