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The racial interface: informatics and Asian/America

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The racial interface: informatics and Asian/America

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THE RACIAL INTERFACE:

INFORMATICS AND ASIAN/AMERICA

By

Huan He

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2022

Copyright 2022 Huan He
ii

Acknowledgements

So much lies beneath the surface of these pages. This dissertation has greatly benefitted
from the guidance, critical generosity, and intellectual support of my committee. I thank my
chair, Viet Thanh Nguyen, who has profoundly shaped how I navigate Asian/American studies
and taught me how to enter field conversations askew in a productive manner. I have been
fortunate to work with Tara McPherson, who models the intellectual risk-taking that I strive for
at exciting intersections. The early seeds of this project emerged, and were encouraged by,
Nayan Shah and his “Archives and Subcultures” seminar. Dr. Shah’s insights throughout my
time in the program have influenced my approach to research. John Carlos Rowe has
consistently supported my work with Asian/American and Transpacific literatures.
In addition to my committee, I have been fortunate to learn from so many other brilliant
professors at the University of Southern California: Dorinne Kondo, Neetu Khanna, Virginia
Kuhn, Vicki Callahan, Vanessa Schwartz, W.J.T. Mitchell, Nancy Lutkehaus, Jenny Chio, Jack
Halberstam, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Sarah Gualtieri, Evelyn Alsultany, and Akira Lippit. They
have given me helpful feedback on this project in one of its stages or have shaped my
methodological approaches and critical lens more broadly. The stellar ASE staff, Kitty Lai,
Jujuana Preston, and Sonia Rodriguez, have made my time in the department easier and
memorable. I am grateful to receive grant and fellowship support through the USC Graduate
School, Visual Studies Research Institute, Center for Transpacific Studies, Center for Feminist
Research, and the Korean Studies Institute. In addition, my undergraduate professors at
Dartmouth College were among the first to show me how close-reading was a form of deep
engagement with the world. From these important years, I especially thank Aimee Bahng, Soyica
Colbert, and George Edmondson for their early encouragement.
iii

The friendships and intellectual community formed during graduate school have
sustained me. I have enjoyed learning alongside my cohort members, K. Avvirin Gray, Chris
Chien, Emmett Harsin Drager, and our honorary member Racquel Bernard. I have grown as a
person and scholar from the exciting interdisciplinary community at USC more broadly: Rosanne
Sia, Viola Lasmana, Rocío León, Karlynne Ejercito, Joshua Mitchell, Nicole Richards Diop,
Jason Vũ, Ann Tran, Cathy Calderon, Teraya Peramehta, Michelle Ruiz, Ennuri Jo, Jean Ho,
Muriel Leung, Minwoo Jung, Kyunghee Eo, Angela Kim, Darshana Sreedhar Mini, and Aurelien
Davennes. I would not be the person that I am without the love, friendship, intellectual
nourishment, and criticisms of Athia Choudhury, Heidi Amin-Hong, Sam Ikehara, and Keva Bui.
In addition to our regular writing sessions, they have been a steady anchor during graduate
school and in life.
Beyond USC, I have shared my research with scholars at the Association of Asian
American Studies, American Studies Association, and the Society for Cinema and Media
Studies. I cherish my relationships with friends, colleagues, and collaborators across institutions:
Dana Venerable, Christofer Rodelo, Michelle Lee, Elliott Powell, Sony Coráñez Bolton, Ava
Kim, Melanie Abeygunawardana, Grace Afsari-Mamagani, Yuhe Faye Wang, Natalia Duong,
Joseph Han, Chad Shomura, and Christopher Patterson. My writing group with Evyn Lê Espiritu
Gandhi, Christina Juhász-Wood, Rachel Lim, and Lisa Ng has been especially grounding during
the dissertation phase, and I am grateful for their friendship. Margaret Rhee, Cody Mejeur, and
the fabulous Palah Light Lab have energized my commitment to critical-creative work. I thank
the archivists at the Isamu Noguchi Archive, Computer History Museum Shustek Archives,
National Archives, Nam June Paik Archives, and the Getty Research Institute.
iv

My life is made all the better because of many friends: Cassandra Hartt, Dravid Joseph,
Renee Lai, Autumn White Eyes, Joshua Lee, Chris Johnson, and Emily Vialpando. I am grateful
to Anthony Kim, my great roommate and friend, who grounded me and celebrated me especially
during my final year in the program. I am so lucky to have Milo Casiano, Daniel Huecias, and
AL Liou. They have all taught me the importance of queer joy and unconditional love and, each
in their own way, lifted me up when I needed it the most. Finally, my family—Chunlin, Min,
Athena, and Selina—have given me so much throughout my life. As I research, write, and grow,
I always find threads that lead back to them.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………..………….……. ii

List of Figures……………………….…………………………………………...………...….…vi

Abstract………………….………………………………………………………..………....…. vii

Introduction………………………………………………………………………..……….…….1

Chapter 1: PREDICTION
Isamu Noguchi’s Gardens and “Yellow Peril” in the Age of Information……………..……..… 34
Yellow Peril… ………………….……………………..…...…………….……... 36
Experiments in Desire ……………………………………………………………44
Garden of the Future………………………………………………………..….... 61

Chapter 2: MODELING
Nam June Paik’s Digital Arts and the Computational Origins of Minority Modeling……..…… 64
Indeterminacy of the Asiatic……………………………………………..……… 69
Model Minorities and Model Computers…………………………………….......78
Asian/American Digital Arts and the Logic of (In)Efficiency…………...…..…. 88

Chapter 3: INTEGRATION
Railroad Mythologies and the Racial Histories of Silicon Valley…………………………...…..95
Asian/American Media Archeology……………………………………………..99
Mythologies in the Machine: Integrated Circuits………………………………105
Railroad Mythologies and the Racialization of Microelectronics…………...…113
Poetics of the “Imperceptible”………………………………………………… 122

Chapter 4: BLACK BOX
Asiatic Inscrutability and the Algorithmic Imaginary……………………………………….…130
Damaged Language Files……………………………………………………… 133
Asiatic and/as Algorithm……………………………………………………….140
Race-Neutrality and the Algorithm………………………………….………… 152
Asian/American Procedural Arts……………………...………………………. 158

Coda
Cybernetic Openings………………...……………………...…………………….....………… 167

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………...……………... 175
vi

List of Figures

0.1: TIME Magazine cover for the 1982 “Machine of the Year” (1983). 1

1.1 Isamu Noguchi, “Poston: Parks & Recreation.” 55

1.2 Isamu Noguchi’s Garden of the Future at IBM. 61

2.1 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). 66

2.2 Nam June Paik’s Untitled (TV Face) (1980). 72

3.1 Still from Zhi Lin’s Chinaman’s Chance on Promontory Summit: Golden Spike 99
Celebration, 12:30 PM, 10
th
May 1869 (2019), Kimball Art Center, Park City, Utah.

3.2 Andrew J Russell, “East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail” (1869). 100

3.3 Design of an integrated circuit, Fairchild Semiconductor Brochure (1969). 109

3.4 Cover of Views (1969), Fairchild Camera and Instrument magazine. 111

3.5 Richard Steinheimer, Westbound Train to Los Angeles (1952) . 119

3.6 Navajo microelectronics assembly worker (1969). 121

3.7 Ahree Lee, Pattern : Code (2019). 129

4.1 Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) in Ex Machina (2014). 133

4.2 “How to Tell” article from LIFE Magazine (Dec. 22, 1941). 145

4.3 Article in TIME Magazine (Dec. 1941). 150

4.4 Article in Science News Letter (Dec. 20, 1941). 150

4.5 Graphic depiction of IBM Diversity in Faces project. 155

4.6 Stills from Ryan Kuo’s File: A Primer (2018). 161

4.7 More stills from Ryan Kuo’s File: A Primer (2018). 165

5.1 Executive Order 9066 poster 172

5.2 “Never Again Is Now” poster 172
vii

Abstract

The Racial Interface: Informatics and Asian/America examines the racial associations linking
Asian/Americans and information technology in the digital era. As computers transformed from
threatening, wartime machines to user-friendly personal devices, so too did Asian/Americans
shift from “yellow peril” to “model minority” citizens. Examining literary, art, and historical
sources, The Racial Interface interprets the dominant history of information technologies as an
assimilation narrative, bolstered by Asian/American racial discourse. My project contends that
Asian/American artists and writers—including Isamu Noguchi, Nam June Paik, Ahree Lee,
Janice Lobo Sapigao, Zhi Lin, Franny Choi, and Ryan Kuo—reveal and/or critique these
converging myths of racial and technological progress, born out of American capitalist values
and settler colonial ideology. Each chapter investigates the overlapping histories of
Asian/America and information technologies, ranging from the cybernetic logics of Japanese
internment to the computational origins of model minority discourse. Bridging Asian/American
studies, critical race studies, and studies of media and technology, The Racial Interface
concludes that liberal capitalism’s focus on individualism, efficiency, and representation became
bound to the rise of digital power.

1
INTRODUCTION
TIME magazine’s 1982 Man of the Year award was given to “The Computer,” the first
and only nonhuman recipient in the honor’s history. Changed to be called “Machine of the
Year,” the award celebrated the era of the personal computer. The cover featured the title “The
Computer Moves In” and an image of a white plaster person sculpted by artist George Segal
facing a concept computer. The computer was here to stay, a new character in the vastly
expanding media and technological landscape in the late 20
th
century. With the “PC revolution”
still in relative infancy (most households at the time of the award did not own a personal
computer),
1
this TIME award functioned more as a declaration of the future where the computer
would become an integrated part of social life. The computer’s “Machine of the Year” award

1
Greggory S. Blundell, “Personal Computers in the Eighties,” BYTE Publications, January 1983, 166.
Figure 0.1: TIME Magazine cover for the 1982 “Machine of the Year” award.
January 3, 1983.

2
evinces a type of qualified personhood imposed onto this emerging digital technology. In
contrast to the first electronic computers associated with de-personalized scientific calculation
and military research, the personal computer was increasingly conceptualized in more
autonomous and friendly terms, an entity that could “move in” seamlessly into the US domestic
sphere for business and personal ventures. Conceptualizing the computer as a type of person-like
thing, the cover image reflects a desire to imagine computers as harmonious and helpful tools in
the era of information capitalism.
TIME frames the story of the personal computer as a story of immigration. Describing a
“machine” that “moves in” into the domestic sphere of the household, the cover corresponds to
the large waves of immigration into the domestic sphere of the nation in the 1980s. In this
period, 7,338,000 immigrants entered the United States
2
, a historical record unfolding in the
aftermath of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, or the Hart-Cellar Act. As a milestone in
immigration reform, the Hart-Cellar Act, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, abolished the
quota system set in place by the Immigration Act of 1924 that restricted entry based on national
origin. In his 1964 State of the Union Address, Johnson frames immigration reform as a
mechanism of combatting discrimination more broadly:
We must also lift by legislation the bars of discrimination against those who seek entry
into our country, particularly those who have much needed skills and those joining their
families…In establishing preferences, a nation that was built by the immigrants of all
lands can ask those who now seek admission: "What can you do for our country?" But we
should not be asking: "In what country were you born?
3

Johnson’s speech highlights how the capacity to be productive citizens (“what can you do for our
country”) has the potential to override the racial encoding of national origins (“In what country

2
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998).
3
Lyndon B. Johnson, “Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union,” The American Presidency
Project, January 8, 1964, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-message-the-congress-the-state-the-
union-25.
3
were you born”). By positioning the United States as a welcoming nation of immigrants and
renewing longstanding liberal ideologies of American imperialism and capitalism, the State of
the Union address promises national inclusion and belonging through the abstraction of the
capacity for labor.
4
The legal recoding of the terms of US citizenship intensified in the 1980s,
when many more immigrants arrived from Latin America, Asia, and Africa in exponentially
greater numbers than the 1960s.
5

The Hart-Cellar Act can be situated within the context of liberal social reform in the
1960s, which responded to the grassroots Civil Rights movements addressing racial segregation,
politicization of ethnic identities, US war and imperialism, Third World solidarity and
decolonization efforts, and other progressive, decolonial, and radical politics. The 1965
Immigration Act advanced an ideology of migrant inclusion to resolve the many decades of
restriction and exclusion that characterized US immigration policy. However, many scholars of
race and liberalism have argued that the formalized liberal policies and practices of anti-
discrimination and anti-racism in the United States did not resolve contemporary racism but, in
fact, shifted the structural operations of racism and inequality under the banner of “equality” and
“inclusion.” At the same time, the legal and national performance of democratic values,
specifically in the realm of racial issues, situated the United States as a global model and face for
democracy and “freedom” in the nation’s bid for global power, thus providing the ideological
engine for US imperialist and transnational capitalist strategies and expansion. Jodi Melamed
terms this the “trick of racialization,” referring to how the mythic American dream supposedly

4
Lisa Lowe attends to the aspiration to de-nationalize the origins of the US immigrant labor force. She situates this
liberal impulse within Marx’s notion of abstract labor that is “unconcerned by the ‘origins’ of its labor force.”
However, Lowe also importantly remarks how the labor abstraction of capital are at odds with the cultural ideals of
the nation, in which the political sphere of “abstract” citizen relies on a need for “unified” culture bound by race,
language, and culture. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1996), 13.
5
Jerry Kramer, “The Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965,” Center for Immigration Studies, Sept. 30, 2015,
https://cis.org/Report/HartCeller-Immigration-Act-1965.
4
“ensures a baseline for social possibility” while “displacing and disguising differential value
making within world-ordering systems of difference.”
6
For Melamed and other scholars of
racialization, race does not contain cultural static meanings but rather indexes the shifting and
contradictory demands of capital and nation, labor and citizenship.
7

If the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act paved the way for high numbers of immigration in the 1980s,
then Silicon Valley’s “Moore’s Law” of 1965 might be understood as its technological corollary.
Less of a legal declaration and more of a technical prophecy of innovation, Moore’s Law
predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every two years,
leading to more efficient, cheaper, smaller, and more powerful information and computational
technologies. Espoused by Gordon Moore, a research director at Fairchild Semiconductor and
co-founder of Intel Corporation, Moore’s Law evinces the ideology of technological progress
that was baked into Silicon Valley as its dominant myth of innovation. Yet, by situating Moore’s
Law of 1965 alongside the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, we can begin to trace how the “technological
imaginaries”
8
of the so-called computer revolution operated through a similar logic to that of
immigration reform. As David Rotman notes, “Moore’s argument was an economic one,”
9
in
which the exponentially high increase of transistors onto a single integrated circuit also
decreased the cost of microelectronics. Moore’s Law, thus, presents a vision of digital power that
situates computational capacity in an inverse to relation to cost. Interpreted as a pronouncement

6
Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota, 2011), 12.
7
Melamed and Lowe both build centrally upon Howard Winant and Michael Omi’s theories of racial formation and
their identification of the postwar “racial break.” Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United
States (3
rd
Edition) (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015).
8
I borrow the term “technological imaginaries” from the incisive work of Anne Balsamo. In Designing Culture: The
Technological Imagination at Work, Balsamo uses the “technological imagination” to think through how culture is a
prediction for the imaginative and innovation aspects of technological development. Anne Balsamo, Designing
Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 6.
9
David Rotman, “We’re not prepared for the end of Moore’s Law,” MIT Technology Review, Feb. 24, 2020,
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/24/905789/were-not-prepared-for-the-end-of-moores-law/.
5
of innovative technological progress, the technical logic of the integrated circuit resembles the
cultural logic of immigration—of an influx of transistors, of the economic efficient justification
for this arrangement, the possibility of smaller, personal user-friendly devices, its impact on the
increased ubiquity of information technologies into the everyday, and its influence on the
personal computing era.
Through juxtaposition, the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act and the 1965 Moore’s Law demonstrate
how the internal logic of digital power—of an inverse relationship between cheap
microelectronics (economic reasoning) and increased computational capacity (technological
reasoning)—corresponds with the internal logic of US liberal power. The imaginary of a
pluralistic, democratic United States, capable of racial harmony and economic prosperity, is a
national myth that attempts to resolve its contradictory desires for cheap labor (economic
reasoning) and national unity and progress (cultural reasoning). I interpret these two historical
milestones of 1965 not as social fact but as evidence of a deeply imbricated myth that tethers
together the technical and the social, the computational and the cultural. In similar ways, the
“Act” and the “Law” both envision a simplified fantasy of racial and technological progress in
the shadow of US liberal capitalism, as the United States is mired in the irresolvable,
contradictory demands of capital and nation. The TIME cover of a 1980s personal computer
“moving in” presents a flashpoint of these seemingly disparate genealogies cutting across
technical and social history.
In its most ambitious form, The Racial Interface: Informatics and Asian/America
contends that racial narratives of foreignness, migration, labor, and assimilation have shaped the
emergence of information capitalism and the digital present. The history of information
technologies in the 20
th
century is often narrated through a series of evolutionary meta-stages:
6
from its wartime origins in the 1940s born out of the military-research industrial complex, to its
Cold War epoch of business computing, advancements in interface design, the corporate rise of
Silicon Valley, to the era of personal computing that eventually paved the way for the idealized
visions of the internet and cyberspace.
10
Many influential studies have complicated this
overarching narrative of the digital age and outlined contingent, alternative, or subjugated
histories of technology.
11
While scholars have rightfully critiqued this evolutionary history for
what it gets wrong or obscures from historiographical view, I am interested in what this story of
technological progress reveals or indexes about the contemporary life of liberal capitalism. Thus,
The Racial Interface interprets the dominant history of information technologies as an
assimilation narrative, bolstered by racial discourse. Building from Lisa Gitelman’s notion of
“media as historical subjects,”
12
my project situates the forms and objects of information
technologies as historical subjects of liberalism, enmeshed within the very fabric of social
integration that described the racial shifts of the postwar era. Epitomized by the
anthropomorphizing of the 1980s personal computer as the TIME Man (Machine) of the Year,
the social desire to personify—and ultimately humanize—the computer has played a significant
role in the rise of digital power under liberal capitalism.
As its central case study, The Racial Interface examines Asian/American culture to reveal
and/or critique these converging myths of racial and technological progress, born out of
American capitalist values and settler colonial ideology. The project contends that

10
Paul E. Ceruzzi, Computing: A Concise History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); James W. Cortada, IBM:
The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Paul N. Edwards, The
Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
11
This footnote is an introductory and incomplete sampling of some critical histories of information technologies
and computation. Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1999); Charlton D. McIlwain, Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to
Black Lives Matter (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020); Joy Lisi Rankin, A People’s History of
Computing in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
12
Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006), 5.
7
Asian/American literature and art present a critical genealogy of the digital and are thus uniquely
positioned to diagnose the linkages between race and technology. Just as Asian/Americans
shifted from being seen as machinic “yellow peril” foreigners to capable model minority citizens,
so too did computers transform from threatening, wartime machines to user-friendly personal
devices.
13
From the 1940s to the 1980s, the dominant perception of Asian/Americans evolved in
ways that powerfully corresponded with the rise of information technologies, and their entwined
histories reflect a liberal myth of progress. This project is an inquiry into how and why. Further,
by situating Asian/American literature and art within a technical history of the digital era, it also
shows how experimental aesthetic forms can help us understand the modern abstractions we
perceive as “race” and the “digital.”
Of central concern in this project is the concept of the racial interface, an organizing
frame that draws from racial and technology histories. In her article “Race and/as Technology;
or, How to Do Things to Race,” Wendy Hui Kyong Chun asserts that “race—like media—has
involved linking what is visible to what is invisible.”
14
Rather than define race as biological or
social, Chun contends that race itself functions powerfully as an epistemic operation of meaning-
making that establishes the terms of biological or the social in the first instance. She extends
Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s influential concept of racial formation:
The concept of race, developing unevenly in the Americas from the arrival of Europeans
in the Western Hemisphere down to the present, has served as a fundamental organizing
principle of the social system. Practices of distinguishing among human beings according

13
Much of my thinking here is informed by Colleen Lye’s work on racial form, in ways that expands the historical
and conceptual scope of Asian American subject-formation. A key insight from Lye is particularly generative: “The
significance of this historicity can be gauged by placing Asian American subject-formation in relationship to other
developments, be they economic, political, sociological, intellectual, or cultural—and whether they belong under the
recognizable heading of “Asian American history” or other kinds of history.” Colleen Lye, “Racial Form,”
Representations 104, no. 1 (2008): 96.
14
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Race and/as Technology or How to Do Things To Race,” in Race After the Internet,
ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 39.
8
to their corporeal characteristics became linked to systems of control, exploitation, and
resistance.
15

Shifting attention from “what” race is to “how” race operates, Chun’s formulation of race and/as
technology—with its crucial conjunction “as”—invites understandings of race as a process of
social mediation. In this frame, diagnosing the relationship between the visible (the corporeal,
the identitarian, the individual) and the invisible (the historical, the social, the structural)
becomes a way of tracking how technological power not only impacts racial subjects and bodies
but sets the terms of what is perceivable as “race” in a sociohistorical moment. Perhaps this is
why, in Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Chun describes the “interface” in similar
ways as “race.” She writes, “‘interfaces’ [are] mediators between the visible and the invisible,”
in which ideas of navigating social relations and ideas of identity and selfhood are constituted.
16

The congruence between these two formulations of “race” and the “interface” lays the
conceptual groundwork for The Racial Interface, in which both forms evince the social and
technological expression of liberal capitalist ideology.
This project suggests that Asian/American cultural critique has intuited a media theory of
race, particularly through a Marxist lens. In Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural
Politics, Lisa Lowe writes: “Through the twentieth century, the figure of the Asian immigrant
has served as a “screen,” a phantasmatic site, on which the nation projects a series of condensed,
complicated anxieties regarding external and internal threats to the mutable coherence of the
national body.”
17
By describing the Asian immigrant as a “screen,” Lowe emphasizes cultural
expressions of anti-Asian fear (such as “yellow peril” discourse
18
) and pro-Asian celebration

15
Omi and Winant, 3.
16
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 8.
17
Lowe, 18.
18
For a comprehensive history of “yellow peril” discourse, see John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats, Yellow
Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
9
(such as “model minority” discourse
19
) are never just about Asian subjects themselves but about
the nation-state’s shifting relationship to global capital. Lowe further describes culture as “the
medium of the present – the imagined equivalences and identifications through which the
individual invents lived relationship with the national collective.”
20
Culture does not reflect
social reality or refer to empirical (racialized) bodies but is an interface that attempts to simply
and resolve the contradiction demands of capital and nation, foreignness and assimilation,
difference and universalisms. The work of Asian/American cultural critique, thus, most
productively can diagnose this shifting arrangement of social power made legible by the
verisimilitudes of racial figuration. Scholars like Colleen Lye and Iyko Day further demonstrate
how anthropomorphic representations of Asian subjects in the realm of culture can provide a lens
for understanding the economic anxieties that subtend American imperialism (Lye) and settler
colonialism (Day). Lye theorizes the “Asiatic as a figure for the unrepresentable,”
21
following a
materialist reading that posits racial representation as a “trace of the social relations that race
marks.”
22
Day, similarly, conceptualizes race as an “expression of settler power,” in which the
figuration of an Asian subject refers to the “threatening abstract economism of capitalism”
23
that
advances white settler colonial capital. Lowe, Lye, Day, and others outline a media theory within
Asian/American cultural criticism, figuring the “Asiatic” as a cultural and racial expression of
labor relations. Thus, each present their own genealogical interpretation of the diverse archive of
Asian/American literature and art. For Lowe, she is interested in tracing a genealogy of

19
For a comprehensive history of model minority discourse, see Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian
Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
20
Ibid, 2-3.
21
Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005), 7.
22
Ibid, 8.
23
Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016), 33.
10
American citizenship; for Lye, a genealogy of US-East Asian economic relations; for Day, a
genealogy of North American white settler colonial capitalism.
Adding to these critical uses of culture, The Racial Interface asserts that Asian/American
literature and art present a genealogy of information capitalism. It demonstrates how the
contradictions at the core of Asian racialization (as simultaneously “yellow peril” and “model
minority”) correspond to the ambivalent constructions of digital technologies, as both
objectifying and liberating, alienating and universalizing, and dystopic and utopic. It is this
internal antinomical logic within racial and technological formations that I track across a variety
of cultural texts, including the sculptural, the media artistic, and the poetic. I also analyze
archival sources that span government, corporate, and journalistic documents to enrich my study
of Asian/American culture. Through this multidisciplinary approach, this project examines the
racial associations linking Asian/Americans and information technologies in the early digital era
from 1942 to 1984, from the wartime origins of cybernetics to the advent of personal computing.
Bringing critical race theory to studies of media and technology, I address how histories of
exclusion, expansion, and citizenship facilitated information technology’s transition from
wartime machine to consumer product. By analyzing the visual techniques of Asian American
artists and writers, The Racial Interface highlights the imperceptible operations of race and the
digital, as their more liberal forms valorize these social phenomena on the representational level
of skin and screen.
Throughout this project, I use the term “Asian/America(n)” to emphasize the interfacing
effect marked by the slash. Centrally, I build from David Palumbo-Liu’s formulation of
“Asian/America” (rather than “Asian-American” or “Asian American”). He writes:
[T]he nature of Asian American social subjectivity now vacillates between whiteness and
color. Its visibility is of a particular texture and density; its function is always to trace a
11
racial minority’s possibilities for assimilation.... Asia/America resides in transit, as a
point of reference on the horizon that is part of both a ‘minority’ identity and a ‘majority’
identity.
24

In Palumbo-Liu’s conception, the solidus of Asian/American attunes to the racial grammar of
subjectivity. Drawing from a psychoanalytic lexicon that frames the “Asia” and “America”
relation as one of introjection, he moves away from the discourse of inclusion/exclusion for
defining “Asian America” and, instead, uses the “slash” to emphasize the shifting and dynamic
signifier of “Asian/America” within American modernity. Explored most directly in Section
Three titled “Modeling the Nation,” Palumbo-Liu describes how Asians in America perform a
modeling function for modern US race-relations, installing ideologies of racial capitalism for
Asian, Black, and white Americans. Marking a horizon toward assimilation, the concept of
“modeling” is what I hope to index in my use of “Asian/America,” to think through how its
resonances with emergent developments in the information sciences and digital technologies
overlap with Asian/American racial form and formation. Modeling, thus, enacts an interfacing
function that helps clarify the relationship between the Asiatic and the technological that is not
simply one of exclusion and dehumanization. Aligning with Alexander Galloway’s formulation
of the interface as a state of “being on the boundary,” modeling attends to the shifting form and
function of race under US race-liberalism.

