Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Human in Bits: Graphical Computers, Black Abstractions

The Human in Bits: Graphical Computers, Black Abstractions

Cohen, Kris

Paperback

Art Criticism & TheoryBlack American StudiesGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 147803209X
ISBN13: 9781478032090
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Aug 29 2025
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.80
Language: English
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.

1 different editions

Also available

Also from

Cohen, Kris

View All

Also in

Art Criticism & Theory

View All