Jazmine Jones knows what she’s done. “On the internet, there’s this concept of trolling,” says Jones, the film’s director. Searching for Mavis Beacon“We take some things very seriously in this project, but we joke about other things. We joke about the idea of detectives because we’re like ACAB,” he said at a recent panel about the new documentary.
But there was a good reason for her trolling: Jones and fellow filmmaker Olivia McKayla Ross were trying to find the woman behind Mavis Beacon Teaching Typing.
The popular educational tool was released in 1987 by Software Toolworks, a California-based video game and software company that created educational games for chess, reading and math. Mavis, the game’s “mascot,” is a Black woman dressed in business attire with slicked back hair. While Mavis Beacon is not a real person, Jones and Ross say she was one of the first examples of Black representation they saw in the tech industry. Searching for Mavis Beaconwhich opens in New York City on August 30th and will roll out to other cities in September, is an attempt to reveal the stories behind the faces that appeared on the tools’ packaging and later became part of their interfaces.
The film finds the pair setting up a detective suite, talking to FaceTimers, calling on people on the street, and tracking down relatives connected to the elusive Mavis, but their journey raises other, less anticipated questions: what effects do sexism, racism, privacy, and exploitation have in a world where we can express ourselves however we want?
Using computer screen shots, poring over archival footage and interviews, this noir-style documentary reveals that Mavis Beacon was actually a black Haitian model, Reneé L’Esperance, who was paid just $500 for the role, with no royalties for her image, even though the show sold millions of copies.
The artificial creation of caricatures of people from marginalized groups is not unique to Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Big brands have used these caricatures to generate both publicity and revenue without informing the real people behind the inspiration of their success.
Lil Miquela, an AI-generated music artist with about 2.5 million followers on Instagram, has appeared in a BMW commercial. MSI, which recently partnered with the artificial influencer to promote its OLED monitors, said on a webpage promoting the collaboration that Lil Miquela is “half Brazilian, half Spanish, and of rich roots.” The AI bot reportedly earns millions of dollars a year as an influencer. Meanwhile, a study published last year by PR firm MSL Group found that social media influencers of color earn up to 67% less per Instagram post than their white counterparts.
Another example is Shudu Glam, who is known as “the world’s first digital supermodel,” according to her Instagram account. Shudu, who debuted in 2017, is tall, slender, and very dark-skinned. She seems more human than Lil Miquela, but she’s not. At a time when black models still face challenges in the fashion industry, Glam has appeared in Czechoslovakia’s Vogue, partnered with Sony Pictures, and amassed 239,000 followers on Instagram.
