The Brooklyn Rail

Technology racializes. Today, we hear this a lot about algorithms and AI as they perpetuate eugenics (noted by sociologist Ruha Benjamin, and “surrogate humanity” (noted by gender studies scholar Kalindi Vora and feminist and critical race scholar Neda Atanasoski). And yet it is a story we don’t often hear about the computer interface itself. Many who use it likely never suspect why the interface is the way it is—graphical, with its folders and drop-downs, its clicks and windows—much less if that design had anything to do with the production of race. This is Kris Cohen’s entry point in his new book The Human in Bits: Graphical Computers, Black Abstractions, which unearths the race work in technological designs and the ways in which art, particularly Black abstraction, engages and resists it. Over five chapters, the book shuffles nimbly between technical, social, and visual arguments.

The line-up of artists—Alma Thomas, Jack Whitten, Charles Gaines, Julie Mehretu—is canonical Black abstraction, but they also share a certain look that understandably caught the eyes of media scholars like Cohen. This look, with its stoic grids of repeated units that Cohen calls “bit[s] in a field,” suggests an artist who not only did not fear but sought out rules and strictures. How could this be, if boring, scripted labor, the kind that can be done by a computer, is what many are taught to run from or rise above? Where did our ideas of freedom and creativity come from, and how are they racialized?

In the introduction, Cohen lays out how these seemingly unfree paintings refute what the free-market economy and its acolytes in the tech industry tried to sell as freedom. In the 1970s, the shift to neoliberalism in the US created a new class of white collar, managerial workers who worked not with objects or people, but an abstraction of them in data. The computer industry adapted, rehauling the PC from a text-based calculator to a canvas. The graphical screen, with its icons and windows, makes the sorting of data feel like fun business. It makes the user feel like he or she is safe from, and sits above, menial and rule-bound tasks. Most important for Cohen, though, is the race work behind this division of labor. The graphical computer, he argues, signals a white fear. It’s the fear of falling prey to what they had for a long time been able to impose on Black life: fungibility. Drawing from gender studies scholar Katherine McKittrick, he notes “the long entanglement of black life with numbers, with numeracy,” with what she calls “data—the ledgers of slave ships, police records” and “various technologies for recording black life in order to extinguish that life.” Whereas white America will use any means possible to recuperate itself from said threat, even if it’s more illusion than solution.

In this light, the self-imposed constraints of Thomas, Whitten, and others is a bold attempt to fathom freedom in other ways—“a training in and not against constraint.” In fact, the political crux of the book comes from how Black abstraction can get ever so close to the graphical screen—its pixel, raster, or infrastructure—without replicating its logic. Each of the book’s chapters pairs Black abstraction with a feature of the graphical screen. Chapter two, for instance, looks at Alma Thomas’s late abstract paintings from the 1970s through the graphical screen’s mediation of experiences that exceed a stable, bodily one. Chapter three reads the “tesserae” works of Jack Whitten since 2000 alongside the pixelated screens. Chapter four takes up the “gridworks” of Charles Gaines from the 1970s to the late 1980s in relation to bitmap, or raster, imaging. Chapter five considers the tension between mechanical tracings and free gestural marks in Julie Mehretu’s early- to mid-2000s paintings, connecting it to the graphical screen’s ability to contain and organize information.

This book is not a material history of Black artists’ access to and use of the computer medium. It is worth noting that most of the parallels Cohen makes have left little to no trace in the artist’s biographies or tech archives—except in the one case of Whitten who took up a residency at Xerox in 1974, as other scholars have shown. As such, the crossing between art and computer history can feel latent at times. The book leaves us wondering about the more obvious questions concerning Black life and computers. What access did Black artists have to computers? And what of the evolution of the graphical itself? Are Black artists dealing with the same screens now as they did in the eighties? What do particularities about the phone vs. PC, Windows vs. Mac, mouse vs. touchscreen say about race or labor within the screens-plural we live among? Cohen’s choice to center non-digital artworks, likewise, makes one wonder about the more “straight-forward” cases of artists making computer-generated abstractions. Shying from these details, the book sometimes wavers between the graphical screen as something to think alongside with and something integral to Black abstraction.

The Human in Bits is a formidable addition to studies on Black life’s intersection with data practices by McKittrick, Simone Browne, and Fred Moten with Stefano Harney. While Black life has historically been excluded by, and divested of, tech investment, Cohen finds other planes for the two to meet. He shows us what is possible when we frame computer design as the making of personhood and labor, and art as the same. Astutely observed, the book combines inspired aesthetic analysis and political commitment, even if at times one wishes it had landed in more material terms.