The Human in Bits : Graphical Computers, Black Abstractions

Kris Cohen

ISBN 10: 147803209X / ISBN 13: 9781478032090

Published by Duke University Press Aug 2025, 2025

About this Item

Neuware - 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.

Seller Inventory # 9781478032090

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Human in Bits : Graphical Computers, Black Abstractions
• Publisher: Duke University Press Aug 2025
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 147803209X
• ISBN 13: 9781478032090
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 224W x 152H x 15D millimeters 224 millimeters width by 152 millimeters height by 15 millimeters depth
• Weight: 363 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.