Electrographic Architecture

New York Color, Las Vegas Light, and America's White Imaginary

Carolyn L. Kane

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9780520392618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: White like No Other
• 1.  Synthetic White, 10,000 BC–1700 AD
• 2.  Edison’s White Light Empire, 1750–1881
• 3.  The “Great White Way,” 1880s–1910
• 4.  Douglas Leigh’s Times Square Spectaculars, 1930–1960
• 5.  The Young Electric Sign Company and Las Vegas Neon, 1920–1970
• 6.  Jenny Holzer’s Light Art as Urban Critique, 1970–1990
• Conclusion: Chromophobia in the Smart City, 1992–2022
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index