The Asiatic and the Technological
From the 19
th
century to the present, the Asiatic has regularly been conflated with the
technological. Machinic attributes such as the “robotic,” the “self-regulating,” the “unfeeling,”
the “interchangeable,” and the “efficient” align with dominant racialized perceptions of Asians

24
David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999), 5.
12
and Asian/Americans in the United States across a range of historical moments. For example,
racist characterizations of Chinese railroad workers were ripe with technological language that
dehumanize the labor force. In 1881, California Senator John Miller described Chinese railroad
workers as “machine-like … of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy,
with muscles of iron; they are automatic engines of flesh and blood.”
25
Speculations on
biological make-up of Chinese laborers as made of “iron”
26
and “machine-like” attest to how the
laboring body becomes a site of racial differentiation during the era of American
industrialization and national infrastructural development. Linking the Chinese and the machine
not only deemed the Chinese as biologically inferior and socially threatening but also positioned
the Chinese as a proxy—or a screen—mediating broader fears and anxieties of American
industrial capitalism’s impact on white, masculine, working class identity. Historians such as
Mai Ngai, Kornel Chang, Madeline Yuan-Hsu, and Nayan Shah have demonstrated the wide-
ranging impact of anti-Chinese sentiment, which culminated in the passage of the Chinese
Exclusion Act in 1882 (renewed in 1892 and 1902).
27
The biologized Chinese body exemplifies
how “seemingly ‘natural’ observable difference” is utilized to explain and justify a racialized
social order.
28
Further, these scholars point to how racial encodings of biology are also gendered

25
Quoted in Iris Chang, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History (New York, NY: Penguin, 2004), 130.
26
In addition to John Miller’s description of Chinese railroad workers as biologically composed of “iron,” the
racialization of Chinese cannery workers in the turn of the 20
th
century also took on machinic and technological
valences. Of note is the “Iron Chink,” which was an automated salmon processing machine that primarily replaced
Chinese cannery workers.
27
Mai M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2014); Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2012); Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home:
Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).
28
Ibid, 5.
13
and sexualized. Heterosexual social formations casted certain bodies and subjects as “deviant” or
“queer” outside of respectable Euro-American norms and arrangements.
29

The technologization of the Asian body has served as the conceptual bedrock for studies
in techno-Orientalism. First coined in their book Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic
Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries, Kevin Morley and David Robins utilized techno-
Orientalism to articulate how “Japan is calling Western modernity into question and is claiming
the franchise on the future.”
30
Renewing Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism”
31
for the
postwar era of technological competition and information capitalism on a global scale, techno-
Orientalism originally addressed the example of Japan and its postwar global rise vis-à-vis
advancements in technological prowess that rivaled that of Europe and the United States. Born
out of the Cold War era of military-research, technological advancements, and transpacific flows
of global capital, techno-Orientalism originally was interested in diagnosing how Japan figured
into information technological modernity. Since Said’s theory of Orientalism has been central for
explaining Asian/American racialization, Asian/American studies also found resonances with the
literatures of techno-Orientalism. David S. Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu’s edited collection
Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media exemplifies a
large effort to collect, plot, expand the rich vocabulary of techno-Orientalism. Broadening

29
Here, I am also invoking the rich scholarship of queer studies scholars that are re-conceptualizing the “queer”
beyond the category of sexual identity. David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñ oz, “Introduction:
What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?” Social Text 23, no. 4-5 (2005): 1-17.
30
Kevin Morley and David Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural
Boundaries (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 149.
31
Theorized by the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said, “Orientalism” refers to a “Western style for
dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” that ultimately gives aesthetic, cultural, social, and
political coherence to the entity we call the “West.” Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Pantheon Books,
1978).
14
techno-Orientalism beyond its Japan context
32
, the collection defines techno-Orientalism as the
phenomenon of “imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-technological
terms in cultural productions and political discourse,…infused with the languages and codes of
the technological and the futuristic.”
33
While contemporary renderings of the Asiatic and the
technological can be traced back to the yellow peril discourse of the “robotic” Chinese railroad
laborer or the hyper-efficient Chinese cannery worker, its most familiar iterations are in the
popular cultural imagination of Western science fiction and other Eurocentric imaginations of a
technologized future. In other words, the future is imagined as Asian: from a technological
dystopic futuristic landscape portrayed as “Asiatic,” such as in the cyberpunk fictions of Ridley
Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), to the Asian cyborg in
Ex Machina (2014) and the film version of Ghost in the Shell (2017). Besides these cultural
examples, techno-Orientalism has also been used to explain historical instances of anti-Asian
violence. For example, scholars have connected the figuration of Chinese coolie “machinic”
labor to the tragic murder of Vincent Chin in 1982 by two white Detroit auto workers who
conflated Chin’s Chinese body with the threatening rise of Japanese automobile industry.
34

Furthermore, the critical framework of techno-Orientalism has also produced a resistant
genealogy of literary and artistic responses to the technologizing of Asian bodies. Ranging from
contemporary poetry such as Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus (2019), Margaret Rhee’s Love, Robot
(2017), and Franny Choi’s Soft Science (2019), to graphic novels such as Sonny Liew’s Malinky

32
While the theories of techno-Orientalism expand to include sites beyond Japan, scholars are careful to still
maintain analytic distinctions between differently geographically and historically inflected iterations of the
technology and Orientalism. Of note is Christopher T. Fan’s example of “techno-Orientalism with Chinese
characteristics,” which outlines how a new register of techno-Orientalism manifests in the context of US-China
interdependency. Christopher T. Fan, “Techno-Orientalism with Chinese Characteristics: Maureen F. McHugh’s
China Mountain Zhang,” Transnational American Studies 6, no. 1 (2015).
33
David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu, Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History,
and Media (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 2.
34
Ibid, 11.
15
Robot (2011),
35
to media art such as Nam June Paik’s Robot K-456 (1964), to speculative fiction
such as Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002), this vast oeuvre of Asian/American technological
imaginaries creatively responds to the legacy of techno-Orientalist ideologies and aesthetics.
While theories of techno-Orientalism often focus on the dehumanization of Asians as
technology, my project contends that the humanization of Asians through technical logics, such
as the computer-like ability to work productively and predictively, provided a larger schematic
model for incorporating race into the structures of U.S. liberal capitalism. This claim does not
refute existing scholarship on techno-Orientalism but adds a critical antinomical supplement for
understanding the continual link between the Asiatic and the technological. Thus, The Racial
Interface attends to the dual processes of dehumanization and humanization, in which the Asian
is not only situated as “the very antithesis of Western liberal humanism”
36
but as a “model” for a
social belief in a capacity for transformation within the structure of US capitalism. The Asian
“model minority,” for example, installs a logic of sameness rather than difference, likeness rather
than antithesis. Just as the Asiatic has been dehumanized as machinic (second-class citizens,
foreign, unfeeling, threatening, inscrutable, expendable, and hyper-efficient), there have also
been moments in which the Asiatic was viewed in humanizing terms, or “like whites,”
37
a racial
category that defined who counted as “human” in the Euro-American imagination. These
moments do not materially resolve histories and continuities of anti-Asian fear and hatred, as
made tragically and visibly evident by the COVID violence against Asians and

35
Aimee Bahng reads Sonny Liew’s Malinky Robot as an aesthetic response to techno-Orientalism’s role in
producing global neoliberal subjects in Singapore. Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in
Financial Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
36
Roh, Huang, Niu, 5.
37
Mia Tuan, Forever Foreigners or Honorary Whites? The Asian Ethnic Experience Today (Newark, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1999).
16
Asian/Americans
38
, but rather indicate how the Asiatic functions as a structuring myth of
liberalism. The model minority, an abstract figuration featured prominently in the historical
analysis of chapters one and two, promises a fantasy of assimilation into Western liberal
humanism through an economic logic. As much as Asian/American studies has debunked the
model minority myth as a myth, my project suggest that this critical position cleaves the potency
of such a myth from analytical purview (by dismissing the myth through naming it as such). This
project contends that we need to take these myths seriously on account of their cultural force and
social visibility. Tracing the “humanization” of the Asiatic allows us to diagnose the converging
myths of racial and technological progress that constitute the liberalism of the digital present.
Thus, the model minority is not only a racial form or economic form, but also a
technological form, shaped by the demands of Cold War science and technology institutions.
Part of the model minority story, and the story of how Asian/Americans could be “like whites”
within the US racial landscape, is due to the targeted recruitment of Asian skilled technical labor
particularly in S.T.E.M. (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields alongside
increased partnerships with science and technology institutions in Asian nations such as China,
Japan, Korea, India, Vietnam, and others. In fact, the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act previously discussed

38
I write this statement on the one-year anniversary of the deadly Atlanta spa shootings. This hate-filled tragedy
resulted in the murders of eight civilians, six of whom were of Asian descent. Their names were Soon Chung Park
(74), Hyun Jung Grant (51), Suncha Kim (69), Yong Yue (63), Xiaojie Tan (49), Daoyou Feng (44), Paul Andre
Michels (54), Delaina Ashley Yaun (33). Amidst what seems to be a never-ending cycle of anti-Asian violence,
particularly against the elderly Asian population, I have asked myself why I continue to be interested in
understanding the “humanization” of the Asian/Asiatic when the evidence all around me is a continuous deafening
reminder that Asians are dehumanized. With the repetition of this violence, despite its high visibility, is also a hint
that pointing out the explicit logic of anti-Asian violence and hatred no longer works on its own. This project
reflects my larger inclination that perhaps the answer also lies in uncovering and unearthing genealogies of pro-
Asian valorization, the shadow side of what Colleen Lye has termed the “Asiatic racial form.” Understanding why
the Asian has been celebrated, such as in the instance of the model minority, might yield new insights into the
intensified racial anxiety that undergirds the nation’s incessant and exhausting declaration as a post-racial
democratic ideal, despite the mountain of evidence proving otherwise. I include this commentary in a footnote,
rather than the body, as this aim exceeds the boundaries and capabilities of this singular project. But, I still hope to
clarify a palpable and urgent motivation behind this project, of exploring why an Asian/American studies project
does not always have to center the topic of injury, violence, or trauma to understand the invisible structural violence
of liberal capitalism.
17
was not simply about immigration reform but was also a mechanism of selecting a skill-based
labor force with a high concentration in science and technology sectors, which was further
expanded by the H-1B visa program. In 1964, Asian immigrants represented approximately 14
percent of science and technical students and professionals entering the United States. This
number rose to close to 64 percent in 1970.
39
In The Good Immigrant: How the Yellow Peril
Became the Model Minority, Madeline Hsu argues that US immigration is a mechanism of both
racial management domestically as well as a projection of US global power. In this sense, the
Hart-Cellar Act demonstrates how “neoliberal principles [have] masked emerging forms of
inequality in global migrations that privilege the mobility of educated elites, particularly for
those concentrated in what are now labeled STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics, fields, and most prominently from Asia.”
40
She notes how a privileged minoritarian
elite were welcomed into the US nation-state to strategically satisfy both domestic and
international needs, with a high concentration in the STEM fields.
41
Immigration, here, functions
quite literally as a “screen.” Economic, corporate, and nation-based demands coalesced in the
desire to recruit Asian international students and people in the fields of science, technology, and
engineering that intensified with the Hart-Cellar Act but also has a longer history preceding the
1965 immigration policy. Pre-1965 international education programs and networks, for example,
played a large role in structuring the United States’ relationship with China and Japan via the
“soft power” of educational exchange. Programs such as the Boxer Indemnity Fellowships
(1909–1937) allowed, and therefore created, an exempt class of Chinese students to study in

39
Paul Ong and John M. Liu, “U.S. Immigration Policies and Asian Migration,” in The New Asian Immigration in
Los Angeles and Global Restructuring, ed. Edna Bonacich, Paul Ong, and Lucie Cheng (Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press, 1994), 58.
40
Madeline Y. Hsu, The Good Immigrant: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2015), 21. Emphasis mine.
41
Ibid, 2.
18
American institutions during the period of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Those trained in science,
technology, and engineering were not only valued for their contributions to American research
but were deemed assimilable for those precise reasons. Thus, racial exclusion, evidenced by
“yellow peril” discourse,” provided the precondition in which racial selection became a
dominant ideology in US immigration policy.
42
The scientific education and technological
research functioned as a social rubric for larger ideologies of class, race, gender congealing into
the formation of the “good immigrant,” often figured as Asian.
43

Thus, returning to Lisa Lowe’s assertion that the Asian immigrant has functioned as a
“screen” for both American anxieties and aspirations,
44
we can consider the process of immigrant
selection vis-à-vis a STEM-based criteria as part of the screening logic of constructing racial
assimilability and inclusion. In my project, the Asiatic does not refer to specific Asian-identified
bodies or subjects but rather the invocation of a second-order racial form such as “yellow peril”
or “model minority.” The Asiatic encapsulates competing national and economic desires and is
culturally expressed at times as a foreign threat and other times as a “good immigrant.” In many
ways, this abstraction serves as a mechanism of racial management, specifically because it
engenders the mythic capacity to shift in racial meaning from “yellow peril” to “model
minority.” This racial fantasy of liberal progress, I argue, corresponds powerfully with the post-
racial dreams of the digital technology and power, which espouse its own fantasies of
immateriality as its defining logic.

42
Thus, ideas of the select “good” Chinese Americans eventually expanded to become ideas of the “good” racial
group (Chinese Americans or Asian Americans as a whole).
43
An Wang is an example of this “model” model minority. A computer engineer and business entrepreneur, Wang’s
personal and professional life demonstrates the selective process of US immigration recruitment during an era of
racial exclusion. In July 1986, President Ronald Reagan awarded Wang as one of a dozen exemplary immigrants
with a Medal of Liberty at a commemoration at Governor’s Island, broadcasted to the world. In this public
performance of democratic ideals of its foundational abstract principles of the American Dream, Wang’s presence
represents the story of Asian/Americans whose legibility as assimilated model Americans (despite or perhaps
because of their status as minorities) coincided with the rise of information capitalism and the digital present.
44
Lowe, 18.
19
Histories of Information as Histories of Race
The humanization of the Asiatic thus presents a genealogy of liberalism’s persistent
wish—that one can transcend race’s material histories through a propensity for hard work. By
humanization, I do not refer to a structural position that has been historically achieved but as an
ideological, discursive, and material blueprint presenting an aspirational horizon aligned with the
fundamental tenets of liberal capitalism. While techno-Orientalism has often linked the Asiatic
and the technological through the modality of alienation, my project attends to its inverse
modality of “freedom” that circulates as myth in the “colorblind” fantasies of liberalism and
digital dreams of disembodiment.
45
The Racial Interface considers the Asiatic as a sign of the
Janus-faced quality present within histories of technological innovation, as both a threat to
(white) humanity’s physical relation to labor and as an opportunity to be liberated from the
material realms of embodied work altogether. The Asiatic, then, marks the shifting line between
a nightmare of alienation and a fantasy of liberation.
The history of modern liberalism presents a series of abstract forms and formations, most
commonly circulated through familiar terms such as “freedom, “citizenship,” “rights,” and
“progress.” In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe excavates a genealogy of the liberal
human subject as an interwoven project of indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery, and
indentured servitude. By reading these discrete genealogies of imperialism and colonialism
together, Lowe not only highlights the material histories of violence that subtend the possibility
of an individuated, feeling “human,” but she also demonstrates how liberalism functions as an
economy of form, in which abstract figurations emerge as an idealized aspiration of personhood.
In other words, Lowe suggests that liberalism operates as an “economy of affirmation and

45
Homay King would describe these aspirations for disembodiment as “dreams of digitality.” Homay King, Virtual
Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
20
forgetting that structures and formalizes the archives of liberalism, and liberal ways of
understanding."
46
One of her most demonstrative examples of this structuring logic is the
colonial iteration of the “model minority,” which takes the form of the Chinese “coolie” laborer
that predates 1960s model minority discourse. Lowe describes how coolie labor provided the
fantasy of “free” waged labor while rendering indentured labor another repressed form of "slave-
like" labor in the historical stage of racial capitalism, thus functioning as an intermediary
between slave labor and exploited but “free” labor.
47
Thus, while the modern conception of the
liberal human subject is dependent on the obscured and imbricated histories of slavery,
indentured labor, and settler colonialism, it is specifically the Chinese “coolie” figure that
mediates a “fantasy of ‘free’ yet racialized and coerced labor, at a time when the possession of
body, work, life, and death was foreclosed to the enslaved and the indentured alike.”
48
Although
Chinese coolie labor was an experimental site of bodily, moral, and labor regulation, its
ideological function within a modern transnational regime of liberalism served as a point of
transition for the emergence of new, adaptive forms of biopolitical governance. Put simply, the
Chinese coolie figure, as a racial form, functioned as a perverse handmaiden to the liberal human
subject.
In Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, Kalindi
Vora and Neda Atanasoski trace theories of modern liberalism to their contemporary
manifestation in the information age. Robots, automation, and other forms of mechanized labor
persist in the shadow of racialized labor in the colonial capitalist history, functioning as non-
human proxies for a longstanding system of racial and gendered exploitation,
disenfranchisement, and violence. “Technoliberalism,” termed by Vora and Atanasoski,

46
Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 3.
47
Ibid, 24.
48
Ibid.
21
describes “the political alibi of present-day racial capitalism that posits humanity as an
aspirational figuration in a relation to technological transformation, obscuring the uneven racial
and gendered relations of labor, power, and social relations that underlie the contemporary
conditions of capitalist production.”
49
Building from Hortense Spiller’s idea of racial
“grammar,”
50
Vora and Atanasoski identify the “surrogate effect” as the key mechanism of
technoliberal desires, in which the dominant engineering imaginaries to “solve” humanity’s
problems via technology define a liberal human subject against the backdrop of histories of
enslavement, indentureship, colonialism, and extraction.
51
Other scholars such as Jennifer Rhee
also employ similar terms to critically challenge the purported “human” as the bastion of
technological innovation. Rhee, for instance, uses the term “robotic imaginary” to critically
diagnose “both an abiding vision of the human that is held up to be, however provisionally or
circumscribed, universal, and the extensive erasures of human experiences that enable this
inscription of the human.”
52

While Vora, Atanasoski, and Rhee all demonstrate a productive critique of the
aspirational “human” as the horizon of technological innovation, their attention to the
genealogies of enslaved and indentured labor often implies a co-eval relation between these
disparate histories of dehumanization. For example, Vora and Atanasoski’s use of the term
“surrogate” has the potential effect of abstracting legacies of dehumanization and ignoring how
particular racial groups were pitted in contrast and in relation to each other in service of
consolidating the liberal human subject. The Racial Interface, thus, focuses on the Asiatic figure

49
Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 4.
50
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 68.
51
Vora and Atanasoski, 22.
52
Jennifer Rhee, The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 6.
22
to emphasize how proximity to, rather than distance from, the aspirational liberal human subject
facilitates the universalist violence of abstraction that traffic under the sign of modern racial and
technological “progress.” With its capacity to take on “model” forms, such as the “model
minority” form, the Asiatic demonstrates how the “model” might be the observe of the
“surrogate” within the racial grammar of technoliberalism. The “model” and the “surrogate” are
two schemas that link race and technology on the level of form by proxy, both consolidating and
naturalizing aspirations for a liberal humanist future. Put differently, the “model” and the
surrogate” inscribe what Seb Franklin calls “informatics of value” through the logic of race.
53

Although my project does not substantively engage histories prior to the 20
th
century in
which ideas of the modern liberal subject originated, their legacies underwrite the digital present.
Scholarship in media studies have traced modern technological artifacts (such as the computer)
and processes (such as surveillance) to pre-digital forms. For instance, much work has been done
on Charles Babbage’s and Ada Lovelace’s Analytical Engine
54
, which conceptualized many
techniques of mechanical computing such as the use of punched cards and memory storage.
55

Other model research include the work of Simone Brown and Christian Paretti
56
, who trace a
genealogy of modern surveillance practices to the infrastructures and ideologies of chattel
slavery. For the purposes of my project, I am interested in naming a historically specific moment
to understand how broader structural shifts in knowing and seeing shaped technological and
racial meaning in corresponding and powerful ways. If race is broadly understood to be an

53
Seb Franklin, The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota, 2021).
54
For more information on the Difference Engine, see Doron Swade, The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and
the Quest to Build the First Computer (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2002).
55
For more on Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and the Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, see James
Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (New York, NY: Vintage, 2012).
56
Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015);
Christian Parenti, The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror (New York, NY:
Basic Books, 2004).
23
episteme of differentially ordering the social, then key developments within scientific and
technological imaginaries are bound up with new techniques of race in the rise of U.S. liberal
capitalism.
Although there is much to be gleaned from looking backward in time, I look laterally to
other attendant racial histories that coincide with the broader shifts in the technological and
engineering imaginaries that led to what we know as the “information age.” Much of this work
builds centrally from feminist media studies scholars, who theorize race as an organizing
structure of differentiation rather than referencing a biologically and/or socially constructed
subject.
57
Together, these works strive to find frameworks and methods that can attend to how
race functions without a visible subject, specifically within the nonperceptual and distributed
infrastructures of modern computational and digital technologies that, on the surface, tend to not
be “about” race at all. To ask what is racial about information technologies requires new
approaches to what counts as historical evidence. Tara McPherson’s work on the history of the
UNIX operating system serves as an important guide for how to think through racial and
technological formations as “mutually reinforcing.”
58
Through analyzing early programming
manuals for UNIX, she demonstrates how culture and computation overlap in their operating
logics and forms, in ways that reflect broader epistemological shifts in the US and the globe in
the 1960s.
59
When information technologies tend to cordon off what is “racial” about its
formation, critically studying their media-specific histories requires alternative approaches to
evidence. I suggest that McPherson models a productive approach of excavating historical

57
In her conception of “race and/as technology,” Wendy Chun describes race itself as a type of meta-category of
analysis that configures debates between the biological and the cultural. Moreover, her formulation “frame[s] the
discussion around ethics rather than ontology, on modes of recognition and relation, rather than being.” Shifting the
question from what race is to how race functions attends to the techniques of differentiated meaning-making that are
quite technological, in the Heideggerian sense of “enframing.” Chun, 39.
58
Tara McPherson, “U.S Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX,” in Race After
the Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 23.
59
Ibid.
24
evidence without guarantees
60
, a necessary mode when confronted with the neoliberalism’s
representation power of tethering knowledge to visibility. But new methods must be attempted,
as Carolyn De La Peña explains: “We have to be willing to talk about race…It is a risk, and it
can lead to overreaching in one's analysis, misreading the data, and simply getting things wrong.
It can also open up essential new terrain in the study of how racialized thinking has shaped
technological innovation.”
61
By juxtaposing histories of computation and culture as well as
technology and race, we can get a better glimpse at the key operating logics that bind these
knowledge structures and formations together.
Thus, the temporal frame of my project begins in 1942, when the theories of information
and cybernetics inaugurated a new way of perceiving the visible world. Born in the military-
research-industrial complex of World War II, scientific developments such as Norbert Weiner’s
statistical formulas for calculating prediction,
62
Claude Shannon’s mathematical theories of
information,
63
and John Von Neuman’s and Oskar Morgenstern’s initial conceptions of game
theory.
64
Yet, these varied theoretical endeavors in mathematics, science, and engineering
emerged out of wartime urgencies, national sentiments, and the “crisis” of race. At the center of
the race question were Japanese Americans, who were deemed enemies of the state after the
attack on Pearl Harbor. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 forcefully

