Six years after releasing A Vernacular of File Formats, I realised that by using my own face as a Shirley card for de-calibration, I had unintentionally aligned myself with the historical trope of the Caucasian calibration test card. Just as Jeff Seidemann once said about Lena: “when you use a picture often, it becomes just pixels”– my face had become pixels; I had lost it. My face no longer belonged to me; instead, it had become an anonymous image symbolizing corruption, ready for co-optation.
When Vogue magazine asked in 2018 to reprint my portrait, I reclaimed it by retitling it A Ghost for De/Calibration. Although this gesture was almost invisible, it signalled my refusal of the color-card discourse and a call for alternative charts and resolutions.
One way to expose the habitual whiteness of color-test cards is to insist that these standard images, so often obfuscated within technological histories, enter the public domain; they need to lose their elusiveness and be widely recognised. In a culture dominated by images, we must recognise that contemporary image-processing technologies, whether based on classic compression, biometrics, or the latest machine-learning algorithms, are built on biased and inherently flawed protocols such as color-calibration test cards.
As adversaries in this war, we need a patch, a signal and symbol of the issues we fight for.
This is why I created the white-on-white (glow-in-the-dark) ‘the Lena’ patch.
When Vogue magazine asked in 2018 to reprint my portrait, I reclaimed it by retitling it A Ghost for De/Calibration. Although this gesture was almost invisible, it signalled my refusal of the color-card discourse and a call for alternative charts and resolutions.
We should be more conscious of the wars unfolding within image-processing technologies, which operate on multiple levels: not only in the images produced, but also the biased ideologies those images internalise. Ideologies enacted at the expense of the marginalised. We must consider what constructed realities these images offer and what they omit or compromise, alongside the economies and power relations they sustain.
One way to expose the habitual whiteness of color-test cards is to insist that these standard images, so often obfuscated within technological histories, enter the public domain; they need to lose their elusiveness and be widely recognised. In a culture dominated by images, we must recognise that contemporary image-processing technologies, whether based on classic compression, biometrics, or the latest machine-learning algorithms, are built on biased and inherently flawed protocols such as color-calibration test cards.
As adversaries in this war, we need a patch, a signal and symbol of the issues we fight for.
This is why I created the white-on-white (glow-in-the-dark) ‘the Lena’ patch.
Desktop tele-chorale in which les Inconnues form the i.R.D. Perfect De/Calibration Army,
fighting the standard biases embedded in color-calibration and beautification.
Rendered for NXT, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2025.