The technology to turn oneself into a mixed-race avatar might be confined to movies, but Brian Banton plays with racial manipulations of himself online, wrote the Toronto Star (online) Jan. 27 in a story that included five photos of him.
As a York graduate student, he explores questions of racial hybridity as related to corporate design. Much of the work is obscurely theoretical, Banton says. “But I also want to be playful. (Mixed race) is a serious issue but I don’t want to be heavy-handed.”
Banton was born in Brampton, the offspring of a Scottish-born mother and Jamaican-born father. When visiting his mother’s family, he feels black, he says. When he’s with his father’s family, he feels white. He calls himself “mixed” and “biracial” and “just myself,” but he also admits to a low-level underlying anxiety. People have guessed him to be Italian, Greek, Arab and South American, he says, never half-Scottish, half-Jamaican. “There is comfort in being explicitly part of a community,” Banton says. “I’m in this middle space, not fully committed to one side."
Banton’s girlfriend, whom he describes as half-Asian, half-white, recently came across a Web site called Face of the Future. Built by Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, it allows the user to upload a headshot and see what the face would look like as another race.
“(The software) clearly shows visual markers that identify us physically in the face,” Banton says. “I’ve always played on my own ambiguity and I thought this was just pushing it a bit further.”
In one photo, he comes out as a white person. In three others, he comes out in progressively darker shades. “I want to experiment,” he says. “It would be interesting to set up different accounts on dating sites and see if people are more attracted to an Asian version of me versus the black or white version.”