60
Here, I reference Stuart Hall’s “Marxism without guarantees,” a provocation that pushes for robust ideological
critiques that cannot be reduced to economism. Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without
Guarantees,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New
York, NY: Routledge, 1996), 26-30.
61
Carolyn De La Peña, “The Histo ry of Technology, the Resistance of Archives, and the Whiteness of Race,”
Technology and Culture 51, no. 4 (2010): 926.
62
Foundational to the Weiner’s famous theories of cybernetics is his book titled Cybernetics: Or Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine, published in 1948. However, the seeds of his theories began in
1942, at the beginning of World War II, in a classified military document nicknamed “Yellow Peril.” The racial
context of this classified document is the topic of Chapter 1. Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics: Or Control and
Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948).
63
C.E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Information,” The Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379-423,
623-656.
64
John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1944).
25
relocated over 120,000 Japanese Americans into an isolated internment camps on Native
American reservations far away from the coastal region. As my first chapter addresses, within a
national sentiment of anxiety, fear, and racial hatred, the Japanese were demonized as a racial
group in part because they were deemed unpredictable
65
(inscrutable, irrational, and ultimately
untrustworthy).
66
The rational-based epistemes of prediction and calculation emerged out of this
atmosphere of “yellow peril.” Thus, the historical moment of 1942 exemplifies an intensified
binding of racial and technological histories, in which new information theories were
inextricably linked to one of the most concentrated racial experiments in American history.
Centrally, the foundational theories of the information age engaged concepts of
perception, isolation, and freedom, ideas that resonate deeply with the motivations behind
Japanese internment. In an updated version of information theory written by Claude Shannon and
Warren Weaver, “information” is defined in technical terms as transmission without meaning, or
otherwise form without content. Central to their definition is the idea of “freedom:”
To be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what
you do say, as to what you could say. That is, information is a measure of one’s freedom
of choice when one selects a message…The concept of information applies not to the
individual messages (as the concept of meaning would), but rather to the situation as a
whole, the unit information indicating that in this situation one has an amount of freedom
of choice, in selecting a message, which it is convenient to regard as a standard or unit
amount.
67

65
In my project, I use the term “unpredictability” instead of similar terms like “inscrutability” to describe Japanese
racialization during World War II yellow peril panic. Inscrutability invites the epistemic problem of interiority and
subjectivity. Unpredictability attends to the element of temporality, if we consider Norbert Weiner’s simplified
definition of his science of prediction, or cybernetics: “the property of being able to adjust future conduct by past
performance.” Norbert Weiner, Human Uses of Human Beings (London UK: Free Association Books), 33.
66
For a longer examination of how ideas of Asian inscrutability shaped the Cold War era after 1945, see Sunny
Xiang, Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2020).
67
Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1949), 8-9. Underlines are mine for emphasis. This book shares almost the same title as Shannon’s
article published a year earlier. The small shift in the title from “A Mathematical Theory” to “The Mathematical
Theory” reflects the significant noticing of the generality of the work for a multitude of fields.
26
Ted Byfield interprets the significance of this definition of freedom within information theory as
counterintuitive to a layperson’s understanding. He writes, “In everyday usage, ‘freedom’ and
‘choice’ are usually seen as desirable—the more, the better. However, in trying to decipher a
message they have a different consequence: The more freedom of choice one has, the more ways
one can render the message, and the less sure one can be that a particular reproduction is
accurate. Put simply, the more freedom one has, the less one knows.”
68
Although this note is
about the scientific paradigm of information theory, it shares a common logic with Japanese
internment, which sought to limit and contain a group’s “freedom” in order to ascertain racial
knowledge and meaning (i.e. whether Japanese Americans were “truly” to be trusted).
How can we perceive our histories of the digital differently when we consider how the
foundations of information theory emerged from the historical periodization of racial liberalism,
in which ideas of “freedom” were negotiated not only in information theories but in racial
laboratories such as Japanese internment? While Japanese internment is often framed as an
intensified instance of racist dehumanization, my project attends to Japanese incarceration as a
violent project of humanization, a cruel faith that isolation could be an opportunity to calibrate
and model democratic assimilability into the American project of “freedom.”
69
Thus, information
theories and racial crisis emerged out of the same historical moment. How can we illuminate

68
Ted Byfield, “Information,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2008), 128.
69
In a similar argumentative vein, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson productively uses a resonant phrase “technologies of
humanization” to describe a peculiar link between blackness and animality. Intervening in black studies approaches
the theorizing the non-human (and non-human frameworks for theorizing blackness), Jackson critically argues that
processes of animalization are “not incompatible with humanization: what is commonly deemed dehumanization is,
in the main, more accurately interpreted as the violence of humanization or the burden of inclusion into a racially
hierarchized universal humanity.” What is particularly insightful about Jackson’s analysis is that she works outside
of the binary of humanization/dehumanization, a limited formulation that often reserves violence for the banner of
“dehumanization” while ignoring how violence may travel under the alluring light of other aspirational ontologies.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York, NY: New York
University Press, 2020), 18.

27
their interpenetration? How might we build a method for examining the co-constitution of racial
and technological formation across disparate histories of the digital present?

Race, Art, and Technology
In this project, I turn to Asian/American literature and art that embrace
nonrepresentational and non-figural techniques of aesthetic expression. By refusing a visible
ethnic figure or subject, these works attend to the perceptual modes in which “race” coheres
meaning and power. Thus, in an era in which race functions as an organizing and differentiating
technology rather than an ontological truth, the cultural works at the center of this project call
attention to race’s technical function. The writers and artists assembled here include Isamu
Noguchi, Nam June Paik, Zhi Lin, Janice Lobo Sapigao, Ahree Lee, Franny Choi, and Ryan
Kuo. Rather than presenting techno-Orientalist depictions of racial subjects dehumanized as
technology, these writers and artists help us attune to race as technology (recalling Wendy Hui
Kyong Chun’s formulation), operating on the procedural level whether it be a racial logic, form,
or process. While certain figures in this project are more intuitively aligned with the thematic of
technology, such as Nam June Paik, others might be less obviously correlated with a history of
the digital, such as Isamu Noguchi.
These nonrepresentational and experimental cultural productions illustrate how art, race,
and technology find common conceptual ground as techne. In her exploration of the
technological art projects and collaborations of the 1960s, Pamela M. Lee frames art and
technology as co-extensive forms by turning to an older Aristotelian conception of technology as
“applied cognition.”
70
Referring to the formulation of techne as “the skill, art or craft and general

70
Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), xx.
28
know-how, the possession of which enables a person to produce a certain product,”
71
a de-
objectified understanding of technology posits art to function as a kind of technology. In “The
Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger also understands technology as techne,
72

not simply as a tool or product but as a mode of revealing, or “enframing.”
73
Technology, in its
epistemological mode, is most harmful when translating the world through a cognitive and
perceptual lens of extraction. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s conception of race as technology
extends this focus on techne to the domain of racial histories and theories, aligning critical race
theory, continent philosophy, and media and visual cultures.
Situated within this theoretical body of work, I assemble Asian/American literature and
art that do not conceptually anchor any self-evident form of “race” (as legible identity) or
“technology” (as realized object). Rather, these works attune to the epistemological mode of
racial and technological sense-making in ways that allow me to track their co-production and co-
evolution. Thus, within the canon of Asian/American criticism, I align this project with the work
of scholars who consider the avant-garde, nonrepresentational, abstract, and experimental modes
of racial expression and critique. Sometimes dismissed by Asian/American critics for being
elitist, apolitical, assimilationist, or purely “formal” or “aesthetic,” these works often take up the
margins of Asian/American culture (while some of these works, such as Noguchi and Paik, tend
to be canonized within art history maybe because of their nonracial aesthetic innovations). I am

71
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Library of Liberal
Arts, 1983), 315.
72
R. John Williams has written a book on what he calls “Asia-as-techne,” which refers to a “compelling fantasy that
would posit Eastern aesthetics as both the antidote to and the perfection of machine culture.” While his study shares
many thematic overlaps with mine, Williams is primarily concerned with an American Orientalist fascination with
“Asia” as an overdetermined signifier of spiritualist aesthetics and Eastern mysticism. This type of work, while
fascinating, is less useful when tracing the perception of Asian/Americans racialized through a particular nexus of
US nation, culture, and capital in the rise of the digital age. R. John Williams, The Buddha in the Machine: Art,
Technology, and the Meeting of East and West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 1.
73
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays, translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 14.
29
not interested in uncovering a “secret” political aesthetic assumed to be buried in these artworks’
unconscious.
74
I am invested in thinking through how these literary and art objects attune to an
emerging information age, in which the conditions of perception, visibility, and knowledge
impacted understandings of race and racial meaning.
The nonrepresentational literature and art I consider call “attention to the operations
through which race is visualized and coded,”
75
in ways that allow us to track how discursive
forms shuttle across the racial and the technological in the digital era. Following Kandice Chuh’s
conception of Asian/Americanist critique as a “subjectless” discourse,
76
many scholars of
Asian/American literature have turned to art-theoretical frameworks to consider the critical
import of the category of “identity” despite its incoherence.
77
For example, Joseph Jongjyun Jeon
analyzes Asian/American avant-garde poetry as a production of strategic art objecthood and
objectification;
78
Christopher Lee interprets Asian/American literary realisms as an art object,
counterintuitively untethered to any a priori reality but rather conceptualize identity as a
mediation between the subject and the social;
79
Sue-Im Lee uses the phrase “postvisible Asian
American artworld definition” to describe how “anything can be Asian American literature if its
embodied meaning can be situated in, and engaged with, the concerns, values, and practices of
the Asian American artworld.”
80
While these different approaches have varying degrees of

74
In other words, the works I consider do not fall under the framework of what Christopher Lee calls the “idealized
critical subject.” Christopher Lee, The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature
(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 9.
75
Joseph Jonghyun Jeon, Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry (Iowa
City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2012), xxv.
76
Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),
9.
77
This move toward the “subjectless” finds resonance in media studies as well, such as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s
“race and/as technology,” media archeology’s decentering of the technological artifact and privileging of
“conditions of existence,” and so forth.
78
Jeon.
79
Christopher Lee.
80
Sue-Im Lee, “Can You Tell By Looking? A Postvisible Definition of Asian American Literature,” American
Literature 92, no. 3 (2020): 547.
30
critical value for my project, what I find interesting is how an embrace of art-theoretical methods
for both literary and art analysis attends to the “Asian/Americanness” of an cultural object as a
kind of techne, an aesthetic that critically reflects on the ways of knowing and perceiving “race”
in the first instance.
It is this unmooring from racial content, identity, or representation that I find productive
for tracking racial and technological formations in the era of the digital. Michelle Huang has
productively noted that when explicit racial markers are removed, racial logics are revealed.
81

Through nonrepresentational Asian/American literature and art (ranging from modernist
aspirations of universalism in Isamu Noguchi’s sculptural designs to “postracial” poetry in
Franny Choi’s Soft Science), it is my hope that each chapter will use the indeterminacy of the
Asiatic racial form for building a lexicon and vocabulary for articulating a racial history of the
digital.

Chapter Overview
In The Racial Interface, I have organized my chapters with dual attention to historical
chronology and historical congruity. They are meant to gesture toward the co-evolution between
racial and technological forms at key historical junctures as well as toward the long protraction
of myths shaping the digital present. Each chapter interprets key events in Asian American
history by situating them within a technical history of the digital era.
The dissertation begins with the wartime origins of the early digital era. Chapter one
places the wartime sentiment of Japanese “unpredictability” alongside the emergence of
“prediction science” in 1942, two corresponding experiments in perception. The first section

81
I am drawing from Michelle Huang’s presentation “Racial Disintegration” at the Asian America Otherwise
Conference held at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on May 6-7, 2022.
31
historicizes Norbert Weiner’s wartime document “Yellow Peril,” named for its yellow bindings
and perilous statistics and served as the origins for his eventual theory of cybernetics. The second
section turns to the archive of Japanese American modernist sculptor Isamu Noguchi. In 1942,
Noguchi voluntarily interned himself at Poston War Relocation Center and proposed a series of
blueprints that attempted to transform the camp into an organized, livable Japanese “garden.”
The design visions for the Poston garden demonstrates how understandings of race were recast as
questions of perception, in which race could be calibrated on the threshold of unpredictability
and predictability. Through examining Noguchi’s writings and blueprints, I argue that scientific
concepts of the information age helped shape understandings of race, citizenship, and democracy
during an era in which visible markers of difference gave way to the logics of prediction.
Chapter two compares two so-called “success stories”: Asian/Americans and computers.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, as computers transformed from threatening, wartime machines to
user-friendly personal devices, so too did Asian/Americans shift from “yellow peril” to “model
minority” citizens. Engaging histories of Asian/America, media art, and information
technologies, this chapter explores the interpenetration of racial and computational forms, logics,
and operations within the structures of US liberal capitalism. It examines the discourse
surrounding computer scientist Jeffrey Chuan Chu, Japanese American model minorities, and
Douglas Engelbart’s Graphic User Interface (GUI) alongside a central case study of Nam June
Paik’s drawing Untitled (TV Face) (1980) and digital artwork Confused Rain (1967). By tracking
the emergence of two visual abstractions—the model minority and the computer interface—I
theorize “minority modeling,” a representational myth that promotes the dual operations of
individualist empowerment and structural obfuscation. While liberal histories of race and
computation prop up narratives of social progress and assimilation, Paik’s art offers an aesthetics
32
of indeterminacy that emphasizes the irresolvable contradictions linking Asian/American
racialization and computational technologies.
Chapter three examines how Asian/American literature and art remediate racial histories
of Silicon Valley. Analyzing the corporate archives of Fairchild Semiconductor alongside
cultural works, I show how mythologies of the railroad, a technology of industrial capitalism,
have shaped dominant historiographies of early Silicon Valley in the age of information
capitalism. While high-tech imaginaries promote conjoining narratives of racial and
technological progress, work by Asian/American artists and writers reveal Silicon Valley to be a
racial and settler colonial formation. I engage Chinese/American media artist Zhi Lin’s
Chinaman’s Chance on Promontory Summit: Golden Spike Celebration, 12:30 PM, 10
th
May
1869, Filipinx/American poet Janice Lobo Sapigao’s microchips for millions, and
Korean/American media artist Ahree Lee’s Pattern : Code. Through close-readings of these
texts, I theorize “Asian/American media archaeology,” an aesthetic strategy that challenges
dominant fantasies and perceptions of technological progress and reveals their deep, layered, and
imperceptible histories and structures.
Finally, chapter four examines the racial associations linking Asiatic inscrutability and
algorithmic imaginaries. While the framework of techno-Orientalism often privileges the
technologized Asian subject as the unit of analysis, this chapter attends to Asian/American
literature and art that engage technological forms, logics, and processes operating underneath the
“screen” of representation. Instead of considering the Asian cyborg as a sign of racial
dehumanization (i.e. the Asian subject is technologized as “less than human”), I take this
technologized racial figure to mark the anthropomorphizing of imperceptible technical
procedures, in which its “Asiatic” form functions as a racial personification of algorithms.
33
Thinking through poet Franny Choi’s Soft Science and media artist Ryan Kuo’s File: A Primer
alongside historical conjunctures of racial algorithmic thinking, this chapter examines how the
discourse of Asiatic inscrutability provides the epistemological grounds for a social “faith” in
calculation. It traces how liberal discourses of benevolence and “good intention” are co-
extensive with a technological desire for “better” algorithms.
Attending to histories of race alongside histories of the digital, the project takes seriously
the liberal myths that formulate social life under information capitalism. Asian/American
literature, art, and history provide a critical lens for understanding how these social fictions shape
sociotechnical imaginaries. Ultimately, The Racial Interface concludes that liberal capitalism’s
focus on individualism, efficiency, and representation became bound to the rise of digital power.

34
CHAPTER 1: PREDICTION

Isamu Noguchi’s Gardens and
“Yellow Peril” in the Age of Information

On February 1, 1942 during World War II, the mathematician Norbert Weiner drafted a
classified yellow book that originated his theories of cybernetics. Cybernetics was the science of
prediction shaping foundational concepts of the information and digital age. Since Weiner’s
manuscript was bound in yellow and contained perilously difficult statistical formulas, this
document circulated among mathematicians and engineers under the moniker “Yellow Peril.”
The racial connotations of Weiner’s “Yellow Peril” are astonishing, considering it was published
months after the Pearl Harbor attack and the anti-Japanese fear that followed.
82
Cultural anxieties
regarding the Japanese—imagined to be volatile and unpredictable—animated the importance of
the Weiner’s document, which was later declassified in 1949 under its technical title
Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series With Engineering
Applications. Although no evidence explicitly addresses the racial dimensions of this yellow
book of statistics, its social context suggests that the specter of Asian terror haunts the origins of
the information and digital age.
Norbert Weiner’s “Yellow Peril” tethers together histories of Asian/America and
histories of the digital. I illustrate how these two seemingly disparate histories correspond to
each other in powerful ways. In the first section, I situate the emergence of prediction science
alongside the growing sentiment of Japanese unpredictability in 1942. Both events are embedded
within the same historical moment when new experiments in perception were taking place. The
second section turns to the story of Japanese American modernist sculptor Isamu Noguchi (b.

82
The main implementation of Weiner’s statistics in 1942 was automating anti-aircraft technologies in the wake of
Japanese “kamikazes.”
35
1904), an artist who links these two histories of information and race. In 1942, Noguchi
voluntarily interned himself at Poston War Relocation Center in order to “make the place more
human.”
83
In Poston, Noguchi proposed a series of blueprints that attempted to transform the
camp into an organized, livable Japanese “garden.” The design visions for the Poston garden
demonstrates how understandings of race were recast as questions of perception, in which race
could be calibrated on the threshold of unpredictability and predictability. Through examining
Noguchi’s writings and blueprints for Poston, I argue that scientific concepts of the information
age helped shape understandings of race, citizenship, and democracy during an era in which
visible markers of difference gave way to the logics of prediction. Noguchi’s garden hoped to
cast Japanese Americans as visible, order, productive, and democratic—altogether ameliorating a
racial association with the “unpredictable.”
This chapter considers Japanese internment
84
as a “laboratory” for information design,
where ideas of race could be isolated for experimental modeling. It juxtaposes two “Yellow
Peril” projects of 1942: Norbert Weiner’s yellow book of cybernetics alongside Japanese
incarceration. As histories of the information and digital age often examine seemingly race-
neutral institutions such as IBM, MIT, or Bell Laboratories, this chapter understands Poston as a
site for cybernetic thinking, a military-research laboratory for the social control of racial
assimilation. In doing so, I demonstrate how the historical formation of the information age
intersects with the historical formation of racial liberalism.

83
Isamu Noguchi, letter to Mr. Yasuo Akibo, Feb. 23, 1979, The Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY.
84
Although scholars of Japanese American history debate the use of “internment” versus “incarceration, I will
primarily mobilize the term “internment.” I do so to emphasize its etymology of “containment” and place it
alongside technical logics of “isolation” and “control” that undergird the ethos of a laboratory.
36
Yellow Peril
In the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a crisis in perception activated
social panic in the United States. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed
Executive Order 9066 ordering the mass incarceration of Japanese and Japanese American
civilians. Over 120,000 civilians from the West Coast were relocated and imprisoned in one of
ten different American internment camps due to anti-Asian fear: Topaz (Utah), Poston (Arizona),
Gila River (Arizona), Granada / Amache (Colorado), Heart Mountain (Wyoming), Jerome
(Arkansas), Manzanar (California), Minidoka (Idaho), Rohwer (Arkansas), and Tule Lake
(California). As a direct response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, Japanese
internment is one of the largest coordinated forced relocation and imprisonment projects in US
history. Internment was the violent solution to the threat of the unpredictable—coded as
Japanese—lingering at the threshold of a visible US racial order.
The element of surprise characterized the fear of the Japanese. Lieutenant General John
L. DeWitt, the commander of the Western Defense Command and lead advocate for the
immediate mass incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans, repeatedly invoked the
description of an invisible and inscrutable menace waiting to strike. He wrote in “Final Report:
Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast 1942:”
The Pacific Coast had become exposed to attack by enemy successes in the Pacific. The
situation in the Pacific theatre had gravely deteriorated. There were hundreds of reports
nightly of signal lights visible from the coast, and of intercepts of unidentified radio
transmissions. Signaling was often observed at premises, which could not be entered
without a warrant because of mixed occupancy. The problem required immediate
solution. It called for the application of measures not then in being…

…Such a distribution of the Japanese population appeared to manifest something more
than coincidence. In any case, it was certainly evident that the Japanese population of the
Pacific Coast was, as a whole, ideally situated with reference to points of strategic
37
importance, to carry into execution a tremendous program of sabotage on a mass scale
should any considerable number of them have been inclined to do so.
85

This report narrated the general atmosphere of wartime paranoia and hysteria that resulted from
the unpredicted attack on Pearl Harbor. The problem, for DeWitt, was how to contain the latent
threat of Japanese attack, one that was potentially worse than the Pearl Harbor strike on
December 7, 1941. In this heightened state of fear, the covert forms of communication—the
“signal lights visible from the coast” and “unidentified radio transmissions”
86
—became signs of
“Japaneseness.” DeWitt’s mobilized these indiscernible activities as evidence of a dangerous
Japanese presence forming both within and outside of US borders. They were nowhere and
everywhere, an ominous threat at the edge of the atmosphere; they were palpable only through
the invisible and pervasive frequencies of electronic technologies themselves.
87
Inscrutability
and unpredictability, then, became a form of Japanese racialization.
Japanese internment, I suggest, was a racial form of information design that responded to
the need to manage a seemingly invisible and unpredictable threat. It was an American
experiment that combined emergent sciences of systems and prediction with the social need to
govern a racial “enemy” of the State. The executive decision to imprison Americans of Japanese
ancestry in ten isolated camps across the West Coast was an approach to national security
through predictive measures of prevention. In other words, internment illustrated how the large
coordination of data capture could go hand in hand with the physical capture of a racial minority.

