Understanding the world is important for everyone. For me, it takes the form of analyzing colorful images and artifacts in the built environment. In the broad traditions of the global northwest, color is regarded as deceptive and unreliable. For centuries now, and throughout disparate media and technical systems, color has had to maintain this secondary, subordinate status as “other,” linked to falsity, manipulation, and deceit or, to quote David Batchelor, “some ‘foreign’ body". In my work, I argue that we have all inherited this tradition in the global northwest, fetishizing color as both excessive and yet indispensable in its capacity to retroactively confirm the sanctity of what it is not.
I wrote
Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America's White Imaginary
Bridging histories of technology, media studies, and aesthetics, Electrographic Architecture forges a critical narrative of the ways in which illuminated…
Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism was one of the first accounts of “postmodern aesthetics” and why it continues to matter today.
Circa 1990, Jameson showed how a new age of high-tech and transnational corporations fundamentally transformed how we create and experience art, design, and aesthetics.
Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson's most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of "postmodernism". Jameson's inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from "high" art to "low" from market ideology to architecture, from painting to "punk" film, from video art to literature.
Once again, some of our most profound insights into contemporary culture derive from a deep understanding of history. For example, why is there a fundamental distrust of surfaces and shiny “bling”?
In The Republic, and in “Book X” in particular, Plato outlines a theory of images, truth, deception, and appearances that we continue to relive in everyday life.
Long regarded as the most accurate rendering of Plato's Republic that has yet been published, this widely acclaimed work is the first strictly literal translation of a timeless classic. In addition to the annotated text, there is also a rich and valuable essay,as well as indices,which will better enable the reader to approach the heart of Plato's intention. This new edition includes a new introduction by acclaimed critic Adam Kirsch, setting the work in its intellectual context for a new generation of readers.
Yes, this is an essay, not a book. But it is such a good essay that the entire book has been re-printed with its title!
The essay is an excellent exegesis on understanding why “technology is not really about technology.” For Heidegger, the question concerning technology is a question about “being in the world”: our orientation, proclivities, values, and habits.
As relevant now as ever before, this accessible collection is an essential landmark in the philosophy of science from "one of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century" (New York Times).
The advent of machine technology has given rise to some of the deepest problems of modern thought. Featuring the celebrated essay "The Question Concerning Technology," this prescient volume contains Martin Heidegger's groundbreaking investigation into the pervasive "enframing" character of our understanding of ourselves and the world.
Also one of the most comprehensive philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment and why taste is taste and not something else…Even though it was penned circa 1790, it still has many gems of insight for the present, especially when it comes to our biases and prejudices regarding color, charm, and sense perception.
For example, Kant writes of color: “The colours which give brilliancy to the sketch are part of the charm. They may no doubt, in their own way, enliven the object for sensation, but make it really worth looking at and beautiful they cannot.” (¶14; p. 56)
'beauty has purport and significance only for human beings, for beings at once animal and rational'
In the Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant offers a penetrating analysis of our experience of the beautiful and the sublime, discussing the objectivity of taste, aesthetic disinterestedness, the relation of art and nature, the role of imagination, genius and originality, the limits of representation and the connection between morality and the aesthetic. He also investigates the validity of our judgements concerning the apparent purposiveness of nature with respect to the highest interests of reason and enlightenment.
The work profoundly influenced the artists and writers…
In 1810, after decades of color rationalizations in early modern science, romantic poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) attempted to return color to its pre-Socratic, Homeric lifeworld.
His Zür Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) glorified color for all of its inconsistencies and mysteries, making subjective perception—in marked contrast to Newton’s 1704 color theory—the most central and sacred to human experience, in service of achieving the “highest aesthetic ends.” For Goethe, color arose “in the spectrum” between black and white, a phenomenological observation dating back to Aristotelean antiquity.
Over two centuries later, this is still a fantastic guidebook for anyone interested in the phenomenology of color, light, and scintillations of subjective perception.
By closely following Goethe's explanations of the color phenomena, the reader may become so divorced from the wavelength theory—Goethe never even mentions it—that he may begin to think about color theory relatively unhampered by prejudice, ancient or modern.
By the time Goethe's Theory of Colours appeared in 1810, the wavelength theory of light and color had been firmly established. To Goethe, the theory was the result of mistaking an incidental result for an elemental principle. Far from pretending to a knowledge of physics, he insisted that such knowledge was an actual hindrance to understanding. He based his conclusions exclusively upon…
Bridging histories of technology, media studies, and aesthetics, Electrographic Architecture forges a critical narrative of the ways in which illuminated light and color have played key roles in the formation of America's white imaginary.
Carolyn L. Kane charts the rise of the country's urban advertisements, light empires, and neoclassical buildings in the early twentieth century; the midcentury construction of polychromatic electrographic spectacles; and their eclipse by informatically intense, invisible algorithms at the dawn of the new millennium. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and visual analysis, Electrographic Architecture shows how the development of America's electrographic surround runs parallel to a new paradigm of power, property, and possession.
