Presented By: Sessions @ Michigan
DSI Lecture Series | The "Great White Way" : Photography and America's White Imaginary | Carolyn Kane in Conversation with Lida Zeitlin-Wu
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, Carolyn Kane argues 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/kaneLida Zeitlin-Wu is a scholar of media, race, and visual culture whose work explores the rationalization of sensory experience and selfhood under techno-capitalism. She received her PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley in 2022 and is currently a DISCO Network Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Her book project, Seeing by Numbers, tells the story of how something as subjective and ephemeral as color came to be seen as standardized. Her writing has been published in Camera Obscura, Just Tech, Frames, and elsewhere, and with Carolyn L. Kane, she is the co-editor of Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media (MIT Press, 2024). Other teaching and research interests include food studies and critiques of the wellness industry, particularly as they intersect with culture, race, and technology.
We want to make our events accessible to all participants. CART services 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.
We want to make our events accessible to all participants. CART services 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.
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