85
John L. DeWitt, “Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast 1942,”
http://www.sfmuseum.org/war/dewitt1.html.
86
Ibid.
87
The history of electronic media has often functioned as an archive of cultural sentiments. Due to its invisible
“inner” workings, electronic technologies (i.e. the telegraph, early radio, networked radio, and television) often
reflect the social desires and fears of its times. For instance, Jeffrey Sconce elucidates how the introduction of
wireless radio inaugurated concerns of a porous and boundless “ethereal ocean.” This sea of radio waves does not
simply index ideas regarding electronic presence and connectivity but also are shaped by social concerns regarding
the disintegration and dissolution of borders and hierarchies of race and class. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media:
Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
38
Questions surrounding the “interiority” of the Japanese—what Earl Warren, the Attorney
General of California at the time, would call the problem of “hearts and minds”
88
—emerged
during a larger midcentury shifts in knowing and representing external reality. Orit Halpern
argues that the introduction of cybernetics in 1942 transformed the epistemic field of the visual.
Inaugurating a scientific language of prediction, cybernetics introduced two interrelated ideas for
understanding the world. First, the world was thought to consist of “black-boxed entities whose
behavior or signals were intelligible to each other, but whose internal function or structure was
opaque, and not of interest.”
89
The internal “essence” or “meaning” hidden within an entity—
human or non-human—became less important in comparison to the process and patterns of an
entity’s external actions. A cybernetic world envisioned reality as chaos. This volatility activated
the episteme of statistical “feedback,” broadly understood to be “the property of being able to
adjust future conduct by past performance.”
90
The external world of entities became visible
through the ability to approximate the likelihood of future conduct based on a ground-level
understanding of pure randomness. Isolation of “signals” from a sea of noise, the foundational
premise of “communication,”
91
emerged as the primary structure for knowing and visualizing the
world. Although there are numerous limitations to the closed-system
92
theories of cybernetics,
the science of prediction introduced a new vision of the world—a reality of dynamism whose
most intimate secret was exposed through calculation and prediction. A world of information—

88
Earl Warren, “Testimony of Hon. Earl Warren,” Hearings before the Select Committee Investigating National
Defense Migration, House of Representatives, Seventy-Seventh Congress (Washington, DC: US Government
Printing Office, 1942), 11011, 11015, https://archive.org/details/nationaldefensem29unit.
89
Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2014), 44.
90
Norbert Weiner, Human Uses of Human Beings (London UK: Free Association Books), 33.
91
Halpern, 61.
92
In many ways, the feedback systems of “cybernetics” helped facilitated the “closed-world” metaphors regarding
computers and the Cold War. Paul Edwards provides a compelling account of the Cold War context in which the
geopolitical world itself was imagined as a large “computer.” Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and
the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
39
made visible by concepts of data, feedback, statistics, calculation, patterns, process, systems, and
so forth—emerged as one dominant episteme of the natural and human world.
In this cybernetic world devoid of interior or essential meaning, the information age
introduced a new science of desire. Prior to cybernetics, the modern conception of desire
stemmed from psychoanalysis and the theories of Sigmund Freud. In the 1890s, through the
clinical attempt to diagnose neurotic or hysterical patients, Freud proposed a set of theories
investigating the structure of the human mind. Psychoanalysis represented what Akira Mizuta
Lippit calls a “phenomenology of the inside,”
93
exposing the contours of the inner psyche. With
it, the burgeoning field of study gave language for understanding the attributes and drives that
motivated conscious and unconscious human behavior. The calculus of desire structured this
interior world of the mind. Ideas regarding drives, object relations, fetishes, and others mapped
out how concepts of the ego, self, and subjectivity came into light. Psychoanalysis gave form to
the psyche and its secrets, and, in this aim, named desire as the governing force of the subject.
If desire could illuminate the cartography of the mind in the Freudian era, then the
cybernetic epoch signaled the externalization of desire.
94
Cybernetics bracketed questions of
interiority and subjectivity in order to develop a language for processing behavior and actions in
an observable world. Understanding the “desire” of an entity was not only possible through
interpretation, typified by theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis; rather, desire could be
processed through inputting behavioral data into a statistical formula. In other words, cybernetics
could expose desire not as an “inner” secret” but as a visible, calculable one, unmooring desire

93
Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 5.
94
Freudian and cybernetic approaches represent two different approaches for understanding psychic and social life
and correspond to each other. For instance, notions of cybernetic “feedback loops” describe a machinic process for
constitute a stable entity, a procedure that resembles psychoanalytic theories of subject formation. Eli Zaretsky
details the relations between the psychoanalytic and cybernetic epochs in a helpful synthesis. Eli Zaretsky, “From
Psychoanalysis to Cybernetics: The Case of Her,” American Imago 72, no. 2 (2015): 197-210.
40
from the depths of the psyche and the domain of psychoanalysis. Cybernetics processed past data
and action in order to understand future conduct—an “objectified” desire—through new
techniques of prediction.
Norbert Weiner’s “Yellow Peril” exemplified this shift from psychoanalytic
interpretation to cybernetic prediction. Emerging from the US military-science complex of
World War II research and the famous MIT Radiation Lab, Weiner’s classified document
introduced new techniques for predicting aircraft patterns and preventing military attacks from
the sky. These statistical experiments represent what Peter Galison defines as a new “ontology of
the enemy.”
95
The desire of an enemy—the wants and motivations of its inscrutable mind—was
recast as questions of response time, data, and patterns all for the sake of prediction. Unleashed
from the depth of an essential interior mind, desire as prediction could be visualized, mapped
out, and ultimately calculated. Through a cybernetic episteme, the “other” could be conceived as
a pure mechanical being, devoid of interiority.
The racial connotations of Weiner’s “Yellow Peril” are astonishing, considering it was
published months after the Pearl Harbor attack and the anti-Japanese fear that followed. In my
research, however, there has yet to emerge an explicit connection to the atmosphere of racial
terror in which Weiner’s document emerged. Simply, as the story goes, “yellow peril” referred to
its yellow-bounded cover and its perilous statistical rigor. To be clear, I am not interested in
locating this link, nor do I believe that one necessarily exists.
96
Rather, Weiner’s “yellow peril”
demonstrated the ideological power of the information age: that its history of mathematical,
scientific, and technological achievements can be cleaved from a sustained inquiry of race,

95
Peter Galison, “Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1
(1994): 231.
96
In fact, Norbert Weiner was a friend of “East,” often collaborating and making trips with colleagues in China and
Japan. Weiner also was a member of the China Aid Society, which aimed to assist displaced Chinese researchers
due to geopolitical conflicts.
41
difference, and identity. How is race operating in these technical registers that seem to have
nothing to do with race? What racial ideologies might be embedded within the very logics of
knowledge production that constitute the information sciences?
Although the statistical models used in Weiner’s “Yellow Peril” were developed during
his time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the racial tint of this difficult
theorem illustrates how, in the words of Brian Winston, the “social sphere invades the
laboratory.”
97
Feminist media theorists have argued for the permeability between the technology
lab and the social world outside. Through investigating early UNIX software of the 1960s, Tara
McPherson has argued for the imbrications of code and culture, software and the social.
98
In a
similar vein, Anna Balsamo has contended that technological achievements are always
technocultural innovations, in which “culture [is] a precondition and horizon of creative effort.
99

These insights illustrate how the processes and practices of scientific and technological research
do not remain confined within the walls of the laboratory. What would happen if we took
Weiner’s “Yellow Peril” not simply as a foundational theory of information science but as a
prototype for a theory of race and racialization? Further, within histories of the early digital age,
could this “yellow” document expand our understanding of the research laboratory—beyond the
usual institutional narrative of MIT, IBM, Bell Laboratories, and others—to include unexpected
experiments in US culture and society in more expansive ways?
Weiner’s “Yellow Peril” signifies the emergence of prediction science during the
historical context of Japanese unpredictability.
100
These technical formulas casted the Asian

97
Brian Winston, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinema and Television (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 1995),
55.
98
Tara McPherson, Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference and Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2018).
99
Anne Balsamo, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2011), 3.
100
For a comprehensive examination of Weiner as a historical figure, see Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark
42
other not simply as a racial “other”—a knowable or unknowable entity—but as a racial episteme
that uniquely exemplified the process of prediction. Within the calculus of information sciences,
Japaneseness occupied the threshold of unpredictability and predictability.
Alongside the research powerhouses of the information age, Japanese internment
functioned as a laboratory in which the logics of prediction shaped a larger US experiment on
race and identity. Internment became a way to isolate, and therefore test, the desire of an entire
racial group and its potential for democratic assimilability. Tara Fickle has suggested that it was
precisely the unascertainable desire of the Japanese—the “galling problem of their ‘hearts and
minds’”—that fueled legislation surrounding Japanese internment.
101
In testifying before a
House Committee in 1942, Earl Warren identified the Japanese as marking a new limit of enemy
knowledge: "When we are dealing with the Caucasian race, we have methods that will test the
loyalty of them, and we believe that we can, in dealing with the Germans and Italians, arrive at
some fairly sound conclusions…But when we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely
different field and we cannot form any opinion that we believe to be sound.”
102
This “entirely
different field” marked a racial imaginary that produced new methods of calculating desire of a
population through mass information. In this sense, desire in mass demanded new techniques of
information gathering and management.
What, then, was new about race and racism during the emergence of prediction science,
or cybernetics? In attuning to the social dimensions of race that contextualize mathematical,
scientific, and technological advancements, my contention is that rise of US racial liberalism in
the 1940s, posited race less as a static category but rather an experimental variable to be

Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener: The Father of Cybernetics (New York, NY: Basic
Books, 2005).
101
Tara Fickle, “No-No Boy’s Dilemma: Game Theory and Japanese American Internment Literature,” Modern
Fiction Studies 60, no. 4 (2014): 741.
102
Warren, “Testimony.”
43
modeled. Scholars like Jodi Melamed have examined the post-World War II era, in which the US
racial hegemony transitioned from an oppressive regime of white supremacy to the formalization
of anti-racism in state ideology. The structural transformations of racial liberalism not only
rearranged the social hegemony of the nation but also positioned the United States to ascend as a
democratic world leader in the global, postcolonial world order after the Second World War.
103

The isolation of Japanese Americans created the conditions for race to be understood as an
isolated variable in the larger experiment of American democracy. That is, the overarching
category of “Japaneseness”—stretching over gender, class, age, and other markers of
difference—utilized experimental logics for testing notions of citizenship and national
assimilability. The social experiment of Japanese internment limned a new model of democratic
citizenship through the early formation of a verified racial model: the model minority.
104

The model minority was also a minority model. It represented the idealized calibration of
desire toward the aims of the US nation state and empire. The Japanese, racialized as
unpredictable, carved out the epistemic ground in which citizenship subsequently could be
modeled through strategies of predictability. Out of the chaos of unpredictability was born the
possibility of order and control—a cybernetic ethos that resonated in sites beyond the
information technology laboratory. As a myth born out of US racial liberalism, the model
minority functioned as a visualizing mechanism for processing racial difference in relation to an

103
Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 3.
104
A topic common to scholars of Asian American studies and Ethnic studies, more broadly, is the myth of the
“model minority.” In the US context, the model minority refers to a racialized minority group that is thought to be
an idealized embodiment of American nationalist and capitalist values. The legacy of the US model minority
primarily applies to the racialization of Asian Americans. In her incisive historical account of the model minority
myth, Ellen Wu details how Chinese and Japanese in the United States transformed from excluded, unassimilable
foreigners—exemplified by the term “yellow peril”—to included, model Americans. Wu suggests that the
accumulated efforts of multiple institutions (including the social sciences, the public relations industry, liberal anti-
prejudice initiatives, immigration and legal reform, and others) produced the “idea” of a racial model minority. The
model minority functioned to mythologize the Untied States as an “anti-racist” democracy in order to facilitate the
ascendance of racial liberalism in the United States. Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the
Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
44
increasingly complex US social landscape slowly transitioning into a “formally anti-racist,
liberal-capitalist state.”
105
Great efforts to visualize the desires of the Japanese shaped strategies
of racial assimilation and integration for the nation-state.

Experiments in Desire
Isamu Noguchi was, in a sense, a “model” minority in the artworld. Primarily known as a
sculptor, designer, and landscape architect, Noguchi embraced a technique of abstraction that
corresponded to the styles of modernism. Throughout his lifetime, he cultivated impressive
achievements, especially for a minoritarian artist whose career began in the late 1920s. His
profile included commissioned works in Mexico, Japan, Israel, France, and the United States; he
received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kyoto Prize in Arts in 1986, the National
Medal of Arts in 1987, and others. In 1968, Noguchi received his first art retrospective in the
Whitney Museum of American Art, and in 1985, he opened The Noguchi Museum in Long
Island City, New York. Highly acclaimed, Noguchi has been canonized as an important artist of
the twentieth-century. His experimental approach to abstract forms embraced the sensorial
capacities of art. Achievements in abstraction—through careful attention to form, technique, and
style—allowed Noguchi to ascend beyond what was viewed as the “confines” of identity politics
and offer universalist, rather than relativist, artistic accounts of the human condition.
106

Noguchi’s use of creative abstraction, for him, was deeply political. As a Japanese
American of mixed European and Japanese heritage, abstraction allowed Noguchi’s artistic
works to be untethered from the realist cues of identity, culture, or nation. Noguchi was born to

105
Melamed, Represent, 1.
106
For a thorough exploration of universalist, and counter-universalist, aspirations in modernist Asian American art,
see Audrey Wu Clark’s work. Audrey Wu Clark, The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in
Modernist Literature and Art (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2015).
45
Japanese American Yone Noguchi and Anglo-American Leonie Gilmour in 1904 Los Angeles.
Amy Lyford contends that Noguchi’s abstraction primarily attuned to transformation—a process
of becoming “hybrid” that was susceptible to reconfiguration and reprogramming.
107
Identity,
and therefore identity politics, was for him a movement toward stasis rather than dynamism.
Artistic abstraction, on the other hand, indexed the possibility to re-imagine what was settled as
the empirical real. In many ways, as a cosmopolitan of mixed heritage who spent his life and
career in Japan, the US, Europe, and Mexico, Noguchi’s hopes for artistic abstraction illustrated
his faith in the ability to transcend the material world wrought with visual markers of social,
cultural, and national difference. This universalist aspiration, for Noguchi, did not strive to erase
any reference to racial or political art but rather sought to rework the language and conditions in
which concepts of the social came to be legible. As an artist who belonged in “no world,” a
marker of pride for Noguchi, he hoped that through his art, he could attune to the infrastructure
of a future world in which he belonged. For Noguchi, abstraction, unmoored from realist cues,
was at its core the art of change.
His primary media was the material arts of sculpture, landscape design, and architecture.
These physical forms, for Noguchi, were not representations of frozen experience but prismatic
expressions of time and change. He wrote:
…Sculpture is the one art, the one communication which cannot be conveyed as two-
dimensional information as with photography. There is a residual experience that cannot
be gotten in any other way than through physical experience, whether by sight, touch,
contact, distance and the ever changing relationship of volume and space which comes
from the continuous changes that time gives, the time of day; that movement gives, or
that thought begets.
108

107
Amy Lyford, “Noguchi, Sculptural Abstraction, and the Politics of Japanese American Internment,” The Art
Bulletin 85, no. 1 (2003): 143.
108
Isamu Noguchi, “1949” (essay), The Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY, 9.
46
Sculpture transcended representational capture. It was affective, perceptual, and experiential.
From the play of light and shadow, perspective and position, depth and flatness, physicality and
imagination, actual and virtual, sculpture attuned to a dynamism that, perhaps, could be sensed
through the molding of physical space. Noguchi’s philosophy of sculpture was not only artistic
but also perceptual, a way to reconfigure a given environment to transform the experience of a
physical space. Influenced by “Eastern” spiritual thought, Noguchi understood sculpture to be an
experiment in experience itself. The environmental materials of the world contain within itself
the potentiality of transcendence—a “freedom” enmeshed in the physical surround.
In the same year Weiner published his classified “Yellow Peril” document, Noguchi
voluntarily entered Poston War Relocation Center in an attempt to rectify the nation’s “yellow
peril” project of Japanese relocation and incarceration.
109
On April 27, 1942, John A. Bird, the
Assistant to the Director of the War Relocation Authority, wrote a letter granting Isamu Noguchi
permission to enter Poston War Relocation Camp:
110

The bearer of this letter, Isamu Noguchi, of New York City, has volunteered his services
to the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the United States Department of the Interior, to aid in
the development of a handicraft project among Japanese evacuees to be located on the
Colorado River Indian Reservation, Parker, Arizona. This relocation project is under the
supervision of that Bureau, which has accepted Mr. Noguchi’s offer of services.
111

Noguchi happened to be in San Francisco when Executive Order 9066 was initially announced,
where he saw firsthand the anxiety and panic of the Japanese civilians. As a New York resident,
Noguchi himself was exempt from the executive mandate, so he sought out government officials
to arrange a political proposition of solitary. Jolted into an urgent political consciousness, he
hoped to enter Poston to improve the livelihood of Japanese and Japanese American internees.

109
For a historical and cultural examination of anti-Asian “yellow peril” fear more broadly, see John Kuo Wei
Tchen.
and Dylan Yeats, Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (New York, NY: Verso Books, 2014).
110
John A. Bird, letter to “Whom It May Concern,” April 27, 1942, The Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY.
111
Ibid.
47
Poston was built on the land of the Colorado River Indian Tribes and thus officially under
the jurisdiction of the Tribal Council for the Colorado River Indian Reservation
112
. Although the
Tribal Council oversaw operations of their land and objected to Japanese Internment, the Bureau
of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the War Relocation Authority overruled their protests in the time of
war.
113
Lacking available land for housing the large number of internees, the WRA enlisted the
support of the BIA. Many of the proposed internment camps were on designated Native
American land, as they were distant enough from the declared relocation zones. However, the
secluded nature of these lands also has a longer history of indigenous dispossession, in which
indigenous nations were relocated onto US reservation territory. For Jodi Byrd, Japanese
internment on Native American land not only resonates with historical irony but also evinces the
operations of US empire through co-constitutive imperial and settler colonial practices.
114
That
is, the carving out of internment camps as a “state of exception” is a structural continuity of the
state of indigenous dispossession through US settler power.
115

In charge was John Collier, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, who was known for
leading the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, or the “Indian New Deal.” Collier’s policies for
Indian self-management and economic self-sufficiency demonstrate the persistence of US settler
colonial strategies that strip indigenous peoples of land and nation in the US liberal nation-state.
As a radical reworking of the 1887 Dawes Act, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 promised
to restore governance to indigenous tribes on native land. Byrd contends that this act of self-
governance—rather than sovereignty—continues the legacy of settler colonization in the US

112
The internment camp is named after “Charles Poston,” the first Superintendent of Indian Affairs.
113
Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press), 186.
114
Ibid, 194.
115
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press,
1998), 19.
48
liberal state.
116
Recognizing the rights of indigenous peoples does not extend to recognizing
sovereignty and nationhood and thus folds Native Americans into the larger vision of American
liberal democracy.
117

As a key official for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Collier’s plan for the Japanese captives
at Poston aligned with his larger strategy for managing indigenous land. From Collier’s view, the
trouble with the Colorado River Indian Reservation was the difficulty of building and sustaining
an infrastructure of life in the arid, desert land. The imprisoned Japanese internees, many of
whom were West Coast farmers, provided Collier a labor resource for transforming the dry land
into a productive agricultural site, one that could also be utilized by the Native Americans.
118

Byrd notes that quite early on in the formation of Poston, Collier had “already laid the
groundwork so that Hopi and Navajo families might join those relocation colonies after the war
ended to continue the work started by the Japanese American internees.”
119
The collaboration
between the WRA and the BIA demonstrated that US imperial and settler colonial ambitions
worked hand in hand. Japanese internment on Native land illustrates that US strategies of
displacement, dispossession, and confinement persist structurally in the longue durée of history.
For Collier, Poston represented an experiment of Japanese self-governance that could
simultaneously advance American Indian management techniques for the Bureau of Indian
Affairs. The Japanese internees provided an incarcerated labor force that could be utilized as a
resource to develop agriculture, housing, and other sustainable infrastructures for the desert
region. The land itself was thought to be difficult to farm, so the relocation of West Coast
Japanese and Japanese Americans who were primarily farmers became a key resource in the

116
Byrd, 194.
117
Ibid, 185.
118
Ibid, 187.
119
Byrd, 187.
49
ecology of settler power. Iyko Day contends that the Japanese internees were viewed as surplus
labor, different from the abstract alien labor that represented “yellow peril” discourse.
120
Asian
racial form expressed the abstract dimensions of capital in the North American settler colonial
context. Japanese internment, then, provided the opportunity to “rehabilitate” Japanese labor and
thus perform the assimilability into the American national body. Participation through labor,
then, sublated the Japanese into the apparatus of US settler power and ideology.
Thus, Poston exemplified the experiment of American democracy that began with Native
Americans and would then incorporate interned Japanese Americans. On June 27, 1942, Collier
espoused his vision for democracy at Poston:
We in this country join with the people of England, the people of Australia, with the Free
French, China, etc., in asserting that Democracy is the right way of life. We are waging a
war for Democracy. That war is going to be won. There is not the slightest doubt. But
when we look around within our own country, whether it be on a national or local scale,
we do not find that Democracy has been achieved. It has not been achieved in any of
these countries and certainly not in the United States. Our Democracy is an imperfect,
embryonic institution as yet.
121

Collier’s speech reflected a mixed state of ambivalence and hope. As a US government official
who saw as his life purpose the “betterment” of the American Indian, he could not
wholeheartedly and unwaveringly support the indefinite suffering of a people through
internment. Proclaiming an insidious optimism, Collier saw Poston as a unique opportunity for
the Japanese to craft a life and society in the face of hardship.
122
In other words, Collier viewed
suffering not as the end of the road but the grounds for interrogating questions of life, sociality,
democracy, and citizenship.

120
Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016), 147-149.
121
John Collier, “Speech to Poston Camp Evacuees,” June 27, 1942, Wade Head Collection MS FM MSS 118, box
1, folder 1, Arizona Historical Foundation. Also available at
https://azmemory.azlibrary.gov/digital/collection/ahfreloc/id/93/.
122
Ibid.
50
In this light, the cybernetic ethos—of order and meaning emerging out of “chaos”—
shaped the settler capitalist project of Japanese internment. The new sciences of prediction not
only played a role in the surveillance technologies of the racial confinement but also were the
grounds by which racial meaning emerged. In the “yellow peril” panic following the attack on
Pearl Harbor, ideas of citizen/enemy were drawn along the threshold of
predictability/unpredictable. Lines between the “good” and “bad” Japanese became
imperceptible based on visual markers alone, and thus required new methods for assessing the
interior desires of a racialized subject. Most famous were the government’s loyalty
questionnaires that asked interned Japanese civilians to declare allegiance to the United States
and renounce any possible loyalty to the Japanese empire or other foreign government.
123

Furthermore, the WRA collaborated with IBM in order to coordinate the movement and
internment of Japanese and Japanese American civilians. At the time, IBM was the primary
producer of punch-card equipment, an analog form of coding and computation that could
quantify and process information.
124
Banal in appearance but powerful in function, the IBM card
provided a method for identifying, tracking, managing, and ultimately executing one of the
nation’s largest data experiments. This WRA “codebook” was central to information processing
efforts within the ten internment camps. Japanese internment was an abundant site of information
technology, testing out new methods for securitizing the unpredictability of racial desire.
Within internment, “Japaneseness” was not only coded as a racial problem but a
perceptual crisis. As incarceration was not dependent on any evidenced crime or transgression,
the internal logic of internment relied on the premise of Japanese unpredictability. Visual

123
“Loyalty: The Questionnaire,” Smithsonian, https://amhistory.si.edu/perfectunion/non-
flash/loyalty_questionnaire.html.
124
“The IBM Punched Card,” IBM100: Icons of Progress,
https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/punchcard/.
51
markers did not reveal a “truth” fixed to any sense of racial identity; rather, Japaneseness
signaled the process by which notions of either “citizen” or “enemy” emerged into perception.
As a racial episteme marking the threshold between unpredictability and predictability,
Japaneseness represented the imperceptible world of information—the chaos of indeterminacy—
that demanded new techniques of predictive modeling. These ideas of race on a mass scale
corresponded to shifts in perceptual logics inaugurated by the prediction science of cybernetics.
Halpern argues that in the 1940s, a new era of “information abundance” produced a vision of
reality built on the recognition of patterns and processes rather than essences and forms.
125
In this
complex and dynamic world of data, Halpern suggests that techniques of information
visualization began to accrue perceptual power. If information abundance exceeded the
capacities of human cognition, then information visualization could bring complexity into visual
clarity, mass information into organized representation. Information visualization captured a
humanizing power and functioned as a method for “making the inhuman, that which is beyond or
outside sensory recognition, relatable to the human being.”
126
The information age introduced
ways to make sense of a dynamic world of data in ways that corresponded historically with the
mass incarceration of the Japanese. In the epistemic chaos of mass information, race could be
calibrated in scales beyond the individual.
With a sculptor’s vision, Noguchi understood the perceptual dimensions of space and
scale in ways that aligned with the ethos of the information age. For him, if visual markers were
not the epistemic key to “truths,” then concepts such as race could be viewed as dynamic and in
flux—an optimism embedded within the possibility of transformation. Moreover, if one could
not change one’s racial identity, in the same way that one could not change one’s historical

125
Halpern, 14.
126
Ibid., 22.
52
conditions, then one critical avenue of political intervention was to reconfigure the operative
logics by which social and racial identity came into perception. This task, for Noguchi, was the
creative expertise of a material artist, one who was skilled in the formal crafting of the perceptual
and the sensorial. Although Noguchi opposed Order 9066, he also saw internment as an
opportune experiment for calibrating perceptions of “Japaneseness” through technical means.
Thus, Noguchi embarked on his project to “make the place more human.” In a letter
dated February 23, 1979 to Mr. Yasuo Abiko, a Nisei journalist for Nichibei Times and the son of
Japanese internees, Noguchi reflected on his motivations:
My going was suggested by John Collier of the American Indian Service. Poston was to
be on Indian land, that of the Mojaves, and he had the idea that I might be of help in
making the place more human. Indeed I had the notion that I could be of some help in
making a more pleasant environment, and in a sense it was a step in my entry into the
field of the ‘imaginary landscape’ which the exhibit in San Francisco is to be about.
127

His philosophy of uplift resonated with Collier’s desire to improve the lives of Native Americans
through his life’s work with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In this brief account over thirty years
after the end of World War II, Noguchi situated his role as a humanitarian one. The idea of
“making the place more human” and “making a more pleasant environment” captured a liberal
optimism that persisted in mass incarceration. Within the dehumanizing state of internment—
physically, emotionally, and psychically damaging—Noguchi believed that one could exceed the
historical conditions of material reality even if one could not change them. An “imaginary
landscape,” which would be the theme of a later exhibition, could be induced through
intervention that provided relief not through an immaterial fantasy or escape but a transformation
of the material environment.
The key to intervention, for Noguchi, was arts and crafts. As an artist versed in
gardening, landscaping, sculpting, woodworking, and design, Noguchi hoped to introduce the

127
Noguchi, letter to Mr. Yasuo Akibo, 1979.
53
artistry and craftsmanship to the Japanese internees. In “I Become a Nisei,” his most known
essay addressing his time in Poston, Noguchi writes:
It is here as potential craftsmen and artisans that I see a solution of the Nisei problem.
The teaching of specific craft and industrial skills and their placement will not only serve
our war effort well but will hasten assimilation, and diminish these camps to the point
where only those who willingly wish remain. Tell us what jobs there are, give us the
training, permit us your confidence as Americans, and you will find an eager army for
democracy.
128

The skills gained from learning material crafts not only offered aesthetic or leisure outlets but,
for an artist like Noguchi, suggested a path toward assimilation and democracy. Internment, here,
is configured as a site of “potential.”
129
The idle time of internment presented the possibility of
an “army” of craftsmen and artisans who could serve the total US war efforts not through combat
but through labor. The acquisition of new skills through hand-based work captured the
opportunity to re-craft self and identity.
For Noguchi, the material arts captured a desire to transform historical conditions through
labor. He writes, “while outside the battle for freedom rages, it is planned to build here a
community, dedicated in democracy and to the proposition that the spirit of freedom may be
nurtured and grow even in confinement.”
130
Shying away from offering an unwavering critique
of Japanese imprisonment, Noguchi envisioned Poston in complementary terms as Collier. That
is, Poston served as a laboratory where experimentation in self-making and self-governance
could take place. The material arts were a conduit for crafting Japanese American identity due to
its affinity for concreteness, visibility, and orderliness. These qualities correspond to the need to
demonstrate the predictability of the Japanese American racialized as otherwise unpredictable.
Put differently, the concrete, the visible, and the orderly attempted to ameliorate an association

128
Isamu Noguchi, “I Become a Nisei,” The Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY.
129
Ibid.
130
Ibid.
54
with the abstract, the invisible, and the chaotic. In Noguchi’s eyes, handicrafts and physical labor
presented an opportunity to reconfigure the perception of the Japanese race.
Central to Noguchi’s design vision were a series of unrealized blueprints for Poston.
Labeled “Poston Park & Recreation,” these blueprints sketched the main sectors of the interior.
Faint lines delineated the land partitioned by square miles while a legend decoded the various
locations, buildings, and markers that constitute the camp.
131
On the bottom left is a key of
symbols that represented the main functional facilities of the camp, including smaller sites such
as dressing rooms, tennis courts, shower fountains, and various types of plants and trees. At the
top of this list were thick black lines signifying “canals” and “laterals.” Together, they made up
the central diagrammatic infrastructure of the blueprint. The irrigation system of the Poston,
housed on desert land, indexed the management of water as central to sustaining camp life. They
resembled the arteries of the camp interior, connecting the blocks together into a unified
community. On the bottom right of Noguchi’s blueprint, in contrast, was a legend of “locations”
that reflect important markers of cultural significance. These sites included a community center,
a gymnasium, a natatorium, hospitals, administration, Japanese gardens, miniature golf, and
others. Represented by a letter in the alphabet, these cultural sites scattered the various sections
of Poston. They marked not only spaces of cultural activity but also functioned as evidence of
humanity in the deprived conditions of Poston.

