Cover of Chromatic Algorithms
Chromatic Algorithms Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code
by Carolyn L. Kane
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Cloth: 978-0-226-00273-6 | Electronic: 978-0-226-00287-3
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226002873.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

These days, we take for granted that our computer screens—and even our phones—will show us images in vibrant full color. Digital color is a fundamental part of how we use our devices, but we never give a thought to how it is produced or how it came about.
           
Chromatic Algorithms reveals the fascinating history behind digital color, tracing it from the work of a few brilliant computer scientists and experimentally minded artists in the late 1960s and early ‘70s through to its appearance in commercial software in the early 1990s. Mixing philosophy of technology, aesthetics, and media analysis, Carolyn Kane shows how revolutionary the earliest computer-generated colors were—built with the massive postwar number-crunching machines, these first examples of “computer art” were so fantastic that artists and computer scientists regarded them as psychedelic, even revolutionary, harbingers of a better future for humans and machines. But, Kane shows, the explosive growth of personal computing and its accompanying need for off-the-shelf software led to standardization and the gradual closing of the experimental field in which computer artists had thrived.
           
Even so, the gap between the bright, bold presence of color onscreen and the increasing abstraction of its underlying code continues to lure artists and designers from a wide range of fields, and Kane draws on their work to pose fascinating questions about the relationships among art, code, science, and media in the twenty-first century.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Carolyn L. Kane is a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University and assistant professor of visual communications at Ryerson University in Toronto.

REVIEWS

“Kane’s fascinating book is the perfect example of what twenty-first century media history and theory should be—wide-reaching; attentive to the details of media and software technologies; bringing into conversation art, science, and code; and combining analysis of particular artifacts and artworks with institutional history. This is one book you must read, both for its methodology and ideas and the histories Kane uncovers. A fantastic achievement from a brilliant young scholar.”
— Lev Manovich, Graduate Center, City University of New York

“To read Chromatic Algorithms is to dive into a hidden history of wild inventions and dramatic standardizations, of artist-engineers whose names are treasured by too few, and of corporations whose norms are praised by too many. Using media archaeology to unpack the mystery and commerce of electronic color that now dominate twenty-first century-perception, Kane communicates lucidly and with passion the joy of discovering lost art and lost ideas, and the euphoria of thinking through them with the most brilliant of contemporary thinkers and artists. From Frieder Nake and Shuya Abe to Eduardo Kac and Jeremy Blake, the book bursts with the struggle for and over color that formed the new digital sensorium. Chromatic Algorithms is a history whose pages could be written only by a scholar who cares equally and passionately about past and future color.”
— Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London

“Theory is gray, said Goethe, but in Chromatic Algorithms, a secret history of how computers and art came together since the 1960s, Kane begs to differ. This jelly bean bowl of colorful and flavorful characters, ideas, and facts promises to cure us all of colorblindness.”
— John Durham Peters, University of Iowa

“Chromatic Algorithms promises to set the fields of color study and new media in a completely new direction. Not only does Kane offer us an important history of the development of digital color technologies and their uptake in video art, she also tells a remarkable story of the relation between art and commerce in her finely detailed study of Bell Labs, which is importantly identified as a site of radical aesthetic experimentation. Kane’s study upends the facile oppositional logics of the relation of art and industry that plague so many discussions of the avant-garde and aesthetic autonomy. Moreover, the digital color aesthetic that Kane elaborates here—which moves from historical accounts of technological development to broader ontological considerations of media, mediation, and aesthetic experience—makes clear the complications of both color and code that any general theory of aesthetic experience in the twenty-first century will have to account for.”
— Brian Price, University of Toronto

"A gorgeous and fascinating study of color, technology, visualization, the digital, and beyond."
— Carla Nappi, New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

"Thrusts color aesthetics into the realm of computer technology, uncovering surprising connections among color theory, chemical mixes, and contemporary digital light applications. . . . [Kane] explores complicated relationships among standardized dyes, Day-Glo shades, and the synthesis of color television, mirroring the sixties counterculture of psychedelic images, a recharged surrealism, and the emerging youth culture. Kane juxtaposes cool, controlled, computer design with the 'dirt style' of the collective Paper Red, whose works in video, web design, and installations bring into collision bright hues, composite color blends, rainbows, psychedelic peace signs, a healthy sense of satire, and an investigation of media design protocols. However, underlying modern color experiments are submerged political concerns regarding conformity, corporatism, and a growing uniformity of web 2.0. Kane describes present color as the 'photoshop cinema'—an era of processed, determined, mediated art, such as Jeremy Blake’s time-based paintings and the highly saturated film experiences of Pleasantville (1998) and Speed Racer (2008).  They appear extravagant and bright but suggest a dark culture of color used to obscure and provide opacity to smooth, inscrutable surfaces. . . . Recommended."
— CHOICE

