Presenter - Carolyn Kane

Carolyn Kane, Author and Associate Professor at Ryerson University
Afternoon Breakout Session

Electrographic color and the formation of the urban surround

Colors of any sort may be placed in a box, inside a frame, dyed into a fabric or placed on a chart, but color’s transgressive nature ensures it will not remain there for very long. On its own, color tends toward the ephemeral and shape-shifting. As Bauhaus colorist Josef Albers puts it, “in visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is, as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.” The same insight applies to color in fields beyond art and design. In Chromatic Algorithms, I analyzed the role of synthetic color in computer art after 1960, contextualized within a broader history of countless attempts to isolate and control color as a stable object of inquiry. Such efforts inevitably fail, I argued, because color is always escaping the protocols that attempt to contain it. After addressing highlights from this work, my talk then turns to an analysis of neon, assessing its material-historical role in the formation of twenty-first century urban aesthetics. This begins in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when novel neon signs began to pave the contours of public space, eventually becoming central to urban commerce and advertising by the 1940s. One of the earliest illustrations of this is Las Vegas, where neon flourished as a symbol of glamour and modern progress until, less than a decade later, it lost ground to cheaper and more efficient backlit plastic, fluorescent lighting, and eventually, LED systems. By the 1960s, neon was abandoned to inner cities, noire film, and New Wave journalism only to disappear en masse by the 1980s. The paper concludes that, while neon’s colorful palette is only one of many light-based color systems to illuminate public space over the last century (and by all standards of technical innovation is now considered obsolete), it is nonetheless definitive of the urban aesthetic now prosaic in major metropolises around the world

Bio

Carolyn L. Kane is the author of High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure (University of California Press, 2019) and Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics After Code (University of Chicago Press, 2014). She is an Associate Professor of Professional Communication at Ryerson University in Toronto.