Photo-editing app FaceApp now includes Black, Asian Indian and Caucasian filters
- On Wednesday morning, the photo-editing app FaceApp released new photo filters that change the ethnic appearance of your face.
- The app first became popular earlier in 2017
due to its ability to transform people into elderly versions of
themselves and different genders.- These new options, however, will
likely cause some outrage: The filters are Asian, Black, Caucasian and
Indian.- Selfie apps like Snapchat have taken criticism for filters that apply “digital blackface.” In 2016, Snapchat released a Bob Marley filter
that darkened the skin and gave
users dreadlocks. Snapchat said another one of its 2016 filters was “inspired by anime,” but many people called it “yellowface,” as it seemingly turned the user into an Asian stereotype.- FaceApp’s newest filters, however, don’t pretend they’re anything but racial. Read more (8/9/17 12 PM)
follow @the-future-now
So, just to give everyone a little bit of an Art History lesson… This has been done before, without all the claims of racism. The Human Race Machine, an art instillation created by Nancy Burson, did the same thing for museum patrons as far back as 2000.
The lines were massive and the wait to try the machine stretches into several hours. Opera herself used the machine to see herself as six different races.
The installation was part of Nancy’s continued message that while race is something we discriminate against others because of, the slightest change of our faces can change us into the ‘other’, that the lines we believe separate us are in fact tiny. Her message, ‘there’s no gene for race’ is a powerful one and it gave people – let me stress, mainly white mainly middle class people who can afford to travel with their kids to museums, a glimpse at their own faces wearing the race of those they might not see as equal.
The experience was profound for many people and videos can be seen of people crying in front of their screens or starting at them.
To me this seems like a way of bringing Nancy’s great work into everyone’s hands, allowing the curious to see the differences between us aren’t so profound. I feel this is technology could easily be a tool of empathy… But instead people are crying blackface, yellowface, don’t try to see yourself in someone else’s skin because that’s wrong!
If it’s wrong in this context, it was wrong in the Race Machine, but I say that elevating this experience when it’s unreachable for many, and condemning it when it’s brought into the hands of everyone is simply assinin, kneejerk, reactionary bullshit.
found a 15 yr old article on it.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2002/04/14/nyregion/through-machine-seeing-more-of-others-in-yourself.html
Did we know something then that we now somehow forgot?
tinfoilparachute 