How Color Became a Technology

My current book project tells the story of how color became a sophisticated technology, beginning with 19th-century mass standardization and culminating in today’s privatized digital landscape. Moving chronologically through five distinct paradigms—the artisanal color wheel, the commercial color grid, the postwar domestic interior, the computer interface, and the social media algorithm—it reveals how color adapts to shifting cultural and economic contexts across classed, raced, and gendered lines to benefit those in power. Yet this isn’t a top-down process. Instead, color, with its infinitely embodied, affective, and spectacular properties, also represents a portal to the “good life,” whether in our homes or on our social media pages—a phenomenon I term chromatic capitalism.

Ultimately, the project offers a new interdisciplinary method for studying color applicable to a range of historical contexts by reframing color itself as a technology for managing and governing human beings (as opposed to a formal quality of “color technologies” like film or television). It also points to a larger tension in the history of capitalism and consumer culture in the United States—between the often-invisible standards and norms that govern the world we move in and the promises of emotional and aesthetic fulfillment that are dangled in front of us and indefinitely foreclosed. We can’t help but desire color: it’s used to sell ourselves to ourselves.