"In documenting how we came to standardize and codify color, Kane opens up new ways of seeing our algorithmic culture as a whole. . . . There is a great wealth of material in this book that scholars of the digital, well beyond art historians, will find valuable."
— Jill Walker Rettberg, University of Bergen, Norway, New Media and Society

"Interrogating the histories of our ever more colorful interfaces, Kane makes an important contribution by recognizing that the organization of the sensible is both pleasurable and ethical. How we are trained to see in the present also conditions how we will design technology and, perhaps, our relationships with each other in the future."
— Design and Culture

TABLE OF CONTENTS


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226002873.003.0000
[media archaeology, cybernetics, phenomenology, technological determinism, technogenesis, Stiegler, Heidegger, cybernetics, digital, algorithm]
Arriving in off-the-shelf commercial software in the early 1990s, the appearance of digital color as flexible, intuitive, and user-friendly is actually quite puzzling. Seductive software interfaces do not explain that, on a technical level, digital color is in fact a series of algorithmic codes, therein making screen color the product of a heightened technologization in cybernetics, information theory, and mathematics, just as much as it is a product of the history of aesthetics. In this introduction the author discusses her research methods in media archaeology and the philosophy of technology, which involves an explication of cybernetics, phenomenology, technological determinism, and technogenesis. She also introduces her main argument for a reconfiguration of color in computational aesthetics; from the optic to the algorithmic, and provides a detailed overview of the chapters in the book. (pages 1 - 20)

Part 1. Chromatic Visions (400 B.C.–1969)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226002873.003.0001
[color, fluorescent, Day-Glo, synthetic, Switzer Brothers, dye, philosophy, aesthetics, Goethe]
While some of the earliest experiences of color must have been sacred and mystical by the 1960s, part I of chapter 1, "Classical Color: Plato through Goethe," shows, the most brilliant colors became machine-made, cheap synthetics. Because there is no extensive account of color in new media art history to date, save for this book, the first part of chapter 1 operates as a second introduction by providing a context to understand color and its role in Western aesthetics and philosophy from Plato through the psychedelic 1960s. The two introductions operate as primers for the chapters that follow. Part II, "Technical Color: Synthetics through Day-Glo Psychedelics," then analyzes the history of fluorescent colors from their origin in late nineteenth organic chemistry through the 1960s, when they are mass produced by the Switzer Brothers in the form of "Day-Glo," a palette that became so pervasive in American culture in the postwar period that, alongside color television and film, these brilliant hues disappeared from conscious awareness. (pages 23 - 59)

I. Classical and Modern Color: Plato through Goethe

II. Industrial Color: Synthetics through Day-Glo Psychedelics


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226002873.003.0002
[Eric Siegel, Nam June Paik, Heidegger, transcendence, color, video, synthesis, WGBH, analog, philosophy of technology]
Chapter 2 enters the New Television Workshop at Boston's WGBH television studios circa 1969 where, under the guidance of visionary WGBH director Fred Barzyk, pioneering video artist Nam June Paik and Japanese engineer Shuya Abe engineered one of the first video synthesizers capable of generating electronic color for visual art. Many believed the colors they produced were revolutionary, and in many ways they were: electronic color was for the first time freed from a dependence on optical input or camera sources. This chapter discusses these developments, including the unique and innovative projects in color and video synthesis developed by pioneers Eric Siegel and Stephen Beck, which are then connected to theories of technological transcendence prevalent in experimental media art discourses at the time, as well as the author's reading of Martin Heidegger's notion of existential transcendence, complemented by Graham Harmon’s more recent, though nonetheless contentious, interpretation. (pages 60 - 100)