131
Isamu Noguchi, “Poston: Park & Recreation,” The Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY.
55

Noguchi submitted these architectural proposals for the Poston landscape but was met
with resistance from Poston officials and the War Relocation Authority. Although many various
factors contributed to Noguchi’s unexecuted vision, the most likely reason was due to the
logistical dilemmas of constructing Poston’s bare infrastructure.
132
The artist had arrived in
Poston I (the camp site that connected its neighbors Poston II and III) on May 12, 1942, a few
days after when the camp officially opened on May 8. The imprisoned Japanese and Japanese
Americans were put to work to build their living quarters. Arts, crafts, and cultural activity took
a backseat to the necessity of constructing housing on the desert land.

132
Lyford, “Noguchi,” 142.
Figure 1.1: Isamu Noguchi, “Poston: Parks & Recreation” (blueprint), The Noguchi Museum,
Long Island City, NY.

56
These blueprints bind settler governance, racial liberalism, and spatial design into the
interface of landscape architecture. More than a layout of technical instructions, “Poston: Parks
& Recreation” capture a biopolitical vision that linked subjectivity to externalized proxies and
actions, such as the capacity for productive labor, aesthetic orderliness, and material form.
Noguchi’s vision gives architectural form to Michel Foucault’s concept of “governmentality,” in
which new regimes of visuality and knowing are linked to the production of democracy’s
“subjects.” These blueprints reconfigure what Foucault might describe as “a knowledge of the
conscience and an ability to direct it”
133
through a materialized cybernetic arrangement of a
physical space. Noguchi’s plans aspire to reformulate racial desire through the infrastructural.
Brian Larkin argues that “are not just technical objects then but also operate on the level of
fantasy and desire. They encode the dreams of individuals and societies and are the vehicles
whereby those fantasies are transmitted and made emotionally real.”
134
Through the built
environment, these blueprints served administrative and governmental ends for transforming
wartime camp into its most “human” form, especially in contrast to Nazi camps as sites of
extermination.
135
Revealing the logic of liberal governmentality in plain sight, Noguchi’s
blueprints advance the belief that internment was not only compatible with democracy but
foundational to it. Suturing design and governance, these blueprints casted ideas of race and
democracy as arts of perception, in which unpredictability could be modeled and racial exclusion
could pave the path to democratic assimilability.
Although these plans were never implemented, Noguchi’s blueprints captured the racial,
social, and political aspirations within the confinement of internment. I read Noguchi’s

133
Michael Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 783.
134
Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 334.
135
Takashi Fujitani, Race For Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During World War II
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 137.
57
blueprints not simply as technical plans but as an aesthetic artifact that reveals a stubborn desire
for transformation even in the direst historical conditions—an optimism for the flourishing of
cultural life unfettered. For an artist who was originally trained as a sculptor, landscape
architecture represented the possibilities for dynamism and change on a larger scale. As a
“sculptor of spaces,”
136
Noguchi understood the molding of physical landscape as a form of
sculpture and thus was also ripe for intervention. His careful attention to maintaining the beauty
of the land through plants, gardens, and cultural activity reflected not simply technical expertise
but rather a method for crafting a renewed Japanese democratic identity and community.
The planting of trees, flowers, and shrubbery attempted to transform the interior of
Poston into, quite literally, a garden. They lined the main walkways while strategic clusters of
flowers and trees indicated ideal gathering spaces. From these blueprints, the vision of Poston
included an integrated system of greenery, gardens, irrigation, housing, and sites of cultural
activity. Together, they attempted to build a functioning and thriving community. Flowers and
gardens not only served a technical function but also a symbolic one. In Poston’s desert, where
plant life faced the harsh climate, cultivating an irrigable land allowed Japanese democratic life
and sociality to “bloom.” These blueprints proposed making Poston “livable” and, in doing so,
evinced a desire to craft identity through the cultivation of an otherwise barren land.
The imaginary of the desert as uninhabitable and lifeless perpetuates the subjugation or
erasure of indigenous life that has long existed in relationship to the land. Day contends the
specific relocation of West Coast Japanese farmers shows how Japanese labor became a vessel to
tame Native land, opening up the Colorado River Indian Reservation land to be made
“productive” for future use.
137
Not only did Japanese labor build the infrastructure for the Native

136
Isamu Noguchi, “The Sculptor of Spaces” (New York, NY: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980).
137
Day, 146.
58
Americans living on the reservation but the development of the land through irrigation and
farming techniques could also benefit white farmers.
138
Imagining the desert as needing
cultivation facilitates a frontier myth that, in this case, extends developmental logics by utilizing
a Japanese labor resource. Transforming Poston into a park illustrates how the material arts of
sculpting the land—through gardening, woodworking, sculpturing, and so forth—could harness
Japanese labor in service of a settler imaginary.
Envisioning a garden sprouting from the incarcerated space of Poston, Noguchi’s
blueprints exemplified how ideas of race, identity, citizenship, and democracy were shaped by
the physical molding of perceptual order. To imagine Poston as an organized and productive
“garden,” lined with the orderly markers of plant and human life, configured internment as a
layered operation for modeling desire. If there was a distinctly “Japanese” character to the
“hundreds of reports nightly of signal lights visible from the coast, and of intercepts of
unidentified radio transmissions,”
139
as suggested by DeWitt, then a garden could serve an
ameliorating and rehabilitating function. In other words, if the Japanese were associated with
unpredictability, the non-visible mass of “nightly signal lights,” then a garden was the
materialization of predictability. Highly visible, orderly, and physical, a garden was the
externalized proxy of Japanese interior desires, historically aligned with information’s
foundational premise of unpredictability and chaos.
Noguchi’s blueprints imagined the garden as an organized system of desire, contained by
laboratory of internment. The garden attempted to collimate Japanese desire with that of
American citizenship and nation, a desire perceptually mediated through the physical act of
labor. The association between Japanese, labor, and land, however, is nothing new. The

138
Ibid.
139
DeWitt, “Final Report.”
59
incarcerated Japanese civilians were primarily farmers. Prior to internment, Japanese farmers
were racialized as a “yellow peril” as they were economic competition for white farmers and
laborers.
140
Alien Land Laws banning Japanese civilians from owning property and land
demonstrated how explicit racial discrimination was the operating logic of the US legal system.
Internment marked an experimental transition in racial ideology, where racial discrimination
provided the conditions for racial rehabilitation. According to Day, “Japanese North Americans
underwent resignification: they started out embodying the threat of yellow peril and emerged as a
dependent surplus labor force who exemplified liberal individualism rather than a collective,
unnatural menace.”
141
This notion of a “collective, unnatural menace” was not only a negative
racial stereotype, although it certainly had this effect as well. Rather, it reflected cultural
anxieties regarding a chaotic world of information abundance inaugurated by developments in
the information sciences. Information abundance was a double-edged sword that not only
provided new techniques of seeing and knowing but also exposed the limits of human cognition
and vision. Japaneseness as a racial category, then, was conceived as the personification of
unpredictability, the epistemological ground in a world of information.
142

In one of his speeches to Poston, Collier espoused an optimistic claim: “We will build a
seed reservoir for the future. You are the middle people who will help teach Asia the meaning of
democracy. This is construction in a world of chaos.”
143
Collier mobilized the language of a
garden of the future—a “seed reservoir”—that will spring out from the ground of “chaos.”

140
Chiang.
141
Day, 149.
142
I also build from Patrick Jagoda’s theorization of the “network.” In Network Aesthetics, Jagoda traces the
ubiquity of the “network” as a material, metaphoric, and aesthetic structure of modern technological life. In his
wide-ranging study of various media forms, Jagoda suggests that a network imaginary can accrue a racial tint in
contemporary discourses of a “terrorist network.” The terror of the network—an imaginary that exceeds human
cognition—can become increasingly associated with that of the racialized “terrorist.” Patrick Jagoda, Network
Aesthetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
143
Noguchi, “I Become a Nisei,” 6.
60
The garden not only served as a metaphor but also was the perceptual rubric for understanding
ideas of “liberty” and “democracy” through modeled order, a path to citizenship through
predictability. Thus, through the case of “unpredictable” Japaneseness, racial internment became
a control test for racial liberalism.
I have contended that the epistemology of prediction was at the heart of Japanese
internment at Poston. Prediction not only facilitated racial surveillance and other forms of
carceral technologies but functioned to make race itself. In A Mathematical Theory of
Communication, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver suggested that “information is a measure
of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message” out of an environment of noise.
144

Meaning emerges, then, precisely when there is less “freedom,” less chaos that could obfuscate
the decipherability of a message. Ted Byfield puts it simply: “the more freedom one has, the less
one knows.”
145
Although these mathematical prescriptions of freedom pertain to statistical
theories, the concepts of containment and isolation were central to how “information” can obtain
knowable form. Built into the very episteme of the information sciences, then, is a history of
modeling unpredictability that shaped new ways of making racial identity under duress.

144
Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 1949), 99.
145
Ted Byfield, “Information,” Software Studies: A Lexicon, Ed. by Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2008), 27.
61
Garden of the Future

At the Noguchi Museum on Long Island City, NY, I first encountered the story of
Noguchi’s self-internment in Poston while researching about the artist’s working relationship
with International Business Machines (IBM). In 1964, Noguchi designed a garden for the new
IBM headquarters in Armonk, NY. Commissioned by chairman James Watson, Jr., the piece was
titled Garden of the Future and reflected IBM’s scientific imagining of a world of computers.
Through abstract sculptures that constituted a landscape of diagrams, algorithms, circuits, and
networks, Garden captured a new frontier of computational thinking. Garden consisted of two
main sections: a South garden of blasted granite, representing the organicism of nature; a North
Figure 1.2: Photo of Isamu Noguchi’s Garden of the Future (IBM Headquarters in Armonk,
NY), The Isamu Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY.

62
garden that experimented with abstract sleek designs, a monument to the information age’s
future. Engrained within were circuitous lines and inscriptions from John von Neumann and
Herman Goldstine’s Planning and Coding (1946), a canonical book on digital computation.
146

The environmental artwork transformed the barren landscape into a garden of informatic visions.
While typing in the words “IBM” into the digital archive, I stumbled upon Noguchi’s
IBM card used for incarcerated Japanese identification in 1942. The punch card contained
biographical information regarding Noguchi after being interviewed by Susumu Igauye on June
8, 1942, months into his voluntary internment at Poston.
147
IBM was the primary producer of
punch-card equipment used for classifying interned Japanese civilians by the WRA. Introduced
in 1928, these punch cards, or “IBM cards,” were an analog form of coding and computation
used to process data with up to 80 columns and 10 rows. According to the corporation’s self-
narrated history, the IBM card contained “nearly all of the world’s known information for just
under half a century.”
148
Within the camps, the WRA “codebook” was central to processing
efforts and included instructions for coding identifying information related to geography,
occupation, education, family status and history, and so forth. The digital database united these
two moments in Noguchi’s life, bringing into stark juxtaposition the horror of Japanese
incarceration and the later celebration of Japanese artistic merit at IBM. Noguchi’s Garden of the
Future eerily resembled similar desires for a “garden of the future” in Poston’s desert.
In Garden, slightly off-center was a large black dome that, in Noguchi’s words, “emerges
from the earth to explore the universe.”
149
Although this statement most explicitly linked

146
Herman H. Goldstone, letter to Isamu Noguchi, Sept. 8, 1964, The Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY.
147
Aloha P. South, letter to Edward McPherson containing Isamu’s Noguchi IBM punch card for internment
identification at Poston, Dec. 3, 2003, The Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY.
148
“The IBM Punched Card.”
149
Isamu Noguchi, Correspondence with Herman Goldstine (August 26, 1965), Projects: Armonk, NY. “IBM
Gardens,” 1975-77, folder 3, archives of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum.
63
computational technologies to 1960s space research, it also depicted a faith in transcendence, the
ability to exceed material constraints. Homay King has suggested that a longing to escape the
binds of earthly embodiment has been a precondition for the digital. After the space race, the
“longing to escape Earth…was channeled into digital futures, dot-com bubbles, and the
information superhighway.”
150
Garden captured a belief in “transcending” material embodiments
and environments, a dream that characterized the emerging digital era. Moreover, the landscape
sculpture depicts a myth associating the digital with the immaterial and the virtual, detached
from earthbound experience. Yet, this desire to perceive beyond the limits of empirical reality
also described Noguchi’s artistic approach over 20 years ago in Poston, where he hoped to make
the internment camp more “human” through a garden. Through the possibilities of material arts,
he believed in perceptual dynamism in which the meaning of embodiment, experience, and
identity were not fixed or static but could be recalibrated and transformed.
Minority modeling is a myth of racial liberalism, and so too are the myths of the digital.
At its core, the origins of the information age reckoned with ideas of perception, meaning, and,
ultimately, freedom. Histories of the digital are histories of race, not simply because they include
accounts of racial minorities but because they reproduce and reinforce the racial schemas that
shape US liberal capitalism. By tracing their corresponding modes of experimentation, we can
begin to link the making of race and the making of the digital.

150
Homay King, Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2015), 6.
64
CHAPTER 2: MODELING

Nam June Paik’s Digital Arts and
the Computational Origins of Minority Modeling

On December 13, 1970, the front page of The New York Times featured an article titled
“Orientals Find Bias Is Down Sharply in the U.S.”
151
Using personal narratives to illustrate the
newfound “success” of Chinese and Japanese Americans, the article begins with the life story of
Jeffrey Chuan Chu:
When J. Chuan Chu came to the United States as a student at the end of World War II
from his home in North China, he had trouble finding a place to live. Having an Oriental
face, he discovered, was a liability…But Mr. Chu, with an engineering degree from the
University of Pennsylvania, has now risen to become a vice president of Honeywell
Information Systems. “If you have ability and can adapt to the American way of
speaking, dressing, and doing things,” Mr. Chu said recently, “then it doesn't matter
anymore if you are Chinese.” His story reflects a quiet, little noted American success
story—the almost total disappearance of discrimination against the 400,000 Chinese and
500,000 Japanese Americans since the end of World War II and their assimilation into
the mainstream of American life.
152

For scholars of Asian American studies and critical ethnic studies, this NYT article is a common
reference point for the model minority myth. Perhaps the first “face” of the model minority, the
Ivy League engineer Chu perpetuates the promise of the American dream, one that upholds
individual achievement as a model for racial assimilation. This anecdote depicts the fantasies of
an American “success story”: the historical recession of discrimination, educational and financial
triumph despite racial hardship, and gradual conformity with American culture. This blueprint
for minority citizenship programmatically installs the promise of social progress in which the
“disappearance of discrimination” functions as the myth’s enduring logic. In this telling, not only
is Chu’s Chineseness no longer a hindrance to becoming American, but the longer US history of

151
“Orientals Find Bias Is Down Sharply in the U.S.,” The New York Times, December 13, 1970,
https://www.nytimes.com/1970/12/13/archives/orientals-find-bias-is-down-sharply-in-us-discrimination-
against.html.
152
Ibid.
65
anti-Asian discrimination, exploitation, and violence precisely becomes the grounds in which
“Americanness” acquires social meaning.
That is, the framing of Chu as a model minority depends on the past historical injustices
experienced by Asian/Americans in order to shore up a culturally compelling narrative of racial
progress. In the NYT article, the invocation of the discrimination faced by “the 400,000 Chinese
and 500,000 Japanese Americans since the end of World War II”
153
signals the history of yellow
peril discourse that has characterized much of Asian racialization in the United States. Yellow
peril refers to the well documented plethora of cultural imagery and rhetoric conceiving of Asian
bodies as menacing, horde-like, invasive, and inhuman. This racist discourse has been renewed
in many historical examples of Asian racialization, such as ideas of “cheap” Chinese railroad
labor, the perceived inscrutability of Japanese Americans during World War II, the economic
threat of China and Japan as new global world powers, and many other instances of continued
anti-Asian feeling, including present discourses surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
154
Yet,
despite the persistence of these negative representations of Asian/Americans, the model minority
myth claims to resolve the historical structures of discrimination against Asians by facilitating
their “total disappearance.”
155
Exemplified by the Chinese American engineer, the myth of an
Asian/American “success story” encapsulates the operative fantasies of US liberal capitalism, in
which the individual subject is purportedly able to overcome histories of racism.
During the 1960s and 1970s, another “model minority” was being mythologized: the
computer. In this period, the computer transformed in the larger cultural imagination from a
scientific instrument of calculation to an integrated part of social living, from a tool of

153
Ibid.
154
For a comprehensive cultural history of “yellow peril,” see John Kuo, Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats, Yellow
Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (New York, NY: Verso Books, 2014).
155
“Orientals.”
66
oppression to an idealized technology of empowerment. The history of the computer marks a
narrative of assimilation, in which information technologies have become central to the
contemporary mediascape. Made between 1943 and 1945, the first electronic computer was the
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). This machine was developed
during World War II through collaborative efforts between the Ballistics Research Laboratory,
Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of
Electrical Engineering. Created for wartime ballistics calculations, the ENIAC was an impressive
machinic feat. It was superhuman in its computational capacity and massive in physical scale,
taking up an entire laboratory room. Its military roots entrench the computer as an instrument of
Figure 2.1: Publicity photo for the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC).
Image in the public domain.

67
domination and dehumanization, of power and control. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, new
technological visions of the computer began to emerge alongside these wartime imaginaries: the
computer itself started to be associated with “liberatory” terms. With a nascent computer
industry rising through the likes of Bell Labs, IBM Research, and Silicon Valley startups, the
idea of “information” began to take on a different resonance, as information technologies
transitioned from war machine to personal device. As N. Katherine Hayles notes, the “great
dream and promise of information is that it can be free from the material constraints that govern
the mortal world.”
156
This liberal, transcendental myth professed that new information
technologies were no longer threatening but could be integral and productive components of
modern life. What is particularly striking is that J. Chuan Chu was also on the team that designed
the ENIAC, the first electronic computer, back in the 1940s. His career as a computer scientist
encapsulates two so-called “success stories” in the twentieth century: Asian/Americans and
computers.
This chapter explores the linked perceptions of Asian/Americans and computers and what
this connection reveals about the racial and technological dimensions of US liberal capitalism.
Although their dominant perceptions reflect corresponding myths of racial and technological
progress, the histories of Asian Americans and computers offer up contradictory beliefs—of
otherness and assimilation, of oppression and empowerment, and of alienation and freedom—
never fully resolved within the American cultural imaginary. I examine an underlying racial form
that links the Asiatic and the computational through technological modalities. Colleen Lye
theorizes an “Asiatic racial form,” which allows us to think about how the “Asiatic” in cultural
production refers “not to persons but to a host of modernity’s dehumanizing effects (laboring

156
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 13.
68
conditions, group entities, corporations).”
157
In this sense, racial perceptions (such as the hostile
“yellow peril” or the assimilable “model minority”) are not merely stereotypes; rather, they are
visual expressions of an underlying racial form that, I suggest, also take on technological
valences. In this chapter, I utilize the term “minority modeling” to focus less on the figure of the
model minority and more on the procedure of representation itself, calling “attention to the
operations through which race is visualized and coded.”
158

I highlight two key moments in the late 1960s that shifted the perception of race and
computation. These flashpoints are the emergence of the “model minority” and the making of the
“computer interface,” two visual abstractions whose ideological power resides in their ability to
reduce race and computation to a skin-deep or screen-deep phenomenon. Produced as a
representational “effect,”
159
the model minority and the interface both illustrate how a propensity
to work visibly and efficiently shaped the racial and technological imaginaries of US liberal
capitalism. Like the computer interface that promised to enable the individual user while hiding
the inhuman structures of code, minority modeling promoted a myth of the empowered racial
subject who could overcome, and therefore obfuscate, the historical conditions of racism. Thus,
the computer’s transition from military tool to personal technology is, in part, bolstered by the
racial discourse of its time. I suggest that minority modeling renders race as a screen-level visual
effect that obfuscates the sociohistorical structures of its making. In short, minority modeling is a
user-friendly design of racial logics, a schema for containing the meaning and power of race
within the operations of US liberal capitalism.

157
Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005), 11.
158
Joseph Jeon, Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Grade Asian American Poetry (Iowa City, IA:
University of Iowa Press, 2012), xxv.
159
In this article, I will be extending Alexander Galloway’s framing of the interface not as a technological artifact
but as an “effect,” a visual form of complex historical processes. Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (New
York, NY: Polity, 2012), 67.
69
This chapter utilizes the media art archives of Nam June Paik, whose artistic philosophy
of “humaniz[ing] technology”
160
provides an art-based corollary for investigating the implicit
racial logics of the computer’s evolution from inhuman machine to user-friendly device. It
explores Paik’s writings and artworks, especially his drawing Untitled (TV Face) (1980) and his
unrealized digital artwork Confused Rain (1967) created at Bell Labs. While liberal histories of
race and computation prop up narratives of social progress and assimilation, Paik’s focus on the
aesthetics of indeterminacy across these media artworks reveals the corresponding
indeterminacies of race and computation, despite their prevailing ideologies of representational
empowerment (i.e., minority modeling or the computer interface). If interfaces index the dual
operations of empowerment and obfuscation, mediating racial and technological meaning on the
visual registers of skin or screen, then Paik’s media arts center the deep, irresolvable
contradictions at the core of emerging racial-technological imaginaries.

Indeterminacy of the Asiatic
Known in the art world for his video and media arts, Asian/American artist Nam June
Paik was also a keen theorist of the interface. According to Alexander Galloway, the interface is
“not a thing [but] always an effect, always a process of a translation.”
161
This provocation
conceptualizes the interface not as merely as a technical artifact but as a broader aesthetic
phenomenon “mediating thresholds of self and world.”
162
Although Paik himself never used the
terminology of the interface, his experiments in the screen arts intuit this understanding in his
artistic practice. For Paik, screens marked the composite arrangements of subjectivity, time, and

160
Michelle Yun, “Nam June Paik: Evolution, Revolution, Resolution,” in Nam June Paik: Becoming Robot, ed.
Melissa Chiu and Michelle Yun, (New York: Asia Society Museum, 2014), 18.
161
Galloway, 33.
162
Ibid, viii.
70
representation, expressed through different technical media. In his exploration of a particular
electronic medium, such as TV, we can see Paik’s embrace of poetic metaphor across a range of
works including Moon is the Oldest TV (1965), TV Garden (1974), TV Fish (1975), and others.
Employing environmental metaphors, Paik decenters the focus on the technological artifact to
consider older forms of media, such as the moon. For instance, in Moon is the Oldest TV first
displayed at Galeria Bonino in New York City, Paik plays with the registers of temporality.
Using twelve vacuum-tubed television sets, Paik uses a magnet to manipulate each TV screen to
look like a different phase of the moon, waxing and waning. By translating the moon’s phases
into the televisual screen, Paik’s artwork asks the viewer to broaden their conception of
mediation beyond the technical artifact and to consider the moon as a cosmic interface, shaping
the perceptual field between self and world. In an unpublished note located in Paik’s archive,
which is housed in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, he draws from Buddhist philosophy
to ask a question of art and the moon:
What is art?
Is it the moon?
Or
The finger-tip, which points to this moon?
163

If art is not the moon but rather the “finger-tip” that points to the moon, in the way that an
interface is not a thing but rather an “effect,” then media arts offer a method for exposing the
underlying logics that configure the perceptual fields of the technological. For Paik, media art
can attune to the processes of perception in contemporary screen cultures, like a revealing
“finger-tip” or a familiar computer cursor.

