BOMB: The Camera Is Like a Scalpel-Triton Mobley Interviewed by Patrick Harrison
Triton Mobley’s research-based media art unearths the power relations sedimented in pixels. Juxtaposing intimate imagery of Black and Brown skin with abstract, digital color palettes, his video installations reveal how racial ideology has literally been encoded into digital image-making technology. His work can be situated within a larger effort of artists, scholars, and journalists to expose how racial domination has been baked into technology design. Artists like John Akomfrah, Arthur Jafa, and Bradford Young have commented publicly on the challenges of working in a medium that was not made for them: the first film stocks were not sensitive enough to light to record non-white bodies in the same legible detail as white ones. Scholars like Lorna Roth, Richard Dyer, and Ramon Amaro have shown how the same bias has been reproduced at every major transition in media history. From photochemical film, to magnetic tape, to digital cinema, to machine vision, visual technologies have been designed with white people in mind first and only later modified to picture everyone else—that is, the majority of people. Journalists have recently brought mainstream attention to the issue with stories about facial recognition software that can’t see Black people and iPhones that can’t tell Chinese faces apart. Mobley's media archaeological artworks do more than just reveal and critique this history, however. Experimental in the true sense of the word, they explore whether it would be possible—or desirable—to reengineer visual technologies to adequately image Black life.