Part 2. Disciplining Color: Encounters with Number and Code (1965–1984)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226002873.003.0003
[digital art, computer art, color, Max Bense, John Whitney, Stan VanDerBeek, Frieder Nake, Peter Struycken, aesthetics, programing]
Moving on from the analog color discussed in the last chapter, this chapter offers a comparative analysis of color in early computer art in a "German" versus a "U.S." context. The chapter shows how the former (including the work of Frieder Nake, Max Bense, Peter Struycken, and Herbert Franke) maintained a highly rational attitude towards color and pursued a "Programming the Beautiful" to enable new media aesthetic principles "to be formulated mathematically," and thus end the lofty mystifications that had for too long been associated with Romantic notions of artwork and art-making. In contrast, the chapter demonstrates how members of the U.S. school (including the work of U.S.-based John Whitney Sr., Stan VanDerBeek and Ben Laposky) tended instead towards mystical and utopic uses of color in their early computer art. The chapter's juxtaposition offers a fresh perspective and affirmation of the aesthetic analysis of color in early computer art offered in chapters 2 and 4. (pages 102 - 139)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226002873.003.0004
[computer art, aesthetics, color, Bell Laboratories, Lillian Schwartz, Kenneth C. Knowlton, A. Michael Noll, Laurie Spiegel, Richard Shoup, SuperPaint]
Similar to chapter 3, chapter 4 offers an aesthetic, cultural, and historical analysis of experimental color in early computer art in the 1960s and 1970s, here in the exclusive context of the U.S. Specifically, the chapter focuses on key computer artworks developed by A. Michael Noll, Kenneth C. Knowlton, Leon Harmon, Béla Julesz, Max Mathews, Joan Miller, Laurie Spiegel and Lillian Schwartz, all of whom worked at or were associated with Bell Laboratories in the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter also analyses Dick Shoup"s "SuperPaint," one of the first digital color computer graphics systems developed at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. However, the chapter argues that the eventual democratization and standardization of digital color, underway by the 1980s, meant that such experimental practices were no longer possible or (for many) desired. (pages 140 - 173)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226002873.003.0005
[chromakey, alpha channel, blue screen, compositing, Peter Campus, video art, dirt style, net art, web 2.0, Paper Rad]
Ending the set of historical analyses that began in chapter 2, chapter 5 first considers key color experiments produced at NYIT, IBM, and WGBH in the early 1970s and 1980s, including Alvy Ray Smith's and Ed Catmul's development of the "alpha channel" and pioneering video artist Peter Campus's contributions to chromakey compositing, which, the author argues, marks the advent of a new "spatial" aesthetic in electronic imaging. The last part of the chapter turns to recent trends in net art and digital media, characterized by either a low-fi, dirt style, "aesthetics of interference," as Friedrich Kittler has informally coined it, or a clean-cut "2.0" look. Color in the new school of media art and design, the author argues, has since become an issue of style and critique, and much less about the ability to "transcend" technology or express some inner vision, as much of the art and colorism of the 1960s did. (pages 174 - 208)

Part 3. “Transparent” Screens for Opaque Ontology (1984–2007)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226002873.003.0006
[new media, exhibitionism, voyeurism, infrared, electronic warfare, signal processing, targeting, tracking, capture, ontology]
In chapter 6, the "functional" color of chapter 5 is reframed as algorithmic color. This chapter argues that the algorithm has become culturally dominant in terms of both visual imaging practices and ontology, heralding what the author terms the "algorithmic lifeworld." The algorithmic lifeworld presents both an extension of and challenge to classical models of vision rooted in optics, the hegemony of the (human) eye, and theories of the gaze. In contrast to optical images like those of photography or film, an algorithmic image is a system that operates through post-optic principles of information reduction, predictive scanning, and the allegorical presentation of data. In the chapter digital infrared is used as a primary example of the algorithmic image, analysed in the work new media artist Jordan Crandall, the Graffiti Research Lab, Experiments in Art and Technology, Denis Oppenheim, and a selection of infrared scenes from military action films made after 1987. (pages 210 - 241)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226002873.003.0007
[new media, exhibitionism, voyeurism, infrared, electronic warfare, signal processing, targeting, tracking, capture, ontology]
Where chapter 6 marks the end game of visual culture, Chapter 7 follows suit by analyzing an emerging style of visual media equally unconcerned with nuance, detail, or optical clarity. Luminous and hazy images appear in what the author terms the "Photoshop cinema," analyzed through the work of American artist digital Jeremy Blake and a selection of recent feature films including Pleasantville (2000), Waking Life (2001), and Speed Racer (2008). All of these examples, the chapter argues, employ digital grading techniques or thick patches of opaque color that figure as a stylistic and intellectual block in the image and one's relation to it. In the twenty-first century, color in digital art no longer invokes the utopic and mystical visions that it once did in the 1960s, but rather, the realities of the information age, marked by blockage, absence, and automated indifference. (pages 242 - 277)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226002873.003.0008
[bio art, fluorescent, brainbow, declension, Eduardo Kac, Jennifer Steinkamp, aesthetics, color, new media, art]
In the postscript the author returns to chapter 1's archaeology of fluorescent color with an updated analysis of key artworks in transgenics, bioengineering, and bio art. Under the heading of a "New Dark Age," the postscript braids together several of the book's thematic threads, providing an overview of the shift from the visionary and utopic age of the 1960s to the new dark age that is, paradoxically, filled with brighter and more saturated hyper-colors, generated by increasingly stealthy algorithms. To have "color consciousness" today means looking beyond the often gauche and hysterical colors on a homepage, Internet advertisement, or web profile. Looking past the brightness and so-called high visibility of our chromatic screens allows one to understand how color connects to complex experimental, aesthetic, cultural, and technical histories. (pages 278 - 293)

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2014. Page maintained by BiblioVault.