A 1972 Playboy portrait of Swedish model Lena Forsén is one of many so-called “white shadows”—faces of Caucasian women historically used to evaluate and adjust the colour accuracy of cameras, monitors and printers. 

This practice, once presumed neutral, embedded racist biases into our most basic image-processing algorithms. Colour test cards featuring anonymous, objectified Caucasian women dominated the standardisation of image processing across analogue and digital media. Engineers relied on these “idealised” faces, stripping the women of their identities and codifying racist biases into our technologies. As a result, much of our technology struggles to process people of colour accurately.

In this video work, the ladies of colour calibration meet on a desktop to form the DE/CALIBRATION ARMY—a collective that critiques the use of exclusively Caucasian women in these test cards. They de-calibrate their faces to expose the destructive potential of automated algorithms. 

Rosa Menkman | b. 1983, Arnhem
Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist, researcher, and educator. She interrogates the concept of resolution – not simply as a measure of detail but as a dynamic site of cultural and perceptual negotiation. As a “media archaeologist from the future,” she digs into the compromises at the core of image processing across technical, cultural, and political contexts. Her publication Glitch Moment/um (INC, 2011) has been central to developing theoretical and practical frameworks for Glitch Art. Her publication Beyond Resolution critiques the emphasis on high-resolution digital media, exploring how glitches and image distortions reveal deeper creative and conceptual insights.

DE/CALIBRATION ARMY (2017), by Rosa Menkman, Video, with sound by Rosa Menkman.