Mendi + Keith Obadike: The Interaction of Coloreds
August 2002
Mendi + Keith Obadike: The Interaction of Coloreds
The Interaction of Coloreds, part of Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Black Net.Art Actions, explores patterns of racial classification on the web. Drawing attention to the strong link between skin color and money in the filtering and tracking inherent to e-commerce, the artists created the Color Check System, which is considered the world’s first online skin-color verification system. The interactive website enables the translation of skin tone, as captured in a photo or screenshot, into a six-digit, three-byte hexadecimal number used in HTML (an online scripting language) to represent color: #FFFFFF, for example, equals white.
Using satire as strategy, the work prompts conversations about racial discrimination in internet commerce. It also critiqued the tactics utilized in the early 2000s by online commercial ventures to position the web as a space without prejudice, free from bias due to physical appearance, and therefore devoid entirely of notions of race.
Mendi + Keith Obadike (established 1996, Nashville, Tennessee) are artists, composers, and writers whose works draw upon histories of experimental media art and performance. Their early collaborations were pioneering pieces for the Internet. Their projects include a series of large-scale, sound artworks that engage cities, architecture, and public space include the projects Blues Speaker (for James Baldwin) (2015) at the New School’s University Center, New York; Free/Phase (2014–15) at the Chicago Cultural Center and the Rebuild Foundation, Chicago; Sonic Migration (2015–16) at Tindley Temple, Philadelphia; Compass Song (2017), an app for New York’s Times Square; and SlowDrag (2023) in the St. Louis Place community, Missouri. Mendi + Keith Obadike have released recordings on Bridge Records and books with Lotus Press and 1913 Press. Their work has been shown in New York at the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art; and in exhibitions including Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966) (2016) at the Whitechapel Gallery, London; I Was Raised on The Internet (2018) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 (2018–19) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art (2021) at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. They have received a Rockefeller New Media Arts Fellowship (2004), a Pick-Laudati Award for Digital Art (2007), a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction (2010), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award (2016), and have served as the David Tudor Composers in Residence at Mills College at Northeastern University, Oakland (2021). Mendi + Keith Obadike are professors at Cornell University, Ithaca, and serve on the boards of Rhizome and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York.
Gate Pages
Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.
Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.