Theodore Kim’s SIGGRAPH 2021 keynote on anti-racist graphics research: Computer graphics research has a race problem. (SLYT)
“What I mean is that our basic scientific formulations have insidious biases built into them. This is an extremely uncomfortable and disturbing version of this because many of us are used to thinking that math is math and physics is physics, and we resist the idea that science could contain any sort of bias. In fact this is what attracted many of us to the sciences to begin with. We get to look at these clean neutral problems all day and we don’t have to get all tangled up in the ugly politics of the real world. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like this is the case. […] Historically racist assumptions have been baked into many of our everyday institutions whether we like it or not. […] Computer graphics is not an exception to this.”
Some books mentioned in the talk:
* Algorithms of Oppression, by Safiya Noble
* Race After Technology, by Ruha Benjamin
* Girl Head, by Genevieve Yue
* Captivating Technology, edited by Ruha Benjamin, Lorna Roth’s chapter is “Making Skin Visible Through Liberatory Design”
The original Lorna Roth paper is “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity”