01:15 min excerpt

Light is the spectre that hovers around photographic technologies. From analog to digital and from light-sensitive coating to computer algorithms, light always occupies an irreplaceable place in competing image-making technologies. Throughout the process of negotiating with light, however, it cannot be disputed that white supremacy in this competition has “unconsciously” and “imperceptibly” shaped human prejudices. Jean-Luc Godard was one of the first white persons to (self-)reflect this crisis in the discourses of the former West: when he was invited to Mozambique assisting the country’s development of image in 1977-78, he realised that Kodak films that were mainstream of the time could not be accurately exposed for portraits featuring subjects of dark skin tones. We cannot simply attribute this technical failure to inadequate equipment for the reason that even the most advanced algorithms used today still show a rather high error rate when determining certain group of people and their skin tones.

The Lighting aims to revisit and clarify the issue of discrimination rooted in technological development and image production through an interdisciplinary exploration. The work comprises three narratives—three professional Togolese photographers explore how to use instruments to compensate for insufficient exposure for dark skin tones; a leading software engineer developing facial recognition algorithms at Taiwan’s MediaTek talks about how they have created a camera algorithm that is highly popular on the African continent; moreover, the artist uses Kodak’s Ektachrome, a popular film in the 70s, to produce a kung fu film in the style of exploitation film, using images of the famous Black martial art film star, Jim Kelly, in Bruce Lee’s movies in the 70s. The work is also interlaced with an animated Bruce Lee as the narrator trained by facial motion capture and a speech recognition algorithm.