The Human in Bits: Graphical Computers, Black Abstractions

In The Human in Bits, Kris Cohen examines black abstractionist painting to demonstrate how race and computation are intimately entangled with the personal computer’s graphic user interface. He shows how the personal computer and the graphical field of its screen meant to transform the human by transforming what environments humans were to labor in. It also provided the means for whiteness to tie itself to notions of colorblind meritocracy. Cohen focuses on the post-1960s experiments of black abstractionists Alma Thomas, Jack Whitten, Charles Gaines, and Julie Mehretu, who developed a nonrepresentational approach to blackness that was oriented more toward constraint than human expression. From Gaines’s use of grids to Mehretu’s layering of paint, these artists - in their knowledge that black life had always been conflated with numbers and bits of information - flirted with repetition, systems, and formulas to test other ways of being human. By demonstrating how these artists bypassed the white fear that the human would become interchangeable with data, Cohen reframes modernism and modernist art to account for racialization in computational cultures.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Human in Bits 1
1. Operational Processes: Leo Steinberg 37
2. In, Around, Above, Behind, and Other Forms of Space Flight: Alma Thomas 52
3. Nonrelational Blackness: Jack Whitten 74
4. Modernity and Fungibility: Charles Gaines 110
5. Infrastructures of Containment: Julie Mehretu 124
Coda: Resistance and Standing 150
Notes 161
Bibliography 179
Index 193

About the Author :
Kris Cohen is Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and Humanities at Reed College and author of Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations, also published by Duke University Press.

Review :
“Kris Cohen tracks how contemporary Black artists disrupt the fantasy of the human as an autonomous observer, revealing instead how racial capitalism renders the human a byproduct of technology. This critique of Western transcendentalism refuses containment within the racial hierarchies that structure society. The Human in Bits remaps modernist art criticism through the lens of Black radical thought, showing how art and technology conspire in, but also unsettle, racial value. For those committed to opposing white supremacy, the task is clear: engage Black art not as a detached aesthetic pursuit, but as a call to dismantle the systems that commodify life itself.” - Tavia Nyong’o, author of Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World

“Original in its conception, carefully argued, and beautifully written, The Human in Bits makes an important intervention in art historical and media studies discourses as well as cutting-edge discussions of black aesthetics, particularly in the ways it approaches themes of the nonrepresentational and nonrelational. Kris Cohen’s unique perspective on the artists he discusses offers a set of conceptual and methodological tools that will become valuable for future generations of scholars. This book taught me a lot.” - Shaka McGlotten, author of Dragging: Or, In the Drag of a Queer Life