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.
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Human in Bits 1
1. Operational Processes: Leo Steinberg 37
2. In, Around, Above, Behind, and Other Forms of Space Flight: Alma Thomas 52
3. Nonrelational Blackness: Jack Whitten 74
4. Modernity and Fungibility: Charles Gaines 110
5. Infrastructures of Containment: Julie Mehretu 124
Coda: Resistance and Standing 150
Notes 161
Bibliography 179
Index 193
