Articles
Carolyn L. Kane, 鈥淭he White Noise of Rhetoric鈥� 51 (2023).
This essay analyzes Jenny Holzer's Times Square billboards, featured in issue #51 on the MULTIHYPHENATE.
Carolyn L. Kane, 鈥溾�� in the Colour Turn (June/July 2020)
Color is flippant; unreliable and notoriously difficult to work with. It resists being placed in a static chart, frame, or dyed into a 鈥渃olorfast鈥� fabric. In an age of HD digital video, however, working with color鈥�-from the perspective of a designer or artist鈥撯�� has never been more user friendly. How then do disruptive colors show their face today? This article answers this by turning to the work of American video artist Ryan Trecartin. Trecartin鈥檚 fashionable use of digital media, fast-paced editing, belligerent makeup and costume, and broken dialogue all echo his unforgiving color juxtapositions, making him a 鈥済rinder and mixer of multicolor drugs,鈥�&苍产蝉辫;as Plato once put it in reference to artists in general.
Carolyn L. Kane, 鈥溾��&苍产蝉辫;Visual Communication (June 2020): 1-22 .
In the first quarter of the twentieth century, luminous neon signs paved the way for the multiscreen aesthetic now punctuating major intersections in metropolis around the world. And yet, these epicenters of spectacle currently bear little or no neon themselves. This article draws from visual studies and histories of electricity to chart a unique material history of neon from novelty to norm, to obsolescence.
Carolyn L. Kane, Theory, Culture & Society 35; 3 (May 2018): 21-47.
Heaps and masses of garbage brought into direct view still somehow manage to escape acute recognition, let alone sustained social responsibility or global political activism. This article investigates this trend as a growing problem between the human world and its representation.
Carolyn L. Kane and Zeina Koreitem, Project: A Journal for Architecture Issue 7 (Summer 2018): 76-87.
A conversation about colour, digital computing, and architecture
Carolyn L. Kane, Harvard Design Magazine 44 (Fall/Winter, 2017).
鈥淚t鈥檚 2017. The millennium is in its teenage years鈥攁nd it shows. The world is acting out鈥攎aking rash, impulsive decisions whose repercussions may be irreparable. The body politic is moody, volatile, and uncompromising.鈥濃��Harvard Design Magazine
Carolyn L. Kane, Communication Design (April, 2017): 41-62.
Driven by an insatiable appetite for profit, scientific research in compression techniques are used to reduce data and economize signals to questionable extremes. Given this awareness, does one comply, paying attention to the point of exhaustion, offering endless hours of eyeball attention re-tweeting, re-blogging, and 鈥榣iking鈥� so someone else may reap profit, or does one tweak the circuit and rewire the rules of the game? A number of contemporary artists have gravitated to the latter, reconfiguring otherwise functional Internet tools and interfaces into error-laden 鈥榞litch art鈥� and animated Graphic Interchange Format (GIFs).
Leonardo, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2017): 6-11.
Defined as the artistic use of compression artifacts and related digital errors, glitch art emerged in the 2000s and has since become a set of vernacular media art effects, featured in digital videos by artists, net art, digitally manipulated photographs and the work of industry professionals and amateur media makers alike. Despite its rapid claim to 21st-century fashion, however, the technique has received little scholarly or curatorial attention.
History of Photography 40:2 (2016): 129-145.
Like past avant-garde movements, glitch and noise in the twenty-first century are used to reveal the materiality of the medium. But instead of providing insight or clarity into the politics or social conditions of a technology, they demarcate broader conditions of opacity and blockage.
Design Journal, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York (May, 2018): 15-19.
An essay on digital colour commissioned by the Cooper Hewitt / Smithsonian Design Museum in New York for their exhibition, Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color (2018).
"" Public Books, October 2016.
A review of Yale University Press's digital release of Josef Albers鈥� classic text on color.
e-flux special issue for the 2015 Venice Biennale, ed. Tom Holert (July 2015). (e-flux Architecture and the Royal College of Art School of Architecture)
Also published as 鈥淧lastic Shine,鈥� in Supercommunity: Diabolical Togetherness Beyond Contemporary Art. e-flux /SUPERCOMMUNITY (Verso Books, 2017). Plastics are more flexible, easy to produce, and versatile than most other modern and naturalsubstances. They are the essence of change and mutability, which is to say, the very definition of the modern.
Journal of the International Colour Association (2015): 14, 1-13.
An essay on colour and chromophobia in modern architecture.
Journal of InVisible Culture no. 21 (October 2014).
An article viewing the glitch鈥攁n accidental or manufactured disturbance of encoded information鈥攁s a tool for critiquing ideologies of technological purity.
Leonardo 47:5 (October 2014): 480-487.
This essay considers the aestheticization of post-World War II research in cybernetics as part of a cultural shift in art practices and human and machine subjectivities.
Journal of Design History vol. 27; 1 (March 2014): 1-22.
Around 1968, the synthetic fluorescent colours known as 鈥楧ay-Glo鈥� exploded across the cultural landscape of the United States. While these luminous and mysterious colours were at first celebrated for their electrifying capacities, as they moved from novelty to norm they marked a shift in design and consumer practices surrounding colour.
鈥淕rowing Glitch Aesthetics,鈥� (opens in new window) Ryerson鈥檚 Intersection 3 (Spring 2019): 6-7.
Interview with Chris Dorland for Interview Magazine (January 2018).
ELLE USA (March 2017)
Interview with David Beer for Theory, Culture & Society (January 2015).
Review of Bright Signals: A History of Color Television by Susan Murray (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). Technology and Culture (January 2020): 375-376.
(University of Minnesota Press). Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism vol. 46 No. 3 (September 2019): 73-76.