- 233 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
About this book
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 artistsāin their knowledge that black life had always been conflated with numbers and bits of informationāflirted 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.
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access The Human in Bits by Kris Cohen in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Art & Art Theory & Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Gallery
- Introduction: The Human in Bits
- 1. Operational Processes: Leo Steinberg
- 2. In, Around, Above, Behind, and Other Forms of Space Flight: Alma Thomas
- 3. Nonrelational Blackness: Jack Whitten
- 4. Modernity and Fungibility: Charles Gaines
- 5. Infrastructures of Containment: Julie Mehretu
- Coda: Resistance and Standing
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index