Event overview
While the dominant aspiration for human beauty on social media is smoothness and symmetry, the benchmark for quality in digital humans is texture and irregularity.
Within the visual economy of hyperreal videogames, imperfection imparts character to artificial beings, enhancing their capacity to engage, influence, and entertain. Requiring more resources to model, visual character can now be blended from databases of diverse facial features, skin tones, and hair textures captured from photogrammetric scans of real humans. Predominantly white makers of digital human tools such as Epic Games’ MetaHuman Creator promote their ‘diverse series of presets’ as empowering equitable character creation. Scholars of post-race call out these practices as diversity surfing, which casts race as a cosmetic rather than political category, producing compliant digital humans who stand in for Black and creators of colour. Building on this scholarship, this talk analyses how tools such as MetaHuman Creator abstract racial diversity as mathematical fact derived from databases of photogrammetric human scans. The MetaHuman Creator implements a data-based and asset-driven approach to race-making. As an imaging technology, MetaHuman marginalises minority representations, treating them as optional, fragmented, and peripheral to a default model of techno-physiological functioning. Beyond these post-racial logics, the MetaHuman Creator undermines the basis for diversity politics, by framing diversity as a priori to racial concepts and classifications.
Aleena Chia is Lecturer in Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 6 Feb 2025 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
If you are attending an event and need the College to help with any mobility requirements you may have, please contact the event organiser in advance to ensure we can accommodate your needs.