163
Nam June Paik, “Tribute to John Cage,” Nam June Paik Paper Archives, Washington, DC, Box 7, Folder 9.
71
Scholarship in media art history has considered the intermedial dimensions of Paik’s
artistic work, in which Paik’s experimentations across a range of technological media is one of
his greatest contributions. According to Gregory Zinman, for instance, Paik has “consistently
explored how concepts or practices developed in one media form would find expression in
another.”
164
Paik’s intermedial approach did not subscribe to any fixed notion of media
specificity in order to emphasize the logics, energies, and desires that shuttle between different
forms, technological or otherwise. It is precisely this artistic intermediality that is useful for the
historical study of technologies, as it helps chart unexpected links for understanding the digital
present. Paik exemplifies what Jussi Parrika has called “media-archaeological creative
practices,” referring to the “use [of] aesthetic methods as epistemological investigations—
formations of knowledge … about our technical world around us that is often structured as
‘imperceptible.’”
165
Paik’s artistic practice reveals media technologies themselves to be
indeterminate, merely condensing in time and space as an effect of social, cultural, and technical
forces.
Besides the environmental metaphors employed by Paik’s TV-based media art, one
important analogy for his screen-based experiments was the concept of race.
166
In 1980, Paik
produced a little-known drawing referred to as Untitled (TV Face). Deviating from his usual
practice of using technological screens as canvas or material, TV Face is a hand-drawn depiction
of a screen on a sheet of white paper. Blue pastel scribbles and heavy black coloring mix, giving
an impression of an abstract screen filled with static. This paper drawing of a staticky screen thus

164
Gregory Zinman, “Nam June Paik’s Etude 1 and the Indeterminate Origins of Digital Media Art,” October 164
(2018): 18.
165
Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 152.
166
Margaret Rhee has also written about Paik’s artistic inquiries in Asian/American racialization. Teasing out the
conflation between the Asian and the robot, Rhee suggests that Paik was invested in racial critique through his
creative tinkers. Margaret Rhee, “Racial Recalibration: Nam June Paik’s K-456,” Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures
and the Americas 1 (2015): 285-309.
72
aligns with Paik’s intermedial ethos of exploring the representation production and rupture of the
screen itself. Overlaid are strips of yellowed tape that give the impression of a caricatured
“Asian” face: a slanted eye and buckteeth. Resembling the racist imagery applied to Chinese and
Japanese individuals, TV Face harkens back to the “threatening” portrayal of Asians as “yellow
peril,” a racist representation that haunts the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Conflating an aesthetic of yellow peril with the static of a screen, TV Face uses a
depiction of technological glitching to remediate the historical formation of Asiatic fear.
Representationally, yellow peril is a visual abstraction that refers to different Asian-identified
subjects, such as Chinese migrants and Japanese citizens, in an atmosphere of collective national
fear and hatred. Its formal rendering as a menacing, Asiatic face reflects the racist sentiment Chu
Figure 2.2: Photograph of Nam June Paik’s Untitled (TV Face) (1980). Image from San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

73
alluded to in the opening NYT article: “[h]aving an Oriental face…was a liability.”
167
In the case
of TV Face, the liability is cast as a technical one, alluding to glitching, visual noise, and
malfunction. Within his oeuvre, screens were the technological equivalent of a face. In fact, Paik
was quite fascinated with imposing faces on screens, including his large-scale works such as Li
Tai Po (1987), as well as smaller pieces like Smiling Face (1986). Paik would sometimes distort
his own face on the screen or even pose for photographs with TV sets by playfully inserting his
face into the screen. What unifies Paik’s TV Face and Chu’s commentary on the “Oriental face”
is a mutual recognition that the face is a representational abstraction, figuratively marking a
deeper historical or technological process that gives the face social meaning. Illustrative of
minority modeling’s logic, Chu’s “Oriental face” is something to obscure, supposedly
evidencing the “almost total disappearance of discrimination.” The NYT article touts Chu’s
“engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania” as the key to overcoming his racial
“liability,” ultimately allowing him to “[rise] to become the vice president of Honeywell
Information Systems.” The article frames engineering as an empowering vehicle for Chu’s social
mobility, as the key to minimizing the liability of his racialized face. In contrast, Paik’s TV Face
presents a much more ambivalent expression of the “Oriental face,” one that does not fit into a
myth of racial progress. Since Paik uses a non-time-based medium, TV Face does not clarify
whether the yellow peril figuration of an “Oriental face” is becoming more visible or
disappearing into the static. Rather, the artwork lingers in a representational indeterminacy that
characterizes the status of the Asian in the American imagination.
If minority modeling promised that racial subjects could overcome their historical
“liability” and obscure the relevance of race in an era that supposedly saw the “almost total

167
“Orientals.”
74
disappearance of discrimination,”
168
then Paik’s TV Face challenges the visual clarity of this
myth of modeling by embracing an aesthetic of indeterminacy. Paik’s fascination with
indeterminacy—the forces of chance, contingency, and disorder—draws from cybernetics and
information theory, especially the work of Norbert Weiner. Paik was particularly interested in
the idea of feedback, or what Weiner would describe as “the property of being able to adjust
future conduct by past performance.”
169
Emerging from wartime statistics research of the 1940s,
feedback was foundational to cybernetic theory. The term referred to the ability to predict an
entity’s behavior and actions and proved useful for wartime ballistics combat. Shaping much of
the early decades of the information era, the idea of feedback became embedded in media
technologies and their technical operations. Orit Halpern notes that feedback was a “nascent
form of interactivity,” creating a technical episteme of input and output.
170
Feedback was about
prediction, control, and efficiency, a way to quickly determine meaning from an external world
awash in chaos, to glean information from noise. For Paik, indeterminacy as an aesthetic concept
challenged the information clarity of feedback systems within media technologies, using
technical glitching to complicate the assuredness of screen-based representation. Paik’s work
participated in the larger embrace of feedback by artists, activists, and theorists, such as those
associated with the publication Radical Software in the 1970s.
171

Indeterminacy provided a framework for understanding the contradictions of Asian
racialization. In an unpublished essay meditating on feedback, Paik suggests that “feedback
techniques run in many layers of symbolism,”
172
a claim that resonates with Paik’s consistent use

168
Ibid.
169
Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1950), 33.
170
Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2015), 60.
171
David Joselit, “Tale of the Tape: Radical Software,” Artforum 40.9 (2002), 155.
172
Nam June Paik, “Unidentified Transcripts,” Nam June Paik Paper Archives, Washington, DC, Box 14, Folder 27.
75
of analogy to situate technological ideas and artifacts within social and political reality. As a
media artist invested in social critique, Paik describes his aesthetic practice as a historiographical
one: “My aim is not to find out the ‘truth,’ what actually happened, but just to find out what was
fed to people as the ‘truth,’ which was to form the consensus and influence the history.”
173

Attuned to Steve Anderson’s assertion that “all history is really historiography,”
174
Paik was
equally invested in unsettling the perception of both technological and social forms, both as a
product of historical conditions. Paik was uniquely aware of the indeterminacy of the Asiatic in
the American cultural imagination. During the Cold War, Paik notes in an untitled essay on
feedback how “China has turned suddenly from No. 1 friend in Asia to No. 1 enemy in the
world…Input became output. Plus became minus.”
175
Using the technical rhetoric of input and
output, Paik suggests that the Asiatic racial form, signified by the geopolitical entity “China,”
produces contradictory representations under different historical circumstances. At times positive
(“friend”) and other times negative (“enemy”), the Asiatic demonstrates how racial meaning
cannot be fixed as truth but rather as indeterminate, and as suggested by Colleen Lye, always
tethered to the “international context in which American race relations take shape.”
176
By
attuning to the ambiguity of racial perception, TV Face invokes the question of how racial
meaning becomes fixed as “truth” within history, akin to Paik’s critical attention to screen-based
mediation.
As an aesthetic method, Paik’s media art reveals how racial and technological formations
converge in corresponding ways. Paik’s fascination with how social meaning achieves the power
of “truth” in contemporary information technology cultures extends to a consideration of Asian

173
Ibid.
174
Steve F. Anderson, Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2011), 9.
175
Paik, “Unidentified Transcripts.”
176
Lye, 9.
76
racialization. Like the magnets or the Paik-Abe synthesizer
177
he uses to manipulate television
sets and video signals, Paik suggests that perceptions of the Asiatic are subject to distortion by
historical forces.
By exposing how visual effects accumulate power as “truth,” Paik’s artistic inquiries
offer a case study for my theorization of the racial interface, as it pertains to the history of
computation. In her formulation of “race and/as technology,” Wendy Hui Kyong Chun disrupts
any settled notion of race as a cultural or biological “truth” in order to attend to the mediating
function of race, a way for “linking what is visible to what is invisible.”
178
Chun reminds us that
race is a complex visual abstraction, and its moments of representational clarity should always be
treated with suspicion. By attending to the inner workings of representation, the underlying code
that historically produces the effect of “truth,” Chun suggests that race, as a dominant technology
of power, cognitively organizes and maps social relations across time and space. Her framework
proves useful for investigating the late 1960s, when the idea of Asian/Americans as “model
minorities” began to emerge as a sociological “truth” during a pivotal decade of racial reckoning.
Despite being perceived in previous decades as “yellow peril,” foreign and threatening to Euro-
American ways of life, Asians/Americans became idealized in the cultural consciousness as
“model” American minorities. Model minorities, however, also exemplify a process of minority
modeling, in which Asian/Americans were not only celebrated but were promoted as a model of
racial subjectivity for other racial groups to emulate. Building on Chun’s assertion of race

177
Paik partnered with Japanese video engineer Shuye Abe to invent the Paik-Abe synthesizer. The
device receives images from seven cameras and then distorts and colorizes the imagery. Through signal
manipulation, the synthesizer distorts the input to produce a prismatic, surrealist video or image. For a detailed
description, see Yun, 47-52.
178
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Race and/as Technology or How to Do Things To Race,” in Race After the Internet,
ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 39.
77
“and/as” technology, I examine how the concept of modeling links seemingly disparate forms of
computation and culture that were coevolving in the shadow of US liberal capitalism.
Through tracking Paik’s aesthetics of indeterminacy, I complicate art historical accounts
of his desire to “humanize technology.” Scholars often frame Paik as a “visionary” whose art
anticipated the successful integration of new information technologies into human society, such
as the introduction of the World Wide Web of the 1990s. For instance, Michelle Yan writes, “As
early as the 1960s the artist Nam June Paik challenged his contemporaries to imagine a future
where today’s innovations might exist.”
179
By rendering Paik as a prophet of new media
environments, these descriptions situate his philosophy of humanizing technology within a
dominant history of digital and information technologies, as they transitioned into ubiquitous,
personal devices and companions. I suggest that foundational to Paik’s aim to humanize
technology were the aesthetics of indeterminacy, a recognition of the contradictions within an
emerging information technology culture that could not be fully reconciled through user-friendly
commercialization. His media art show that to humanize technology was not to resolve these
contradictions but to imagine ways to live with and alongside them. Excavating the
indeterminate and the irresolvable, Paik’s art-technological experiments were not necessarily
prophetic but diagnostic, pointing to the contradictions at the core of dominant myths of social
and technological progress.

179
Yun, 15.
78
Model Minorities and Model Computers
This section examines how perceptions of Asian/Americans as model minorities emerged
alongside the development of the computer interface. At their core, both models are powerful
visual abstractions that acquire the mythological effect of social or technological “truth” by
reducing complex historical formulations of race and computation into usable ideas. Like the
interface that provides a sense of user agency, minority modeling creates the belief that an
individual racial subject could overcome historical and structural conditions. Moreover, this
effect of empowerment gains ideological power because it circulates as a lived promise, thus
obfuscating the social forces of its making. Racial discourses, such as minority modeling,
fortified the computer’s transition from wartime machine to personal device. Reciprocally,
information technologies covertly participate in what Jodi Melamed describes as the “trick of
racialization,”
180
containing racial meaning to an aesthetic dimension of cultural representation.
Computer history, then, encapsulates a genealogy of US liberal capitalism.
As mentioned previously, minority modeling contains two computational ideologies that
work in tandem to bolster US liberal capitalism’s operations: individualist empowerment and
structural obfuscation. Thus, one problematic function of minority modeling is that it valorizes
the achievements of the individual, or individual group, in order to elide the ongoing structural
oppression of other marginalized populations. Scholars like Ellen Wu have demonstrated how
the model minority myth is a tool of whiteness, in which Asian/American success is used to
devalue demands for racial and economic justice by Black, Latinx, and other disenfranchised
groups.
181
The model minority myth is a racial abstraction that refers to a range of

180
Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 2.
181
Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2013).
79
Asian/American experiences, including Japanese and Chinese Americans, as well as select
groups of non-Asian/American minorities. Under its logic, the capacity to work productively and
efficiently is the rubric for obtaining social inclusion into the nation-state. Minority groups with
a notable history of exploitation, disenfranchisement, and violence become exemplars for this
capacity to work, precisely because the narrative of perseverance through oppression gives
potency to the meaning of “hard work” while effacing the continuity of structural racism.
William Petersons’ New York Times article titled “Success Story, Japanese-American Style”
(1966) is often regarded as the first general account of the model minority myth. Instead of
focusing on a single individual like Chu, Peterson emphasizes the experience of Japanese
Americans as an ethnic group to espouse a minority “success story”:
The history of Japanese Americans, however, challenges every such generalization about
ethnic minorities, and for this reason alone deserves far more attention than it has been
given. Barely more than 20 years after the end of the wartime camps, this is a minority
that has risen above even prejudiced criticism. By any criterion of good citizenship that
we choose, the Japanese Americans are better than any other group in our society,
including native-born whites. They have established this remarkable record, moreover, by
their own almost totally unaided effort. Every attempt to hamper their progress resulted
only in enhancing their determination to succeed.
182

Peterson offers a narrative of racial progress from the perspective of the model minority myth. In
this view, freedom from historical violence supposedly depends on self-reliance and self-
sufficiency, in which sheer determination is enough to overcome historical oppression.
The model minority myth emerged in the mid-to-late 1960s during a period of rapid
technological developments. With the establishment of Silicon Valley and advances in hardware
and software technologies, the computer became a cultural artifact that reflected the hopes and
fears of a new information age. As corporations such as Fairchild Semiconductor, IBM, and Bell
Laboratories hoped to commercialize new computational technologies, the computer expanded

182
William Peterson, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” The New York Times, January 9, 1966. Emphasis
mine.
80
beyond its role as an instrument of military research. Within the social imagination, the
computer’s fast and efficient capabilities enshrined it as a transformational technology that could
better human life with remarkable speed. In 1965, Gordon Moore, the research director of
Fairchild Semiconductor, posited his law on accelerated information processing in the computer
age. According to this now famous “Moore’s Law,” computing would exponentially increase in
power and decrease in cost every two years, due to advancements in integrated circuits and
microprocessors.
183
For the digital electronics industry in the 1960s and 1970s, when silicon
transistors were crammed into microchips, Moore’s Law served as a “golden rule” and fueled
technological visions of innovation. Computers themselves would become more efficient and
more powerful, as processing capabilities entered new horizons with microelectronics. This
became the dominant narrative of the digital revolution, a story of technological determinism in
which computers “naturally” became an integral part of the social landscape.
But how did the computer become assimilated into the social imagination? The answer
lies, partially, in a history of design thinking, a way to profoundly frame how we understand
computational tools, even as their processing capabilities became more powerful at the same
time as they were becoming more invisible. This is the story of the interface, the result of many
experiments with human-machine interactivity. According to Chun, the commercial history of
interface is “widely assumed to have transformed the computer from a command-based
instrument of torture to a user-friendly medium of empowerment.”
184
Yet, as Alexander
Galloway reminds us, interfaces are an aesthetic effect of mediation,
185
obfuscating the machinic
operations of computation while producing an empowering representation of its technical

183
Celebrated by Gordon Moore’s company that he founded, Intel, Moore’s Law is still embraced as prevailing
imaginary of technological development. “Over 50 Years of Moore’s Law,” Intel, accessed Dec 2, 2020,
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/silicon-innovations/moores-law-technology.html.
184
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 18.
185
Galloway, 44.
81
functions. Although interfaces also have origins in military research, the interface’s
technological power is often associated with user agency. Even though they consistently fail their
users, interfaces and the visual power they wield allow computation to be a non-threatening and
integrated part of the social landscape.
It is fitting that in the late 1960s, the period in which journalists and sociologists coined
the term “model minority,” advancements in computation introduced the graphic user interface,
or GUI. Although the GUI has links to midcentury radar systems such the Semi-Automatic
Ground Environment (SAGE),
186
the user interface in its most familiar form can be traced to the
influential work of Douglas Engelbart.
187
In the 1960s, he created a new text-based hyperlink
program called the “oN-Line System,” or NLS, inaugurating “a new dreamscape for what
computing was to become: the mouse, the teleconference, email, the windowed user interface,
the hyperlink, the internet.”
188
NLS was developed in Engelbart’s Augmentation Research
Center at the Stanford Research institute. In 1968, he presented this new system in a 90-minute
demonstration famously known as the “The Mother of All Demos.”
189
Engelbart showcased how
he could navigate hypertexts, graphics, folder systems, and windows through the easy control of
a cursor to an audience awe-struck by Engelbart’s omniscient command. The cursor provided a
way to navigate the visual/spatial composition and logic provided by a user-oriented screen. In

186
For a detailed history of SAGE’s relationship to the modern user interface, see Cliff Kuang and Robert
Fabricant’s genealogy of the modern user interface. Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant, User Friendly: How the
Hidden Rules of Design are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play (New York, NY: MacMillan Publishers,
2019), 127-158.
187
The influence of Engelbart’s GUI and oN-Line system on the contemporary computer interface is a point of
debate for computer historians, who sometimes highlight other actors, institutions, and events that contributed to the
GUI’s realization. My aim here is not to conclusively credit Engelbart with the GUI but rather to point to the
technological visions that have orbited around Engelbart, his “Mother of All Demos,” the oN-Line system, and
bootstrapping. All of this illustrate the nascent imaginary of the interface forming in the late 1960s and, no doubt,
developed further in the later decades in the era of personal computing.
188
Kuang and Fabricant, 309.
189
Full coverage of Doug Engelbart’s “The Mother of All Demos” (1968) can be found in an online video and text
archive at the Doug Engelbart Institute. “Doug’s Great Demo: 1968,” Doug Engelbart Institute, accessed Jan. 25,
2020, https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/448/.
82
the early 1970s, Engelbart’s NLS team migrated to Xerox PARC (currently known just as
PARC, or the Palo Alto Research Center) and helped to develop the earliest personal computer
built with a GUI in mind. The interface employed visual models and graphics—visible,
navigable, and interactive—in order to calibrate the technical imaginary of the computer,
rendering the computer as something non-threatening and workable.
Made possible by a GUI, a user-friendly computer was an important part of Engelbart’s
larger technological vision for “bootstrapping,” a computational term with ideological
resonances beyond computer history. The term “bootstrapping” derives from liberal discourses,
in which the logic for social progress is dependent on an individual’s capacity for hard work and
perseverance. In the nineteenth century, bootstrapping referred to the mentality of “pulling
oneself up by one’s bootstraps,” a task deemed quite impossible to achieve. However, by the
twentieth century, its connotation had shifted to the opposite meaning: to achieve the near-
impossible without the aid of others. In its contemporary meaning, bootstrapping has strong
associations with the model minority myth. Conceived as the exemplar of model minority logic,
Asian/Americans’ propensity for overcoming racial discrimination (such as Japanese internment
and anti-Chinese exclusion) becomes a rubric for US minority life more broadly. As Helen
Heran Jun suggests, this myth casts Asian/Americans as “ideally self-enterprising, self-regulating
subject[s].”
190
Bootstrapping functions as an aspirational ideology of individual empowerment
that obfuscates deep systemic racial infrastructures. Not only does it suggest that progress is
something specific to an individual or particular group, but it also installs the rubric of efficiency
as the mode for escaping race-based disenfranchisement. Returning to Peterson’s New York
Times article on the Japanese American model minority, one can find the resonance of a self-

190
Helen Heran Jun, Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal
America (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2011), 129.
83
enclosed capacity for overcoming racism: “They have established this remarkable record,
moreover, by their own almost totally unaided effort. Every attempt to hamper their progress
resulted only in enhancing their determination to succeed.”
191
Through a bootstrapping logic, the
capacity for social progress appears to be dependent on, rather than despite, historical
discrimination and violence.
In similar ways to bootstrapping as a racial ideology, bootstrapping in computation refers
to a vision of software development that aspires to make complex programming more efficient
and legible for a human user. Thus, bootstrapping indexes the process of humanizing
computation, or assimilating code into greater levels of human usability. In the most general
terms, bootstrapping is what allows the separation of code and machine. Computers are
comprised of machine code, or the binary digits 0 and 1, that corresponds most closely to the
hardware processes. Stored in the actual hardware of the computer, machine code is machine-
dependent and is the most technical and inhuman type of programming language. Because of the
isolated nature of machine code, higher levels of programming languages are needed to make
computers more usable, accessible, and humanized for software developers. For this reason,
bootstrapping refers to the process by which programmers can produce more complex forms of
code that scale beyond the individual machine. Through assemblers and compiler languages,
software engineers can develop higher-level programming languages that make machine
language palatable and more “human,” or closer to semantic and linguistic systems. From an
accessibility perspective, code that is more developer-friendly allows for more complex, faster
programming environments to emerge, which results in media eco-systems unified by software.
However, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reminds us, the higher-level versions of programming
languages fortify the technological myth of software as an invisible and intangible “thing”

191
Peterson. Emphasis mine.
84
beyond the screen, promising to empower the programmer or user while the code disappears
from view.
192
Bootstrapping, then, is a process of producing not only more complex code
environments but also more “human” forms of code. It installs an imaginary of human-machine
relations: that one primary aim of technological innovation is to make computers work for us in
visible and efficient ways.
According to Thierry Bardini, Engelbart greatly influenced the modern digital age by
developing bootstrapping as a technological ideology.
193
Engelbart envisioned bootstrapping as
an iterative and collaborative environment not only for increasing research productivity but also
for increasing the capacity for productivity. Drawing from cybernetic concepts of feedback,
Engelbart believed that the computer as a new information technology could play an integral role
in advancing human knowledge and research exponentially if it could optimize organizational
efficiency on a broader scale. Rather than understanding computers as autonomous entities,
194

Engelbart believed that these new technologies could work in tandem with users to enhance and
extend user capabilities.
195
Within this vision of bootstrapping, the interface mediated human-
machine interactions and optimized computational efficiency. That is, by reducing the need to
understand how computers work as machines, users could maximize their productivity and
capacity. Separating the “inhuman” dimensions of machine code from the user-friendly graphical

192
Chun, Programmed Visions, 6.
193
Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
194
Competing technological imaginaries accompanied the development of new digital and computational
technologies. Kuang and Fabricant show how Engelbart’s ideas differed from other leading technologists, such as
computer scientist and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky. They write, “On the one side, Minsky
imagined what the machine could become as something outside ourselves, perhaps beyond us. Engelbart, instead,
saw machines as tools built to serve.” Kuang and Fabricant, 313.
195
In many ways, Engelbart’s technological media philosophy aligned with Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of
media as extensions of human faculties and sensoria. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory
of Effects (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1967), 26.
85
schema, the interface presented a fiction of subjective agency vis-à-vis the “humanized”
experience of computation.
Engelbart’s embrace of cybernetic concepts influenced his view of computation as a type
of machine-based augmentation of human society, in which feedback allowed computation to
become a productive component of an emerging information technology ecosystem. For
Engelbart, feedback enabled the seamless optimization of human-computer interaction, a
technological ideology facilitated by the visual power of the interface. Feedback privileged a
narrative of technological efficiency, in which past error and insights would play a role in the
ability of the computer, or society at large, to recursively improve. What Engelbart imagined was
a progress-oriented teleology of computational power that corresponded with the fundamental
tenets of US liberal capitalism. That is, the past could not only be overcome and obfuscated; it
also played a direct role in making the logics of efficiency and productivity socially meaningful
in the technological realm. Engelbart’s vision was a computational corollary to Peterson’s
framing of the “criterion for good citizenship.” Alluding to the historical discrimination faced by
Japanese Americans, Peterson asserts that “every attempt to hamper their progress resulted only
in enhancing their determination to succeed.”
196
Peterson’s valorization of Japanese Americans
as model minorities was based not merely on the social success that they had achieved but also
on their ability to turn historical discrimination into an enhanced determination, a type of
recursive teleology for modeling social mobility. Together, Peterson and Engelbart illustrate the
interpenetration of computational and racial discourse, facilitated by a recursive and teleological
framing of feedback.

