![]() ![]() An important strategy in her work is the use of digitally archived images that she finds, transfers, and stores on her Instagram account Founded in 2013, Orupabo’s ‘personal’ archive today consists of more than 2,700 photographic images, as well as excerpts from high- and low-culture videos, films, and texts from all different time periods. My essay focuses on the particular relationship between the Black body and the archive by considering the work of Frida Orupabo, one of the participating artists in the Resistant Faces exhibition, who engages with the history of photography and its shifting role in the digital age.īorn in 1986 in Norway to a Norwegian mother and a Nigerian father, Orupabo uses reconfigurations of virtual, historical, and personal image material to explore questions of race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity. Jenst Schröter, ‘Archive-Post/photographic’, Media Art Net, July 1, 2021. For them, the point is not a nostalgic return to the safe refuge of the museum – which is impossible as it is – but to keep the discussion about the archive of the future in motion by working on alternative models to it. By offering oppositional orders of dispersive image material, or by inventing new logics that allow them to structure the heterogeneous image material differently, they find ways to subvert traditional archival logics. Many young artists today use the possibilities of platforms such as Instagram, the ‘mega-archive’ of digitized images, as a space that has the potential to produce new, real, and meaningful interactions and relations. The smartphone has made the shooting, accumulation, and distribution of photographs in social networks simpler than ever before. One of the main observations that motivated my research was the following antagonism: while the tech world celebrates new digital image technologies as ground-breaking and ‘neutral’, contemporary artists remain suspicious of the latest technological developments, especially when it comes to the claim such technologies make to objectivity and truth. Resistant Faces, a group exhibition I curated in 2021 at Pinakothek der Moderne, addressed these urgent questions by introducing eight different artists working on the body and the archive in the digital age. How do new digital technologies change the relationship between photography, the body, and the archive? And how could the digital sphere be used as a space of resistance against algorithmic control and surveillance? This unveils how digital technologies perpetuate and optimise photographically based standardisation methods, which since the nineteenth century have been classifying groups of people according to racist, sexist, and criminal categories based on skin and hair colour, facial features, and so on. Shoshana Amielle Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity(Durham and London, 2011), 69–90. On the other hand, many criminal databases used by governments are trained with pictures of mainly dark-skinned people from economically deprived neighbourhoods. Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (2019). Raji, ‘Actionable Auditing: Investigating the Impact of Publicly Naming Biased Performance Results of Commercial AI Products’. MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini, for example, has uncovered how many varieties of facial recognition software fail to identity the faces of women with dark skin, because they were trained in the learning process using pictures of white men. The assumption that a person’s ethical character could be deduced from their facial features was already ominously institutionalised at that time, yet this sensitive debate becomes even more topical in the digital age: as scandals regarding discriminatory technologies have shown, the artificial intelligences developed today in Silicon Valley, Innopolis, and Beijing are anything but objective and neutral. Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters, vol. ![]() Allan Sekula, ‘Der Körper und das Archiv‘, Diskurse der Fotografie. The idea of the passport photo emerged soon after the invention of photography portraits were taken of imprisoned persons and collected in so-called criminal albums for the identification of repeat offenders. Since the early beginnings of photography, the relationship between the photographed body and the archive has been a conflicted one. Bodies that Glitch: The Black Body and the Digital Archive in Frida Orupabo’s Photographic Work
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