The Human in Bits: Graphical Computers, Black Abstractions - Hardcover

Cohen, Kris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1478028858 ISBN 13: 9781478028857

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

In The Human in Bits, Kris Cohen examines black abstractionist painting to demonstrate how race and computation are intimately entangled with the personal computer's graphic user interface. He shows how the personal computer and the graphical field of its screen meant to transform the human by transforming what environments humans were to labor in. It also provided the means for whiteness to tie itself to notions of colorblind meritocracy. Cohen focuses on the post-1960s experiments of black abstractionists Alma Thomas, Jack Whitten, Charles Gaines, and Julie Mehretu, who developed a nonrepresentational approach to blackness that was oriented more toward constraint than human expression. From Gaines's use of grids to Mehretu's layering of paint, these artists - in their knowledge that black life had always been conflated with numbers and bits of information - flirted with repetition, systems, and formulas to test other ways of being human. By demonstrating how these artists bypassed the white fear that the human would become interchangeable with data, Cohen reframes modernism and modernist art to account for racialization in computational cultures.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kris Cohen is Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College and author of Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations, also published by Duke University Press.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1478028858
• ISBN 13: 9781478028857
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande