Chromatic Algorithms
Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code
328 pages
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114 color plates, 15 halftones, 3 line drawings, 1 table
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7 x 10
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© 2014
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 alike regarded them as psychedelic, even revolutionary, harbingers of a better future for humans and machines alike. 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.
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 alike regarded them as psychedelic, even revolutionary, harbingers of a better future for humans and machines alike. 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.
Brian Price, University of Toronto
“Chromatic Algorithms promises to set the fields of color study and new media in a completely new direction. Not only does Carolyn L. 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.”
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