Yeah, I mean, Half black is God’s photoshop. Worst case scenario you’re looking at the chick from Avatar.
–Max, Happy Endings

Modern Mixing of blackness has taken a new turn.  Rather being defined by impurity, being part black now makes people better, at least in terms of aesthetics. Popular culture has even coined the term “God’s Photoshop”, a way to explain the effect of race mixing with black people has on the offspring produced. Perhaps the images we received in the ’90s of our raceless future are what helped make this moment possible.

What I find most interesting about this idea, and why I think it calls for a rethinking of where we place the cyborg, is the how technology has become central to creating representations of ideal human aesthetics. Even God has access to Photoshop!  The images we see on a daily bases of people are becoming less and less human without us realizing it.  Photoshop and other image editing suites help us filter how we create our own image.  We accept these composite images as reality until the truth behind the collage creations are revealed, and even then that is only a problem if we feel like we were tricked.  If we know of the trickery ahead of time, we seem to accept it.  The book Remediation discusses the issue of cosmetic surgeon’s use of technology to digitally show patients their future should they go through with surgery (Bolter 237-238).  The  trajectory digital imagery manipulation to show everyday images of people in everyday life, partially real, partially computer generated, and completely normalized probably seemed a bit far fetched when the book was written.

In Film

While the representations created by humans  through computers are unable to think and speak, they are given life by the people that are grafted onto or into them.  The 2002 film S1m0ne played with the possibilities the advances made in technology might permit for the entertainment industry.  The perfect actress is created by the director.  She cannot speak back.  He controls her every action, from how she moves through the film, to how her lines are delivered, because he is the one performing the actual action.  As much as Simone is her own individual being, she is also him.  Though she does not fit the traditional idea of a cyborg, she is a hybrid of human and technology.   The fear for the director remains the same.  What if someone finds out his creation, his baby, is not really human? The fact that he is, and he is a part of her does not erase the fact that Simone is passing.

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

In Imagery

It has become common knowledge that the imagery we see in print media or still photography of celebrities will generally be edited.  Online gossip sites over the past few years have continually run stories on magazines titled and tagged “Photoshop fail”.  These stories feature badly edited pictures that depict a reality that, even with our distorted vision, look off.   On December 5th,  Jezebel, a general women’s interest website, posted a story entitled H&M Puts Real Model Heads On Fake Bodies.  The horror of the story is not that the models bodies had been Photoshopped, that is to be expected, but rather that even the Photoshopped body of the model was no longer able to be on display.  Rather, the ideal body for displaying clothes, a body that the viewer thought was real, a body that was passing for human, never existed.  It was simply an illusion, a cyborg in disguise.

While this may seem a bit strange at first, as a commentator on the site pointed out the reason H&M is doing this is because they  have a virtual dressing room.  Having the same body allows for the clothes to be changed more easily.  As this was coming from an outside source it was able to appear more shocking.  However, software services such as My Virtual Model and the InStyle Hollywood Makeover have existed for years.  These services allow people to create virtual selves in their own image for the purpose of trying on clothes or hairstyles.  The difference between these sites and H&M is a lack of control and transparency.  The replication of sameness, and our inability to see it for what it is, with the H&M models creates a fear and reaction that is similar to those in films that examine Human/Cyborg relationships.

 

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