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.
Carolyn L. Kane is author of High-Tech Trash: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure and Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code.
"If you think that ubiquitous bright urban light is a story solely of technological achievement, then you should read this book. If you want to understand how the American night in particular, mantled in effervescent color, nonetheless remains a narrative of whiteness naturalized, then you must read this book."—Sandy Isenstadt, author of Electric Light: An Architectural History
"In this challenging book, Carolyn Kane traces a line from urban electrification to AI spectacle to argue that whiteness is hardly a neutral color but rather expresses the whitewashing, sanitization, and surveillance of a new spatial order."—David E. Nye, author of American Illuminations: Urban Lighting, 1800–1920
320 pp.6 x 9Illus: 50 b/w images
9780520392601$29.95|£25.00Paper
Aug 2023