Ibiye Camp, 2020
5’58”
Behind Shirley deconstructs and rethinks the colonial narratives in the development of facial recognition systems, exploring how darker skin was not taken into account in film chemistry and is now ignored in facial-recognition software.
In photography, ‘Shirley cards’ were used as a standardised reference for colour-balancing skin tones. These cards generally showed a single Caucasian woman dressed in bright clothes, and coloured square blocks of blue, green and red. The chemicals distorted tones of red, yellow and brown, which led to faults when photographing darker skin. Film was not improved until furniture and chocolate makers began complaining that it was unable to capture the difference in wood grains and chocolate types. The default towards lighter skin in technology is still present today, with facial recognition occasionally not registering people of colour.
The algorithmic bias that exists in digital-imaging technology is due to human biases. When trying to make artificial intelligence, we inevitably recreate human intelligence. AI finds patterns from within pools of data, reflecting our own behaviour and often exacerbating its negative aspects. Empathy has a growing importance in artificial intelligence, datasets and algorithms, fields whose inherent perspectives require further interrogation.
With the Topkapı Palace, the center of political authority until the 19th century, and many other examples of classical Ottoman and Byzantine architecture included in its premise the Historical Peninsula is the heart of the Empire.
“The portrait tells us that there is an inner and an outer dimension of the human condition; it provides—or should provide—information about both the physical and psychological character of an individual.”
Following the opening of his studio, “El Chark Societe Photographic,” on Beyoğlu’s Postacılar Caddesi in 1857, the Levantine-descent Pascal Sébah moves to yet another studio next to the Russian Embassy in 1860 with a Frenchman named A. Laroche, who, apart from having worked in Paris previously, is also quite familiar with photographic techniques.
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