Articles
Carolyn L. Kane, Essay, “The White Noise of Rhetoric” Harvard Design Magazine 51 (2023)
This essay analyzes Jenny Holzer's Times Square billboards and collaborations with Virgil Abloh.
The ISSUE, "51: MULTIHYPHENATE" examines multihyphenation as a mode of creative practice, a political response, and an economic imperative in our 21st century neoliberal world."
“Chromophobia in the Smart City,” Architectural Design (AD) (March 2022)
This essay shows how spectacle-based AI in the twenty-first century engenders a new form of electrographic architecture while simultaneously perpetuating the most tried and true strategies of white power under the banner of algorithmic diversity.
“Accidental Colour, Performative Colour: Video Art’s New Disruptors (external link) ” in the Colour Turn (June/July 2020)
Color is flippant; unreliable and notoriously difficult to work with. It resists being placed in a static chart, frame, or dyed into a “colorfast” fabric. In an age of HD digital video, however, working with color–-from the perspective of a designer or artist–– has never been more user friendly. How then do disruptive colors show their face today? This article answers this by turning to the work of American video artist Ryan Trecartin. Trecartin’s fashionable use of digital media, fast-paced editing, belligerent makeup and costume, and broken dialogue all echo his unforgiving color juxtapositions, making him a “grinder and mixer of multicolor drugs,” as Plato once put it in reference to artists in general.
“Neon Visions: From Techno-Optimism to Urban Vice (external link) ” Visual Communication (June 2020): 1-22 .
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, luminous neon signs paved the way for the multiscreen aesthetic now punctuating major intersections in metropolis around the world. And yet, these epicenters of spectacle currently bear little or no neon themselves. This article draws from visual studies and histories of electricity to chart a unique material history of neon from novelty to norm, to obsolescence.
“The Toxic Sublime: Landscape Photography and Data Visualization,” (external link, opens in new window) Theory, Culture & Society 35; 3 (May 2018): 21-47.
Heaps and masses of garbage brought into direct view still somehow manage to escape acute recognition, let alone sustained social responsibility or global political activism. This article investigates this trend as a growing problem between the human world and its representation.
Kane, Carolyn L. and Zeina Koreitem, “Computational Color,” (external link, opens in new window) Project: A Journal for Architecture Issue 7 (Summer 2018): 76-87.
A conversation about colour, digital computing, and architecture
“Millennials Think Pink,” (external link, opens in new window) Harvard Design Magazine 44 (Fall/Winter, 2017).
“It’s 2017. The millennium is in its teenage years—and it shows. The world is acting out—making rash, impulsive decisions whose repercussions may be irreparable. The body politic is moody, volatile, and uncompromising.”–Harvard Design Magazine
“GIFs that Glitch: Eyeball Aesthetics for the Attention Economy,” (external link, opens in new window) Communication Design (April, 2017): 41-62.
Driven by an insatiable appetite for profit, scientific research in compression techniques are used to reduce data and economize signals to questionable extremes. Given this awareness, does one comply, paying attention to the point of exhaustion, offering endless hours of eyeball attention re-tweeting, re-blogging, and ‘liking’ so someone else may reap profit, or does one tweak the circuit and rewire the rules of the game? A number of contemporary artists have gravitated to the latter, reconfiguring otherwise functional Internet tools and interfaces into error-laden ‘glitch art’ and animated Graphic Interchange Format (GIFs).
“Exhaustion Aesthetics” (external link, opens in new window) Leonardo, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2017): 6-11.
Defined as the artistic use of compression artifacts and related digital errors, glitch art emerged in the 2000s and has since become a set of vernacular media art effects, featured in digital videos by artists, net art, digitally manipulated photographs and the work of industry professionals and amateur media makers alike. Despite its rapid claim to 21st-century fashion, however, the technique has received little scholarly or curatorial attention.
“Photo Noise,” (external link, opens in new window) History of Photography 40:2 (2016): 129-145.
Like past avant-garde movements, glitch and noise in the twenty-first century are used to reveal the materiality of the medium. But instead of providing insight or clarity into the politics or social conditions of a technology, they demarcate broader conditions of opacity and blockage.
“Designing with Digital Color,” (external link, opens in new window) Design Journal, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York (May, 2018): 15-19.
An essay on digital colour commissioned by the Cooper Hewitt / Smithsonian Design Museum in New York for their exhibition, Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color (2018).
"Josef Albers in the iPad Era (external link) " Public Books, October 2016.
A review of Yale University Press's digital release of Josef Albers’ classic text on color.
“Plastic Shine: From Prosaic Miracle to Retrograde Sublime,” (external link, opens in new window) e-flux special issue for the 2015 Venice Biennale, ed. Tom Holert (July 2015). (e-flux Architecture and the Royal College of Art School of Architecture)
Also published as “Plastic Shine,” in Supercommunity: Diabolical Togetherness Beyond Contemporary Art. e-flux /SUPERCOMMUNITY (Verso Books, 2017). Plastics are more flexible, easy to produce, and versatile than most other modern and naturalsubstances. They are the essence of change and mutability, which is to say, the very definition of the modern.
“Broken Color in a Modern World: Chromatic Failures in Purist Art and Architecture,” (external link, opens in new window) Journal of the International Colour Association (2015): 14, 1-13.
An essay on colour and chromophobia in modern architecture.
“Glitch Art: Failure from The Avant-Garde to Kanye West,” (external link, opens in new window) Journal of InVisible Culture no. 21 (October 2014).
An article viewing the glitch—an accidental or manufactured disturbance of encoded information—as a tool for critiquing ideologies of technological purity.
“The Tragedy of Radical Subjectivity: From Radical Software to Proprietary Subjects” (external link, opens in new window) Leonardo 47:5 (October 2014): 480-487.
This essay considers the aestheticization of post-World War II research in cybernetics as part of a cultural shift in art practices and human and machine subjectivities.
“Synthetic Fluorescents: From Day-Glo Novelty to Everyday Norm” (external link, opens in new window) Journal of Design History vol. 27; 1 (March 2014): 1-22.
Around 1968, the synthetic fluorescent colours known as ‘Day-Glo’ exploded across the cultural landscape of the United States. While these luminous and mysterious colours were at first celebrated for their electrifying capacities, as they moved from novelty to norm they marked a shift in design and consumer practices surrounding colour.
“Growing Glitch Aesthetics,” (opens in new window) Ryerson’s Intersection 3 (Spring 2019): 6-7.
“Glitch artist Chris Dorland talks transhumanism with author Carolyn Kane” (external link, opens in new window) Interview with Chris Dorland for Interview Magazine (January 2018).
Interview with Anne Slowey, for “I Broke Up With The Color Black” (external link, opens in new window) ELLE USA (March 2017)
“The Aesthetics of Algorithms” (external link, opens in new window) Interview with David Beer for Theory, Culture & Society (January 2015).
Review of Bright Signals: A History of Color Television by Susan Murray (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). Technology and Culture (January 2020): 375-376.
Review of Shannon Mattern’s Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media (external link, opens in new window) (University of Minnesota Press). Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism vol. 46 No. 3 (September 2019): 73-76.