VANISHING PORTRAIT

Permanent Collection of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art

The Vanishing Portrait is a collection of interactive videos that investigate biases related to women's bodies in both social media and AI.

“Identity” shows a video of an asian model and invites the public to click on vanishingportrait.com/google/. Here, a screen shot of the Google search, “Asian Girls” will appear on the video screen. After a period of time, the screen is covered from these images. These images reveal sexualized descriptions and imagery associated with the search term, noting the racial bias present in Google searches.

"Label" showcases an African American model and invites the public to tag a photo on Instagram with "#vanishingportrait." With each participant's action, this tag accumulates on the video screen. As more visitors contribute, the screen becomes completely covered in these hashtags. This video work initially addressed Instagram's filters which predominantly lightened the skin. This showed the discriminatory aspect of the social media platform.

Lastly, ”Ghost" presents a video image of a light-skinned model, questioning the ethics of AI systems' datasets. Using Google AI and a webcam, it detects the gaze of the person in front of the screen. The more people gaze at the screen, the opacity of the image diminishes. "Ghost" was crafted by training an AI system, revealing that a search for "women looking into the camera" predominantly yields images of lighter skin. This perpetuates a hierarchy system of skin color, indicating that lighter skin is embedded into AI systems as a preference. The piece explores how societal perceptions of attractiveness are still rooted in the notion that lighter skin is more appealing, haunting our artificial intelligence.