Abstract
“Color is not exclusively about vision,” Carolyn L. Kane writes in this strong first book. “Rather,” she continues, “it is a system of control used to manage and discipline perception and thus reality” (p. 211). Chromatic Algorithms presents a media archeological history of color in video art, digital art, and bioart to understand the evolution of color, and in documenting how we came to standardize and codify color, Kane opens up new ways of seeing our algorithmic culture as a whole.
Digital colors are so ordinary to us today that we rarely stop to think about their algorithmic nature. Dyes, paints, and crayons and even analog photographs and film reproduce color, but color in television, video, and computers is generated from nothing but code, whether that code is digital or analog (p. 70). We even generate colors that the human eye cannot see. The bulk of Chromatic Algorithms is devoted to a history of the development of synthetic and algorithmic color, and of our understanding of color, from the classical color theories of Aristotle, Goethe, Kant, and others, through the first uses of DayGlo fluorescent dyes (pp. 44–57), generative color synthesizers in early video art (chapter 2), web 2.0 color conventions (pp. 196–199), the “dirt style” of retro web art of the last few years (pp. 199–206), and to the use of colors that cannot be seen by humans in nature, such as infrared (chapter 6) and ultraviolet and even the use of synthetic fluorescent proteins in transgenic bioart (pp. 283–287).
Kane aims to use media archeology, “defined as the archival examination of the materiality of media objects” (p. 3), to understand the relationship between today’s consumer-friendly use of bright, bold digital colors and the opacity and even obfuscation of the algorithms that generate these colors. Kane’s introduction presents the theoretical traditions she builds upon, where Kittler, Stiegler, and Hayles are important figures. She presents herself unabashedly as a media determinist, but as a thoughtful media determinist who, with theorists like those I just mentioned, as well as McLuhan, Flusser, and others, sees “media technologies as systems that resonate through and within multiple registers and produce real and tangible results not exclusive to pieces of hardware” (p. 4).
Media archeology is a fitting methodology for a time when we have realized that not only are “new media” no longer new but that they were never new. Studying the material history and development of today’s technologies is a productive way of understanding our present culture. Yet, given this focus on the materiality of the technology Kane analyses, there were moments in the book where I wished she had been more explicit. For instance, she writes that most users don’t know the technological rationale for the 216 web safe colors (p. 143), but leaves readers hanging without attempting to explain the rationale herself. Not being an expert on early video technology, I struggled to follow explanations about early video color, such as how Eric Siegel’s color generators from 1969 and 1970 worked (pp. 74–75), and I wish these explanations had been clearer. To be fair, Kane writes, “While I offer no pretense to expert knowledge in the engineering standards behind digital color, I do chart the results of these shifts through emergent ontologies and art and design practices” (p. 143), and Kane certainly does present a fascinating and thought-provoking history of digital art as seen through color.
For the most part, Kane’s archival work is impressive, and her presentation allows the reader to gain some real experience of the works, despite the distance in time. There are over a hundred color illustrations, and many of the works Kane discusses are viewable as online video. I would strongly recommend searching for these videos and viewing them as you read, as there are some really remarkable works among those discussed. But video artworks from the 1960s and 1970s were of course not originally produced for online viewing. They were broadcast on art television stations, or displayed as installations in art galleries. As Kane points out, our liquid crystal displays (LCDs) show color quite differently from the phosphorous tubes of televisions of the 1960s and 1970s: color today is more sterile, precise, and clean. Here, her material analysis is very useful, and Kane explains just why colors look so different in today’s digitized versions of decades old videos: “with LCD screens, liquid crystals are ‘sandwiched’ together between two layers of polarized glass, a more precise arrangement” in comparison to the original analog cathode ray tube (CRT) colors which are “materially and technically dirtier because their phosphors are less precise and often blurred on their trace points” (p. 96). In her interpretations, Kane has done considerable archival work, for instance, rebuilding Lillian Schwartz’s Proxima Centauri (1968), a mechanical and kinetic light-based sculpture.
While I expected to find the discussions of digital art interesting, I had not expected to come to see color as such a fascinating entry point to our algorithmic culture as a whole. The final chapters would be of interest to anyone interested in surveillance and the visual. Color is discussed in relation to a society that is what Kane calls post-optical, where we no longer use color (and sight itself) as an end in itself but as a means to another end. Chromakey techniques mark a significant turn, as blue or green is used only as placeholders to show which parts of the image should be replaced in a new composite: “with chromakey, color becomes functional: used only to negate itself” (p. 178). The analyses of infrared, where Kane looks both at artworks using infrared technology and at the ways in which cinema represents infrared, take this further, placing surveillance at the forefront of her discussion. In these examples, machines measure humans seeing (what we see, where we look) using our sight simply as a data source (p. 225), or we insert synthetic fluorescent proteins into brains to map brain function, using color only as a means to an end. Some of the conclusions drawn in the last chapters, where Kane sees color as the driving force behind our entire digital culture (e.g. on p. 289) may seem a little too ambitious, but there is a great wealth of material in this book that scholars of the digital, well beyond art historians, will find valuable.
Several books of late have chosen this kind of very specific entry point for discussing new media. Timothy Scott Barker’s (2012) Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process Philosophy of Time similarly looks at works of digital art from a new and quite narrow perspective. Kelly A. Gates’ Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (2011) is not interested in art per se, but looks as the ways in which the technology of biometrics has developed in concert with the technologies of photography and of surveillance, in many ways reminding me of Kane’s discussion of color technology and surveillance. Each of these three approaches, color, time, and facial recognition, allows us to reconsider our own digital culture and to understand its history in convincing and very clearly focused ways.