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.

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.

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