196
Peterson.
86
Tara McPherson has argued that there is something formally particular to digital
computation that works to “cordon off race and to contain it,”
197
in that it is difficult to identify
what is racial about computing. In other words, the technical history of computers may appear to
have very little, if anything, to do with race and racialization. This process of effacement is not
only a paradigmatic logic of computational structures but also an integral function of US liberal
capitalism in the mid-twentieth century. In this sense, effacement lodges racial logics and
operations beneath perceptible view. What I have suggested is that our computation imaginaries
and racial mythologies, such as Asian/American minority modeling, are mutually reinforcing in
an era of both technological and social transformations in the United States. Like the logic of
minority modeling, which valorized individualist empowerment while obfuscating historical
structures of racialization, the interface encapsulated these dreams of how computers, as
productive machines, could be seamlessly assimilated into the mediascape of new information
technologies. In other words, by promoting the perceived ability to “[rise] above…prejudiced
criticism”
198
through the empowered individual, minority modeling does not challenge the
structural source of US racial discrimination but rather emphasizes ways to make discrimination
itself disappear from view, serving as another technology of cordoning off race. Minority
modeling emerged in the late 1960s when US and transnational uprisings began to collectively
challenge structural racism, colonialism, and disenfranchisement.
199
As an effective technology
of managing the explosion of social meaning, complexities, and energies, minority modeling
functioned as a racial-technological schema for designing a user-friendly experience of race. By

197
Tara McPherson, “U.S Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX,” in Race After
the Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 24.
198
“Orientals.”
199
To learn more about the specific ways model minority discourse was used as a racial strategy for managing social
uprisings, See Wu.
87
rendering race into a graphic phenomenon, as merely skin-deep or screen-deep, minority
modeling served to quell deeper structural critique and relational modes of solidarity.
As I have suggested, the rise of the computer as a model technology tracks closely with
the emergence of Asian/Americans as a model minority. This overlap is, in part, due to the
occupational concentration of Asian/Americans in the science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics (STEM) fields. In 1968, the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 went into effect and abolished
the quota system restricting immigration based on national origin. This reform caused an influx
of new Asian migrants to the United States (primarily of East Asian and South Asian descent) as
a skilled and technical labor force. In 1964, only 14 percent of immigrants in the scientific and
technical fields were of Asian ancestry, while in 1970, the total rose dramatically to 62
percent.
200
The historical tendency towards STEM fields became a vehicle in which
Asian/Americans were further concretized as minority models. Thus, minority modeling, as it
pertains to Asian/Americans, is not only a racial form but also a scientific-technological one. As
such, technical laboratories also participated as a site of racialization, in which the ideologies of
“objectivity” and “universalism” often associated with the sciences corroborated the minority
model mythos of race’s irrelevance. The 1968 Asian/American STEM boom also echoed
previous attempts to recruit elite science and technology students and researchers from Asian
nations. For instance, Chu himself immigrated from China to the United States during World
War II when Japan invaded Shanghai in 1940.
201
Thus, the impact of the Hart-Cellar Act on
immigration demographics can be traced back to earlier efforts of US-East Asia scholar-
researcher exchange, such as the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship established in 1909. The Boxer

200
Paul Ong and John M. Liu, “U.S. Immigration Policies and Asian Migration,” in The New Asian Immigration in
Los Angeles and Global Restructuring, ed. Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng (Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press, 1994), 58.
201
“Obituary,” Jeffrey Chuan Chu, accessed Dec. 18, 2020, https://tsaifamily.org/chuan/.
88
Indemnity Scholarship, which was offered during the era of Chinese Exclusion (1882—1943),
marks the selection of elite Chinese/American researchers over disenfranchised laborers. Across
the twentieth century, scientific-technological development has facilitated the model-making
effects of Asian/American racialization in the US social landscape.
202

Asian/American Digital Arts and the Logic of (In)Efficiency
Although Paik himself immigrated to the US before the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, the
development of his art practice coincided with the forceful emergence of this association
between Asians and technology that occurred in the late 1960s. As one of the canonical artists
associated with the art-technology projects in this time, Paik’s racial identity is still mostly
ignored or only briefly mentioned by most art critics.
203
What I am suggesting here is that the
STEM-driven economic conditions inform Paik’s racialization and are not simply background
historical context. Rather, they shape how we read—or don’t read—the racial dimensions of
Paik’s media art. My intervention here is partially evidentiary, as I aim to question what counts
as evidence for racial inquiries within media art archives. Simply identifying Paik’s overt
discussions of race would cordon off the relevance of race to its explicit mention and thus
overlook its underlying logics, processes, and operations, similar to the way computational
technologies “cordon[ed] off race.”
204
Instead, I return to Paik’s media archive to track the racial-
technological modalities of efficiency and how they impact his media art investigations. If the
power of US liberal capitalism lies partially in its investment in the representational model, akin

202
My thinking on the STEM-driven economic conditions of Asian/American subjectivity and racialization is
informed by Christopher Fan’s analysis of post-1965 Asian/American literature. Christopher T. Fan, “Science
Fictionality and Post-65 Asian American Literature,” American Literary History 33, no. 1 (2020): 75-102.
203
Margaret Rhee has written an informative article about Paik’s artistic inquiries in Asian/American racialization.
Teasing out the conflation between the Asian and the robot, Rhee suggests that Paik was invested in racial critique
through his creative tinkering. Margaret Rhee, “Racial Recalibration: Nam June Paik’s K-456,” Asian Diasporic
Visual Cultures and the Americas 1 (2015): 285-309.
204
McPherson, 24.
89
to what Chun might term “the persistence of visual knowledge”
205
in reference to the age of
software, then media art archives can be crucial sites for revealing how artists negotiate these
ideas in both realized and unrealized projects. Attuned to the dynamics of interfaces and screens,
Paik’s archive contains moments in which the processes of art-making, technology-making, and
race-making collide.
As Gregory Zinman highlights in “Nam June Paik's Etude 1 and the Indeterminate
Origins of Digital Media Art,” Paik was one of the first artists to tinker with computational
media for the purposes of artistic expression.
206
In 1967 and 1968, Paik held an informal
residency at Bell Laboratories to experiment with the programming language FORTRAN.
207

Owned by AT&T and Western Electric Company, Bell Labs was an influential American
information and communications research institution.
208
During the late 1960s, Bell Labs began
to explore ways to make the computer more “usable” for non-scientists and non-engineers by
exploring how visual graphics could enhance human-computer interactivity. For this task, they
invited artists who worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, poetry, music, visual art,
and performance. This collaboration allowed artists to experiment with how the computer might
expand the aesthetic, sensorial, and perceptual boundaries of their art. On the other hand, artistic
experimentation promised to offer new creative insights for Bell Lab’s research projects.
209
In
the words of Paik, “computerized video experiments derived from the unorthodox instinct of an
artist will surely bring forth some unusual results in the research of pure science and applied

205
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 18 (2004): 26-51.
206
Zinman, 4.
207
Paik entered Bell Labs under the guidance of Bell Labs engineers such as A. Michael Knoll, although Paik
mostly experimented on his own. Nam June Paik, letter from M.V. Mathews, Nov. 23, 1966, Nam June Paik Paper
Archives, Washington, D.C., Box 7, Folder 7.
208
For a thorough history of Bell Labs, see Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American
Innovation (New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2012).
209
There were many scientists and engineers at Bell Labs who, themselves, were also artists. Early digital art at Bell
Labs includes the work of A. Michael Noll, Leon Harmon, and Kenneth C. Knowlton, who all worked on software
and computer art projects individually and collaboratively.
90
technology.”
210
As a whole, these invited artist residencies played a role in information
technology’s transition into the consumer sphere by incorporating the humanizing impulse of art
into the tech laboratory. Paik’s brief residency at Bell Labs marked another early experiment
with the computer interface, occurring in the same years as Engelbart’s GUI developments on
the West Coast.
While other early computer artists at Bell Labs such as A. Michael Nolls and Kenneth C.
Knowlton worked to demonstrate the usability of computer graphics for animating film, video,
and other visual forms, Paik’s digital art experiments exposed the indeterminacy at the core of
computational media. Initiating a series of unrealized and largely forgotten artistic experiments,
Paik was interested in creating machine-generated art built from the randomness of programming
code. During his residency, Paik experimented with three digital artworks: Digital Experiment in
Bell Labs (1967-1968), Etude 1 (unrealized), and Confused Rain (unrealized). Each of these
projects used the programming language FORTRAN to generate a time-based visual output
while simultaneously revealing the difficulty of the computer medium. Because these pieces are
unrealized, which may have been Paik’s intention all along, they demonstrate a vision of the
computer as unusable for a non-engineer. Working against racial-technological modalities of
visibility and efficiency idealized by computational imaginaries, Confused Rain highlights their
indeterminacies in Paik’s artistic explorations at Bell Labs.
Paik created Confused Rain, a piece depicting a disarrayed assemblage of letters from the
word “confuse” marked in black ink on white paper. The letters descend the page in random
clumps of C-O-N-F-U-S-E, resembling the fall of textual rain down a blank canvas.
211
William

210
Nam June Paik, “Untitled essay,” Nov. 30, 1966, Nam June Paik Paper Archives, Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Washington, DC, Box 12, Folder 14.
211
In a sense, Paik’s Confused Rain is a predecessor of the more commonly known visual of “code rain” popularized
by The Matrix. As a characteristic marker of the franchise, the green Matrix digital code (which, interestingly
91
Kaizen has likened this illegible graphic output to concrete poetry, similar to the work of Paik’s
fellow FLUXUS artists such as Jackson Mac Low and Alison Knowles.
212
Confused Rain uses
blank space, textual play, and aesthetic difficulty to shroud the art object in a veil of illegibility.
The signifier, “confuse,” broken up into its individual letters quite literally connects the graphic
output to its programmatic making, in which the represented word “confuse” also describes the
process of representing. Exposing the “lack of common sense” embedded within code-based
operations,
213
Paik highlights the indeterminacy of computational media while refusing any
interpretive refuge on the level of the screen. When attempting to make sense of his Confused
Rain piece, the viewer is confronted with the random assortment of letters, a type of “page not
found” artifact that does not disclose any artistic meaning based on screen content. Even Paik’s
invocation of rain, often associated with generation, productivity, and growth, is
counterintuitively associated with degeneration and disruption of representational meaning.
Rather than showing how computational media could be a model technology for a new frontier
of artistic exploration, Paik exposed the un-model characteristics of code. Demonstrating a failed
interface, in which artistic output was not rendered visible, predictable, or efficient, Confused
Rain encapsulates a moment in the history of digital art that is at odds with the computational
imaginaries of usability in the late 1960s.
By revealing the unseen operations of graphic representation, Confused Rain stages
familiar debates relevant to Asian/American cultural analysis within a computational
environment. Kandice Chuh has critiqued the discourse of “aboutness” (i.e. what is

enough, combines both Japanese and Western Latin typography) represents both the immersion and glitch of a
virtual reality environment.
212
William Kaizen, “Computer Participator: Situating Nam June Paik’s Work in Computing,” in Mainframe
Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts, ed. Hannah B. Higgins and Douglas
Kahn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 231.
213
Nam June Paik, Videa ’n’ Videology 1959–1973 (Syracuse, NY: Everson Museum of Art, 1997), 42.
92
Asian/American about this art?), which, for Chuh, encodes relations to labor and time. She
writes, “Aboutness is an instrumental analytic; it enables a quick determination of relevance that
is also a determination of time-worthiness, as in, is this lecture or book worth my time?”
214
The
discourse of “aboutness” functions as a technology of efficiency, described by Chuh as an
appealing “mechanism that helps to sort—and to sort quickly—that which is important and
‘relevant’ from the rest.”
215
By promoting the logic of efficiency via categorization, “aboutness”
is an epistemology of the age of information abundance. To ask what a thing is “about” functions
as an unevenly applied question across modern regimes of knowledge production. Chuh reminds
us that how, when, and where race signifies is often conditioned by the selective containing of
racial knowledges within institutions. In this sense, her analysis of “aboutness” resonates with
Tara McPherson’s specific concerns regarding information technological formations, a process
that “partitions race off from the specificity of [its] media forms.”
216

Thus, I consider Confused Rain to be an artwork at the intersection of race and
computation because it shores up the logic of efficiency, or lack thereof. Unlike Engelbart’s
successful GUI and demonstration of the oN-Line system, the inefficiency and slowness of
FORTRAN played a role in Paik’s abandonment of computational media as a platform for
artistic expression. In the early 1990s, Paik reflected on his frustrating experience at Bell Labs:
I thought digital technology, at its enfance [sic], was too slow for me. It took three
months to run my first computer generated movie BUG frEE. I thought, what if I work
for a year for a program and if the result does not please me??? . . . However the good old
analogue way the real time thing I could quickly modify, hijack and crush . . . and rise
again . . . [I]t was more human.
217

214
Kandice Chuh, “It’s Not About Anything,” Social Text 43, no. 4 (2014): 130.
215
Ibid, 131.
216
McPherson, 24.
217
Nam June Paik, “For a Deer,” in Het Binaire Tijdperk: Nieuwe Interacties, Charles Hirsch (Ghent, Belgium:
Ludion, 1992). Quoted in Zinman.
93
Paik’s struggle with early programming languages demonstrated how channeling artistic intent
through FORTRAN punched cards was a laborious task. These punched cards encoded data
through a series of input holes in 72 columns. Any error in the physical punching of holes could
result in re-typing the entire card. Decks of punched cards constituted a “program” or a set of
programs that could be used to execute a computational operation. Because of this error-prone
process, a computer programmer would often utilize coding sheets to sketch out the intended
function of each portion of punched card code. However, even with these steps, code often
contained “bugs” that broke the program. For Paik, this process of expressing an artistic vision
through FORTRAN was “too slow” and was difficult to keep bug free. In his reflection on his
artist residency at Bell Labs, Paik foregrounds the terms of speed and efficiency as his primary
issues with FORTRAN. Such a frustration led him to desire a way to “rise again,” a puzzling
phrase that shares language with both the description of J. Chuan Chu (who had “risen to
become a vice president of Honeywell Information Systems”
218
) and Peterson’s Japanese
Americans (“a minority that ha[d] risen above even prejudiced criticism”
219
). Paik’s comments
on the desire to overcome the programming limitations of FORTRAN fortify a “more human”
220

technology

as ideal. Yet despite Paik’s wish, Confused Rain remains a stubborn testament to the
computer’s “lack of common sense” and failure to deliver artistic meaning. Its formalization of
computation’s indeterminacy, signified by the meaninglessness of the word “confused,”
exceeded the rubric of the human that valorized computational and racial capacity. By
foregrounding its internal nonsensical operations and proclivity for error, Confused Rain
suggests that the desire for a “more human” computer was, ultimately, a manufactured myth of
the late 1960s and 70s based on the logic of efficiency. The designation of the “more human”

218
“Orientals.” Emphasis mine.
219
Peterson. Emphasis mine.
220
Paik, “For a Deer.”
94
might even be understood as the ultimate interface, in which the dream of assimilation promises
to resolve the historical production of social difference, whether technological or racial.
In conclusion, by engaging Paik’s digital arts archive as a case study, this chapter has
demonstrated the uses of racial critique within liberal capitalist histories that obfuscate its racial
content. Even without a visible ethnic subject, the computational concerns laid bare by Confused
Rain strongly resonate with the logic of Asian/American racial formation. Reflecting its
American capitalist values of individual empowerment, minority modeling shows that
liberalism’s terms of efficiency and representation are bound to the expansion of computational
and digital power in the 1960s and 70s. Yet, Confused Rain does not fit into the user-friendly
desire of technological assimilation, marking the computer’s transition from wartime machine to
personal device. The illegible desires of Confused Rain, then, index the need to trace critical
genealogies of “humanizing technology” that exceed dominant narratives of racial or
technological progress and development. If, as Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora contend,
“humanity as an aspirational figuration” functions as an “alibi of present-day racial
capitalism,”
221
then media and digital arts might offer ways to excavate new arrangements of our
sociotechnical system, which are never fully determined.

221
Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological
Futures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 4.
95
CHAPTER 3: INTEGRATION

Railroad Mythologies and the
Racial Histories of Early Silicon Valley

Jerry Yang, the software engineer and billionaire co-founder of Yahoo!, often narrates his
Asian/American success story through the historical metaphor of the railroad. In the five-part
PBS film series Asian Americans, Yang describes his experience in the competitive tech start-up
environment as “laying down the train tracks.”
222
To keep up with the fast-growing pace of
innovation, he tells the viewer that “as the train is running, you just gotta stay ahead of it.”
223
In
another article for CNN’s Asiaweek, journalist Belinda Rabano writes:
Jerry Yang once compared his job as the co-founder of Yahoo!, the world's top Internet
destination, to that of a lowly railroad worker. The Net, he said, is a "huge, fast-moving
train." And while that train rushes forward, Yang and his fellow Yahoo-ites “are just half
a mile ahead, laying the track so that it doesn't go off the cliff.”
224

In Yang’s telling, he recounts his own pioneering status in 1990s Silicon Valley by invoking the
railroad as a mediating device, in which the history of US industrial expansion and development
in the 19
th
and early 20
th
century, for him, are linked to the internet corporatization of the late
20
th
century. Against the abstraction of the “The Net,” the metaphor of a “fast-moving train”
concretizes the dot-com industry’s obsession with the speed of innovation, development, and
progress.
Although Yang does not make it explicit in either railroad metaphor, Yang’s reference to
the “lowly” railroad worker imbues a racial quality to his description of Silicon Valley. His
metaphor invokes the abstraction of ethnic identity to connect his elite position as a Chinese
American tech entrepreneur with the manual labor of disenfranchised Chinese railroad workers,

222
Asian Americans, directed by Geeta Gandbhir and Grace Lee (Arlington, VA: PBS, 2020).
223
Ibid.
224
Belinda Rabano, “Storming Asia,” Asiaweek, Nov. 17, 2000.
http://www.cnn.com/ASIANOW/asiaweek/technology/2000/1117/acom.yahoo.html
96
whose bodies were racialized as machinic, expendable, and inhuman. In the racist words of
California Senator John Miller in 1881 describing Chinese coolies, the workers were “machine-
like ... of obtuse nerve, but little affected by heat or cold, wiry, sinewy, with muscles of iron;
they are automatic engines of flesh and blood.”
225
Not only were Chinese railroad laborers
dehumanized, but they were specifically racialized in technological terms—a hyperscrutiny of
the mechanized body that are noticeably absence from the abstract, immaterial fantasies of
Yang’s cyberspace era. Thus, Yang’s deployment of the metaphorical railroad also attempts to
smooth over incommensurate relations between Asian subjects and technology—sometimes as
the exploited subject (i.e. Chinese coolie “machine”) and other times as the beneficiaries of
technological modernity (i.e. elite Chinese American tech entrepreneur).
For Yang, the railroad concretizes both a so-called Silicon Valley success story and an
Asian/American success story. On two seemingly different registers, the past is revived to
reinforce a narrative of development. Yet, I contend that these two registers, one racial and one
technological, are not distinct but are rather intertwined. That is, Yang’s railroad metaphor
demonstrates how myths of racial and technological progress are conjoined and mutually
reinforcing in the era of information capitalism.
Although Yang’s “fast-moving train” refers to the internet decades of start-up culture and
dot-com entrepreneurship, this railroad mythology played a crucial role in the early histories of
the Silicon Valley in midcentury. Railroad mythology offered a narrative resource for an
emerging industry of information technologies. This chapter examines the mediating function of
railroad mythologies, specifically by situating this cultural and technological nostalgia within the
formation of Asian/America and the project of U.S. settler colonial capitalism. While cultural
historians of technology, such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch, have traced a link between the train of

225
Quoted in Iris Chang, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History (New York, NY: Penguin,s 2004), 130.
97
industrial capitalism and the computer of information capitalism, the railroad also indexes
relational histories of race, labor, capital, and empire. What if we took the railroad not only as a
technological artifact but as a sociohistorical form, encoding relations between alien labor,
indigenous land, and white property that constitute what Iyko Day clearly described as the “basis
and objective of settler colonialism?”
226
How did Silicon Valley narratives and imaginaries draw
from and re-innovate these logics?
227

This chapter argues that mythologies of the railroad have mediated dominant
historiographies of Silicon Valley since its early inception, conjoining narratives of racial and
technological progress and uplift as a “natural” operation.
228
If the railroad marks the
incorporation of Asian labor and indigenous peoples and land into American industrial
capitalism, then Silicon Valley functions as an “E-railroad,” updating these social dynamics for
the era of information capitalism. Specifically, I investigate the corporate archives of Fairchild
Semiconductor (FSC), one of the earliest tech start-ups on the west coast. Famous for making the
“integrated circuit” for computers, Fairchild built a manufacturing plant in 1965 in the Navajo
Nation, an experimental site that became a model for Asian outsourced labor. In this chapter, I
analyze the rhetoric of the railroad in a wide range of Fairchild corporate materials such as
publicity documents, photographs, journalistic writings, employee magazines, executive memos,
and so forth. More than just a simple metaphor, railroad mythologies bolstered ideas of linear
progress of modernity, westward expansion, and national unity that also informed how Silicon
Valley understood its technical achievements in relation to American society. By suturing these

226
Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016), 31.
227
Infrastructurally, Tung-Hui Hu and Nicole Starosielski contend that new media networks, such as fiber-optic
cables, are layered onto older routes of empire. Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2015), 2; Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
228
Here, I build from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept of “remediation,” to describe how older and
newer media, as artifacts and industries, transform each other in reciprocal ways. Jay David Bolter and Richard
Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
98
qualities into the abstract and imperceptible dimensions of information technologies, railroad
mythologies helped frame new computational and digital artifacts as natural and beneficial,
rather than threatening, components of American society, as Silicon Valley began to transition
from its military-research focus to a consumer-oriented market.
Just as the U.S. railroad corporations exploited Chinese Americans and Native Americans
within its technological regime of racial capitalism, Silicon Valley also incorporated
Asian/American and Native American labor into its infrastructure of global manufacturing and
labor. However, unlike the railway companies that propagated dehumanizing myths about
indigenous peoples and Asian laborers, Fairchild Semiconductor on the surface celebrated its
Asian and Native tech workers, featuring many of these faces of diversity in corporate magazines
and in personal interest stories. Under the guise of corporate “benefaction,” these racial histories
were not hidden from view but were quite openly embraced—a celebrated multiculturalism. To
be clear, the transformed perceptions of Asian/Americans and Native Americans do not mark a
smooth narrative of racial progress and assimilation but rather index the shifting orders of what
Jodi Melamed would call a “new racial capitalism.”
229
The explicit corporate embrace of racial
diversity reflected the ways in which Silicon Valley’s liberal tenets were interwoven with its
techno-optimism.
I turn to Asian/American literature and art to theorize what I call “Asian/American media
archaeology,” an aesthetic method that challenges dominant fantasies and perceptions of
technological progress and reveals their deep, layered, and imperceptible histories and structures.
Alongside analysis of Silicon Valley archives, I examine Chinese/American media artist Zhi
Lin’s Chinaman’s Chance on Promontory Summit: Golden Spike Celebration, 12:30 PM, 10
th

229
Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota, 2011.
99
May 1869, Filipinx/American poet Janice Lobo Sapigao’s microchips for millions, and
Korean/American media artist Ahree Lee’s Pattern : Code. Ultimately, I argue that these texts
embrace media archeological aesthetics to reveal Silicon Valley to be a racial and settler colonial
form, buried by the high-tech industry’s liberal myths of racial and technological progress. If one
of the primary functions of technological determinism is to “naturalize” these narratives of
progress, then Asian/American media archeology enacts a process of denaturalization, in which
what is deemed “natural” is revealed to be an encoding of racialized and settler colonial visions
of land and labor.

Asian/American Media Archaeology

Figure 3.1: Still from Zhi Lin’s Chinaman’s Chance on Promontory Summit: Golden Spike
Celebration, 12:30 PM, 10
th
May 1869, Kimball Art Center, Park City, Utah.

100
Zhi Lin’s Chinaman’s Chance on Promontory Summit: Golden Spike Celebration, 12:30
PM, 10
th
May 1869 is a time-based video installation of historical remediation. It critically
reenacts a famous scene in US railroad history: the Golden Spike Ceremony at Promontory
Summit, Utah on May 10
th
1869 photographed by Andrew J. Russell. By critically re-
dramatizing Russell’s photograph, titled “East and West Shaking Hands at Laying of Last Rail,”
Chinaman’s Chance reproduces much of the same composition of the original—the two trains
meeting on a railroad, the assembly of men gathering in front of the train and on top, the
noticeable champagned being raised in the air as celebration, and so forth. Among these
compositional similarities, Lin’s primarily media artistic intervention becomes much more
apparent and compelling: he turns the railroad men’s gaze away from the camera. The slow
video depicts the men assembling in front of and climbing on top of the train, reminiscent of the
Russell’s photograph. This reverse perspective reveals a glimpse of the audience gathered as
well, ready to applaud and photograph the scene.
Figure 3.2: Andrew J Russell, “East and West Shaking Hands at Laying Last Rail,
Chinese Railroad Workers Collection, Stanford Libraries, Stanford, CA.

