In Deconstructing Whiteness (2020) artist Avital Meshi performs with an AI recognition system. By distorting her face, Meshi aims to examine the visibility of whiteness through the lens of AI technology. As the audience reviews the resulting images, she asks us to question the underlying social constructs of race, the ethical problems posed by popular facial recognition technologies, and how we might perform to undermine technology that seeks to segregate.
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Check out Avital Meshi’s Q+A.
Read a response to Deconstructing Whiteness.
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Avital Meshi is a California based New Media Artist. She creates interactive installations and performances, which invite viewers to become engaged with new technologies in an unusual way. The entanglement between the body and technology reveals unique aspects of identity and social connections. It provokes conversations regarding role-playing, identity tourism, cultural appropriation, virtual life, and artificial intelligence. Meshi holds an MFA from The Digital Arts and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz and a BFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She also holds an MSc in behavioral biology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
