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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
This paper explores the use of the digital morph in 1990s visual culture, including music videos, scientific visualizations, popular press, television, and movies. The digital morph is a visual-effects technique that calculates the difference between two images and transforms one into the other. In this paper, I examine how the digital morph mediated conceptions of gender and race in popular imaginings of the future of America, at the same time that digital and electronic technologies promised to create a new kind of society. I focus here on two objects: Michael Jackson’s 1991 music video “Black or White,” and the digital mock-up of a multiracial girl representing the “new face of America” for a 1993 cover of Time magazine. Both of these media objects represent an effort to see raced and gendered bodies as interchangeable. The diverse faces appearing in “Black or White” transform into one another, demonstrating their underlying sameness. Similarly, in the “new face of America” project, digital visualization allowed for the merging of all races and genders into one monotype, suggesting an essential similarity among all American identities even as the picture of that identity has shifted. I argue that these examples illustrate emerging discourses of color- and gender-blindness in the 1990s that laid the groundwork for how digital technologies have envisioned race, gender, and other aspects of identity over the last two decades. In promoting “universalism,” these visualizations ultimately erase differences, leaving us only with the default: the white male standard.
Intersectional Morphs: From Michael Jackson to the “New Face of America”
This paper explores the use of the digital morph in 1990s visual culture, including music videos, scientific visualizations, popular press, television, and movies. The digital morph is a visual-effects technique that calculates the difference between two images and transforms one into the other. In this paper, I examine how the digital morph mediated conceptions of gender and race in popular imaginings of the future of America, at the same time that digital and electronic technologies promised to create a new kind of society. I focus here on two objects: Michael Jackson’s 1991 music video “Black or White,” and the digital mock-up of a multiracial girl representing the “new face of America” for a 1993 cover of Time magazine. Both of these media objects represent an effort to see raced and gendered bodies as interchangeable. The diverse faces appearing in “Black or White” transform into one another, demonstrating their underlying sameness. Similarly, in the “new face of America” project, digital visualization allowed for the merging of all races and genders into one monotype, suggesting an essential similarity among all American identities even as the picture of that identity has shifted. I argue that these examples illustrate emerging discourses of color- and gender-blindness in the 1990s that laid the groundwork for how digital technologies have envisioned race, gender, and other aspects of identity over the last two decades. In promoting “universalism,” these visualizations ultimately erase differences, leaving us only with the default: the white male standard.
Bio
Tanine Allison is Associate Professor of Film and Media at Emory University, where she teaches courses on digital media, video games, television, and film. She is the author of Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Film and Media and is currently writing a book about the performance of gender and race in digital visual effects like performance capture and de-aging. Her writing has appeared in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Convergence, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and various other journals and anthologies.