How Color Became a Technology

My current book project tracks the transformation of color from an ephemeral concept into a sophisticated technology, beginning with 19th-century mass standardization and culminating in today’s privatized digital landscape. Moving chronologically through six distinct visual paradigms—the wheel, the grid, the domestic interior, the computer interface, the Pantone color swatch, and the digital filter—it reveals how color adapts to shifting cultural and economic contexts to the benefit of those in power. Yet, this is not a top-down process: by tracing how the U.S. marketplace commodified the sensation and psychology of color, the book argues that standardization and capital combined to produce a new type of consumer wooed by ideas of “personality,” “authenticity,” and other ideals of personal autonomy—where color is used to sell ourselves to ourselves. This phenomenon, which I term chromatic capitalism, highlights this interplay between hyper-rationalization and the promises of subjectivity and self-fulfillment that come from the wielding of color as a technology at scale.

Ultimately, How Color Became a Technology offers a new interdisciplinary method for studying color across media forms applicable to a wide range of historical contexts. It also points to a larger tension in the history of modern consumer culture: between the often-invisible technical 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.

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