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Presented By: Digital Studies Institute

CANCELED: DSI Lecture Series | The “Great White Way”: Photography and America’s White Imaginary

Carolyn Kane in Conversation with Lida Zeitlin-Wu

Flyer advertising the Great White Way with photo examples of architecture Flyer advertising the Great White Way with photo examples of architecture
Flyer advertising the Great White Way with photo examples of architecture
In the twenty-first century, large-scale media spectacles are ubiquitous in metropolises around the world. These polychromatic spectacles offer a diversity of colors and scintillating delights, though they fail to acknowledge––by their very design––how they also perpetuate historically entrenched legacies of chromophobia. This talk responds to this odd contradiction by leaping backwards in time, to analyze the tensions and power struggles in the history of illuminated light in the American city in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. The polemic between old world (European) whiteness and the explosive colors that mark America's twentieth-century “white imaginary” are charted through an archaeological critique of early advertising, photography, and the development of electric palettes for large-scale illuminated signs. By zeroing in on the “White City” at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian World’s Fair, and New York City’s “Great White Way” in the 1910s-1930s, I argue that a new training ground was forged for the American subject, engendering a unique brand of spectatorship rooted in visual possession by way of spectacle-based consumption.

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). Her current monograph, "Electrographic Architecture: New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America’s White Imaginary" is forthcoming from the University of California Press in 2023. More information can be found here: https://www.torontomu.ca/kane/

Lida Zeitlin-Wu is a DISCO Network Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan. She is a scholar of screen-based media and visual culture whose research focuses on the commodification and quantification of sensory experience under global techno-capitalism. Her current book project, "Seeing By Numbers" traces how color systems—diagrams and models that attempt to encompass the full range of human color vision—came to play a key role in engineering perception over the course of the 20th century.

We want to make our events accessible to all participants. This event will be a hybrid event with both a physical meeting space and an online meeting space. Please register in advance for the online Zoom Webinar here: https://bit.ly/3Cvlmyq

Please register for the physical meeting space at the University of Michigan’s Central Campus: https://myumi.ch/qG1VX

CART will be provided. If you anticipate needing accommodations to participate, please email Eric Mancini at dsi-administration@umich.edu. Please note that some accommodations must be arranged in advance and we encourage you to contact us as soon as possible.
Flyer advertising the Great White Way with photo examples of architecture Flyer advertising the Great White Way with photo examples of architecture
Flyer advertising the Great White Way with photo examples of architecture

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