101
Important to American industrial history, the Golden Spike Ceremony at Promontory
Summit, Utah on May 10
th
1869 is most famous for uniting the Central Pacific and Union Pacific
railroads, culminating in the construction of the first transcontinental railroad. Also known as the
“champagne photo,” Russell’s photograph documents the camera-facing gaze of white
entrepreneurs and laborers, effectively establishing a sense of celebratory ownership and
accomplishment over the train, the railway, and the land. Industry entrepreneurs crowd in front
of and on top of the train, facing the camera with stoic looks of triumph. Russell’s photograph
symbolizes national unity and progress, concretized by the train technology itself. The crowding
of indistinguishable white male entrepreneurs in front of the train visually connects the two
trains, in which the gap between the trains is hidden from camera view. The small frame of
Russell’s camera encapsulates the immense scale of the U.S. railroad industry, visibly
overflowing yet densely concentrated in this photographic frame. Altogether, “East and West
Shaking Hands” documents the composite forces of technological achievement, American
industrial capitalism, and land-based expansion. Furthermore, Russell’s “East and West Shaking
Hands” demonstrates how the formal elements of photographic composition can reflect
historiographical concerns. David Eng puts this problem succinctly: “While more than ten
thousand Chinese American male laborers were exploited for the building of the western portion
of Central Pacific track, no one appears in the photograph commemorating its completion.”
230

Thus, the photograph, quite literally, presents a historical frame that foregrounds white labor and
corporate achievement while leaving out of view exploited Asian labor and the ongoing practices
of settler colonial dispossession.

230
David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2001), 36.
102
At the Golden Spike Ceremony was railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, who hammered
down the golden spike (and memorably missed the mark in his attempt) in a performative gesture
of commemoration. As historians of the digital have noted, Stanford’s role at Promontory
Summit connects rail money to Stanford University, one of the research institutional centers of
what would later become known as Silicon Valley. Dominant histories of digital technology
often remark on how Stanford University not only educated but also connected many of the key
white male scientists and engineers who shaped the burgeoning tech industry, including the
founders of Fairchild Semiconductor and its many corporate off-shoots.
Chinaman’s Chance reorients the otherwise glorifying visual mythologies of the original
photograph. If the frontal, posed perspective in “East and West Shaking Hands” conveys notions
of industrial capitalist triumph, national unity, and technological progress, then the reversed gaze
invokes a sense of exclusion and occlusion. Placing the viewer behind the ceremonious posing of
the men in front and on top of the two trains, the train appears to be a type of physical border,
separating the viewer from the celebration happening out of the sightline. What was perceived as
a scene of corporate conviviality is then transformed into an atmosphere of distance and absence,
disinviting the viewer. Lin’s artwork transmutes technological progress into a sense of alienation.
If Jerry Yang’s railroad metaphor exemplifies Silicon Valley’s forward-moving notions of
development, promoting the ethos of “stay[ing] ahead of [the train tracks],”
231
then Chinaman’s
Chance orients us to the perspective from “behind” the tracks. This view foregrounds the plains
and land not as the photographic background or passive setting but rather as the central subject of
technology history.
Lin’s media art illustrates the aesthetic and formal qualities of what I call
“Asian/American media archaeology.” Scholars such as Jussi Parikka, Wolfgang Ernst, and

231
Asian Americans (PBS).
103
Friedrich Kittler theorize media archeology as a method that understands the “newness” of
digital artifacts as remediations of technical forms of the past. Critiquing any teleological
account of progress and development, media archeology attends to the contingencies of deep
histories and forms that constitute the digital present. In Parikka’s terms, media archeology is
concerned with “how we understand and know…our technical world around us that is often
structured as ‘imperceptible.’”
232
In other words, media archeology attends to the invisible
substrates of technical forms, software code, media-specific logics, and other material and
historical layers of media that produce the visible effect of digital aesthetics and screen cultures.
While media archaeology often ignores inquiries into questions of race, gender, colonialism, and
social power, at its core, it wrinkles any smooth narrative of technological progress, myths
lodged at the core of Silicon Valley’s corporate formation. Bringing media archeology into
conversation with Asian/Americanist critique, Asian/American media archeology centers the
sociohistorical processes of racialization and settler colonialism as the imperceptible code
underlying the digital present and Silicon Valley narratives. Despite media archeology’s
insistence on media-specificity that risks eliding social critique, its attention to the remediation of
the past (as never really past) allows us to read into the deep histories of Silicon Valley’s visions
of innovation and forward-moving progress.
Asian/American media archaeology reconceptualizes the histories and forms of digital
and information technologies from the perspective of the “imperceptible.” By imperceptible, I
am referring to the peoples who constituted the invisible labor networks and infrastructures that
make information technologies possible. By recalibrating historical inquiry from this vantage
point, Asian/American media archaeology does not seek to recover or insert minoritarian
subjects into a dominant history of technology. Rather, this aesthetic approach unearths

232
Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012), 152.
104
alternative mode for perceiving the histories and logics of our technical worlds. Further,
Asian/American media archaeology attend to what David Eng calls the “non-visible.”
233
For him,
the non-visible slips away “from the dialectics of visibility and invisibility that governs the
politics of recognition, the logics of the empirical, and the temporal march of historical progress
from past and present.”
234
Aligning with the methodological ethos of media archaeology, the
aesthetic attention to the non-visible in Chinaman’s Chance re-orients the terms of technology
historiographies.
Elizabeth Freeman reminds us that time arts are “a mode of both close reading and
historiography, an optical and visceral unconscious encoding what is at once lost and
foreclosed.”
235
Time arts function not simply as representational media but are deeply perceptual,
shaping the terms of knowledge formation by activating history’s unconscious. Through the
formal aesthetics of time-based media, Chinaman’s Chance abstains from visually including the
Chinese workers as a form of representational justice, refusing to satisfy the viewer with
historical recovery. Lin’s media art implicitly invokes a queer historical method that focuses on
what Heather Love would call an “affective history.”
236
Historical interpretation is filled with
messy desires, as we reach across time to encounter historical subjects in the “past.” Chinaman’s
Chance refuses to satiate the desire to “see” racial subjects and attunes our perceptions in other
ways. In the wake of realist visual references to Chinese railroad workers, Chinaman’s Chance
does not offer an aesthetic of recuperation but rather of reconfiguration, changing how we
understand the links between race, labor, technology, and progress.

233
David L. Eng develops his idea of the “non-visible” by analyzing Rea Tajiri’s experimental documentary History
and Memory. David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 172.
234
Ibid, 184.
235
Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), xviii.
236
Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2007), 31.
105
Remediating the Golden Spike Ceremony in which Leland Stanford was the keynote, the
reversed perspective of Chinaman’s Chance invokes a connection between the railroad and
Silicon Valley. Its depiction of the open landscape as central to the ceremony foregrounds a
relationship to land that is often buried in dematerialized histories of digital technology. Lin’s
artwork resonates with what Manu Karuka has termed “railroad colonialism,” in which the
corporate and national interests of the U.S. nation state forced intimacies between Chinese
laborers and indigenous peoples and land.
237
By reinforcing what Karuka has called the dual
ideologies of “disappearing natives on the one hand and threatening aliens on the other,”
238
the
construction of the US railroad is a project of visual mythmaking, a process that perceptually
obscures the role of Asian labor and indigenous presence. Asian/American media archaeology,
thus, reveals the railroad to be not only a technological object but a sociohistorical form, one that
indexes uneven Asian and indigenous structural relations.

Mythologies in the Machine: Integrated Circuits
Published in 1957, Roland Barthes’s Mythologies outlines the force of mythology as a
formal-historical schematic across a range of peculiar quotidian things, from ornamental
cookery, photography, stripteases, plastic, among others. Operating as a type of taxonomy of
postwar mass culture, the first half of Barthes’ Mythologies develops a collection of
contemporary “myths” embedded within a variety of everyday encounters. These myths differed
from a conventional understanding of myths as a version of grand narrative, seemingly larger
than life. Instead, for Barthes, the power of these myth objects is precisely in their ubiquity, and

237
Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2019), xiv.
238
Ibid, 8.
106
the role of ideological critique would be to expose the schematic operations of these myths and
its cultural power.
In his preface, he admits to the reader that these “heterogeneous” reflections all contain a
meditation on these objects’ “naturalness.”
239
What unifies these essays is an attention to the
operations of the “natural,” or the ideological valence of what is perceived as “natural” within
bourgeois culture. In his diagnosis of the meaning-making schematics inherent to myths, Barthes
suggests that myths often function as a translation of paradoxes or contradictions into an
aesthetic form. One example he provides is the “jet-man,…a new race in aviation, nearer to the
robot than the hero.”
240
Illustrative as a “proof of modernity,” Barthes writes that the figure of
the aviator in the jet age embodies the “paradox [in which] an excess of speed turns into
repose.”
241
Encapsulating the “mythology of speed as an experience, of space devoured, of
intoxicating motion,”
242
the jet-man signifies the phenomenon of volition without physical
movement, speed without bodily motion, and ultimately, a splitting of perceptual phenomenon
from material reality. Encased within a pilot cockpit, the jet-man becomes emblematic of a
paradox of technological modernity and the mythmaking powers that cohere it, in which the
body is both material (both to time and space) and immaterial (unmoored from time and space).
As a meditation on the aesthetics of acceleration, Barthes’ description of the jet-man provides an
entryway into thinking about the mythologies associated with an emerging digital age, which
often promise a fantasy of dematerialization from embodied reality. We might consider Barthes’s

239
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York, NY: The Noonday Press, 1991), 10.
240
Ibid, 71.
241
Ibid.
242
Ibid.
107
jet-man as a proto-figure of what Margaret Morse calls “de-realized space,”
243
a condition
foundational to the promises of digital, information, and virtual technologies.
The quotidian scope of Barthes’ conception of mythologies is useful for thinking about
an emerging information technology industry that would become known as Silicon Valley.
Although the early days of Silicon Valley primarily serviced the military, the development of
faster, cheaper, and more powerful microelectronics allowed information technologies to
gradually transition into a class of everyday objects. D.J. Huppatz reminds us that for Barthes,
…everyday objects were no longer neutral but objects saturated with latent meaning; in
fact, their very appearance of neutrality was part of the naturalizing, dehistoricizing
impulse of the new consumer culture. Mythologies inaugurated a critical practice that
acknowledged the increasing dematerialization of material objects, and their mediation
by the image-world of glossy magazines, advertising posters and mass communications.
But more than this, for Barthes, designed objects were metaphoric vehicles of collective
desire.
244

With the introduction of new technologies in the postwar era, technical artifacts were not simply
neutral social objects but were archives of social desires, hopes, and fears. In their articulation of
“technological visions,” Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas suggest that “technological
development is one of the primary sites through which we can chart the desires and concerns of a
given social context and the preoccupations of particular moments in history.”
245
Barthes study
of mythologies maps onto critical race, feminist, and queer approaches to studying histories of
media technologies, highlighting critical strategies for investigating the “neutral” or “natural”
status of technical media. If, as Tara McPherson suggests, there is “something particular to the

243
Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, Cyberculture (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press,
1998), 197.
244
D.J. Huppatz, “Roland Barthes, Mythologies,” Design and Culture: The Journal of Design Studies Forum 3, no.
1 (2015): 88. Emphasis mine.
245
Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas, “Introduction: Technological Visions and the Rhetoric of the New,” in
Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New Technologies, ed. Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas,
and Sandra J. Rokeach (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2004), 2.
108
very forms of electronic culture that…partitions race off from the specificity of media forms,”
246

then this “something particular” might be what we call the mythology of the digital. The
discourses of the “natural” has played a central role in narrativizing and imagining the
imperceptible and invisible dimensions of an enveloping world of data, and as such, what is
deemed “natural” impacts the organization of sociotechnical worlds and their histories.
Founded in 1957, the same year as the publication of Barthes’ Mythologies, Fairchild
Semiconductor was one of the earliest start-up corporations in Silicon Valley. Fairchild
developed the “integrated circuit,” a set of microelectronic transistors placed onto a silicon
semiconductor or chip. The technical achievements surrounding microelectronic innovation led
to what we might consider “mythologies” of the integrated circuit, the most famous one being
“Moore’s Law.” In 1965, Fairchild Semiconductor’s Research Director Gordon Moore
prophesized the exponential growth of computational power per year due to the increased
processing abilities of microelectronics.
247
In the technical terms of silicon engineering and
design, integration refers to the harmonious inclusion of increasingly large numbers of transistor.
This expanded the processing power of computation while also cut down costs for manufacturing
and design.
248
In other words, the engineered capabilities of integration on the level of
microelectronics facilitated imaginaries of technological development, moving at an accelerated
pace.

246
Tara McPherson, “U.S Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX,” Lisa Nakamura
and Peter Chow-White, Eds. Race After the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 24.
247
Gordon Moore, “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits,” Electronics 38, no. 8: (1965).
248
Ibid.
109

Beyond its technical dimensions, the integrated circuit reflected the logic and discourse
of “integration” that corresponded to the racial liberalism and emerging multiculturalism of the
American midcentury. In his law, Moore proclaimed that “integrated electronics will make
electronic techniques more generally available throughout all of society, performing many
functions that presently are done inadequately by other techniques or not done at all.”
249
During
these same years, accompanying these new developments in the mediascape were large
demographic changes ushered in by the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965. Signed into law by
President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Hart-Cellar Act abolished the National Quote System that
previously limited immigration and allowed for many new immigrants from Asia, Africa, and
Latin America to enter the United States. Many of this wave of immigrants were recruited

249
Ibid.
Figure 3.3: Design of an integrated circuit. Brochure for Fairchild Semiconductor’s Shiprock
Facility. September 6, 1969. Shustek Archives, Computer History Museum, Fremont, CA.

110
scientific and technical laborers to “ready the US for a postwar global restructuring.”
250
As
Christopher T. Fan has noted, “the system of professional preferences at the heart of the 1965
Act, and subsequently expanded through the H-1B visa program it established, was originally
intended to address a shortage of technical and scientific labor.”
251
Alongside the rapidly
changing technological landscape were also major shifts in the racial landscape of the United
States due to the influx of immigrants from around the world. As discussed in the introduction, if
we juxtapose the two moments of 1965—Moore’s Law of 1965 and the Hart-Cellar Immigration
Act of 1965—we can see the convergence of two similar visions of the “new”: computational
technologies and a diverse technical workforce that could both be integrated “throughout all of
society.”
252

The sense of acceleration toward the “new” reflected early Silicon Valley’s optimism
toward electronic technologies in the 1950s and 60s. Take, for instance, a 1969 cover of
Fairchild Camera and Instrument’s employee magazine Views, which illustrates five black-and-
white portraits dynamically rendered using an exposed zoom effect. The cover of this internal
corporate publication depicts five nameless employees within Fairchild: a young white woman in
the front, two white men and a Native American man dressed in office clothing, and a brown or
black man racially indistinguishable because of the zoom blur. The exposure technique makes
the five faces appear layered, a photographic abstraction in which the bodies and faces are
vaguely distinct but also intimately connected. During the late 1960s while the electronics
corporation continued to expand its Silicon Valley division named Fairchild Semiconductor,
these faces functioned as a representative sample of the company’s diverse employee base. The

250
Christopher T. Fan, “Melancholy Transcendence: Ted Chiang and Asian American Postracial Form,” Post45
(2014).
251
Ibid.
252
Moore.
111
faces blur together and conjure a feeling of sameness and connectedness, ultimately resembling
an abstract prototype for a multicultural corporate “family.” Invoking the exponential growth of
microelectronics research and development that fueled Silicon Valley, the zoom effect conveys a
sense of speed and futurity, personified by the five faces in blurring motion.

The Fairchild employee publication Views served internal purposes as well as the goals of
public relations. Currently housed in the Shustek Archives at the Computer History Museum in
Fremont, CA, Views is part of the Fairchild Semiconductor collection that contains a wide array
of corporate documents and ephemera, photographs, public relations brochures, magazines, and
other materials. For a company that built its success on technical research and development,
Fairchild made extra efforts to highlight the cultural dimensions of its company. Fairchild’s
Figure 3.4: Cover of 1969 Views, Fairchild Camera and Instrument
employee magazine, Computer History Museum, Fremont, CA.

112
archive reveals how a focus on human-interest topics went hand in hand with the corporation’s
technical and research concerns.
The cover of Views illustrates this focus on people that became integral to Fairchild’s
corporate strategy during its pivot to global expansion. Underneath the shiny veneer of techno-
dreams was an emerging transnational network of expendable electronics manufacturing labor.
Fairchild was one of the first US corporations to outsource its manufacturing labor to East Asia,
initiating a transpacific infrastructure of Silicon Valley. The company constructed plants in Hong
Kong, South Korea, Okinawa, mainland China, the Philippines, and other international locations
from the 1960s to 1980s. As the 1975 summer issue of Fairchild’s employee magazine Horizons
states, “tracking Fairchild’s construction is similar to a lesson in geography.”
253
Yet, the
corporate history behind outsourced labor in Asian nations traces back to Fairchild’s insourcing
labor in the Navajo Nation. Building a small manufacturing site on land in Shiprock, NM in
1965, the same year the company expanded into Hong Kong, Fairchild turned to the Navajo
Nation as an experimental site that became a model for Asian outsourced labor. Employee
magazines such as Views captured the corporation’s engagement with racial, gendered, and
national difference. The magazine, along with Horizons, Leadwire, and Microwire, became a
venue where employees could read about diverse topics such as Lunar New Year festivities
celebrated by the Hong Kong electronics workers, the Navajo sites’ company rodeo,
Christmastime philanthropic sponsorship of children in need, a brief history of Korea during
Fairchild’s expansion into South Korea, the first black woman foreman at Fairchild
Semiconductor, and much more. In addition to a “lesson in geography,” these corporate materials
reflect a lesson on race during the race-liberalism of the 1960s.

253
“New Addresses for Fairchild,” Horizons 4, no. 2 (1975).
113
Railroad Mythologies and the Racialization of Microelectronics
In the early years of Silicon Valley, the new industry of information technology narrated
its own emergence by referencing an older technology: the railroad. A corporate memo on the
Shiprock project states:
Aside from the military technology, the first major industry of the white man to move
into the reservation was the westward-pushing Santa Fe railroad. It was an agonizing
period for the Navajos along the line. As the railroad moved across through Gallup,
Winslow and Flagstaff, the government awarded huge blocks of Navajo land to the
builders. Eventually, however, things were to change, and the railroad grew to be one of
the largest employers of Navajos.
254

Situating Fairchild as a successor of the Santa Fe railroad, the document romanticizes corporate
benefaction. This description alludes to the settler colonial practices of the railroad industry by
referring to the “huge blocks of Navajo land” that was acquired by the government-backed Santa
Fe railroad. However, this memo then shifts to emphasize industrial change, in which “the
railroad grew to be one of the largest employers of Navajos.”
255
Through technological
determinism, in which the “railroad” functions as an agent of social history, Fairchild’s reference
to the Santa Fe railroad in the Navajo Nation suggests a narrative of progress that supposedly
resolves past injustices, such as the theft of indigenous land, through the offer of employment.
Espousing a myth of technological transformation by drawing from the history of the railroad,
this Fairchild document narrates its corporate practices by harkening back to the perceived
“social good” of its industrial predecessors. It demonstrates how technological determinism can
function as a form of racial liberalism. They stitch together a narrative of progress while
obscuring the railroad’s structural logic of land-based expansion and indigenous dispossession
that characterized its development.

254
“Memorandum Re: Shiprock (Prepared by Arnold and Palmer),” Shustek Archives, Box 101, X5492.2010 (1/3),
Computer History Museum, Fremont, CA.
255
Ibid.
114
In The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth
Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch contends that the American railway industry not only produced
a new infrastructure of transportation but fundamentally reconfigured the perceptual field of time
and space in the national consciousness. Schivelbusch’s foundational text on the impact of the
European and American railways on 19
th
-century visual culture conceptualizes the train as a
transformative technology of motion, in which the aesthetic of acceleration shaped experiences
of space and time, and thus, land and history. Characterized by the unique sensation of velocity
achieved while stationery, Schivelbusch contends that the train inaugurated the “ability to
perceive the discrete, as it rolls past the window, indiscriminately.”
256
This visual aesthetic of
motion generated a new perception of the environment during industrial capitalism. For
Schivelbusch, the locomotive destroyed a sense of space, collapsing the experience of distance
through the mechanized and systematized notion of train time.
257
Scholars of media and
technology also trace this aesthetic of acceleration to the technical successors of the train. Like
Barthes’ “jet-man,” Vanessa Schwartz identifies this fluidity of motion within the “jet age
aesthetic” of media and mass culture, which laid the groundwork for experiences of virtual
motion in the digital age.
258
Tara McPherson ascribes this quality of “volitional mobility” to the
sense of liveness inherent in surfing the internet.
259
In other words, the railway laid the
groundwork for the perceptual experience of contemporary information culture.
After he describes the “destruction” of space vis-à-vis railway speed and mobility,
Schivelbusch depicts the American railways as a technology for “open[ing] up, for the first time,

256
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth
Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014).
257
Ibid.
258
Vanessa Schwartz, Jet Age Aesthetic: The Glamour of Media in Motion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2020).
259
Tara McPherson, “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web,” in New Media / Old Media: A History and Theory
Reader, ed. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Anna Watkins Fisher, and Thomas Keenan (New York, NY: Routledge,
2006), 200.
115
vast regions of previously unsettled wilderness.”
260
Although he does not explicitly make this
connection, his description of the American railway as an “opening” of land alludes to a settler
colonial capitalist imaginary. Importantly, Schivelbusch emphasizes how the railway was a
technology that not only transported products but also actively functioned as a “producer of
territories, in the same way that mechanized agriculture became a producer of goods.”
261

Through land maps and grants, the railway transformed landscapes into geographic space, a
cartographic process that Walter Mignolo has attributed to the epistemic violence of
colonization.
262
By rendering land as an “unsettled wilderness,” or a terra nullius fantasy, the
American railroad promoted an ideology of progress and cultivation that installed a civilizing
spirit as inherent to the mechanical locomotive engine.
Further, Schivelbusch makes an important observation contrasting American and
European railway systems: “the American railroad did not proceed in a straight line through
natural obstacles, but ran around them like a river.”
263
He clarifies that this deference to the
landscape was not due to any romantic idealization of nature but rather because “labor was
expensive [while] land [was] practically worthless.”
264
Rather than build through environmental
obstacles, such as rivers and mountains, Schivelbusch describes how the American railway,
unlike the straightness of the European railways, deferred to the curvature and unpredictable
paths embedded within natural environments. Thus, the geographic imaginary of the railroad was
not only constructed by an ideology of land expansion but also driven by an economic logic
codified by a supposed “respect” for the natural. The imaginary of uncultivated land was

260
Schivelbusch.
261
Ibid.
262
Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 2003), 259.
263
Schivelbusch.
264
Ibid.
116
enmeshed with the financial calculation of labor cost. The nonlinear pathways of American
railways demonstrates how US railroad corporations could strategically develop its technology
and infrastructure by minimizing labor costs while simultaneously preserving the romanticized
natural landscape. This attention to the nonlinear and curvature expansion of the American
railway exemplifies the experimental capacities of corporatized technological innovation, in
which progress and development were not linear processes but rather adaptive and responsive.
For Schivelbusch, embracing the “natural” as central to—rather than antithetical to—
technological development was one of American industry’s defining traits.
Fairchild’s interest in the Navajo Nation and peoples often employed the language of the
“natural.” In a 1969 brochure touting the ongoing “success” of its manufacturing plant in
Shiprock, NM, Fairchild proclaims:
Building electronic devices, transistors, and integrated circuits also requires [a] personal
commitment to perfection. And so, it was very natural that when Fairchild
Semiconductor needed to expand its operations, its managers looked at an area of highly
skilled people living in and around Shiprock, New Mexico, a city of 8000 located in the
northeast corner of the vast Navajo lands.
265

The term “natural” used in the Shiprock Dedication Commemorative Brochure frames the longer
historical traditions of Navajo textile crafts and weaving as an intuitive prerequisite to the
precision required of digital microelectronic labor. Lisa Nakamura has described Fairchild’s
fascination with Navajo peoples, specifical Navajo women as, effectively, “blurring the line
between wage labor and creative-cultural labor.”
266
Situating the integrated circuit as a natural
progression from the tradition of Navajo textile work, Fairchild represented the “labor of
semiconductor manufacture as a ‘labor of love’ or, more accurately, as agentive or creative race-

265
“Shiprock Dedication Commemorative Brochure,” Shustek Archives, Box 101, X5184.2009, folder 102725169,
Computer History Museum, Fremont, CA. Emphasis mine.
266
Lisa Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronics Manufacture,”
American Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2014): 931.
117
labor rather than as alienated labor.”
267
Far from a race-neutral technical artifact, the silicon-
based integrated circuit was fused with mythologies of the American Indian, who were deemed
“naturally” suited for digital work.
Fairchild Semiconductor embraced race-liberal ideas to position the new American
industry of Silicon Valley as a leader in both technical and social innovation. Take, for instance,
a 1969 article published in the Fairchild employee magazine Views titled “Return of the Red
Man.” In this piece, Don C. Hoefler, the journalist who coined the phrase “Silicon Valley,”
268

reflected on his impressions at Shiprock. He began the article with a comment on “social
justice”:
Today’s Troubled American, bearing generations of guilt for the racial injustices
practiced by his forefathers, presently focuses on the most vocal of the downtrodden
minorities, those with black skins. But he occasionally must face the unpleasant fact that
those of yellow and red tint also have received their share of the white man’s malice.

One firm which has done much to improve the lot of both of those latter ethnic groups is
Fairchild Semiconductor, and that firm’s pioneering work with the American Indian may
prove to be a landmark in the contribution of American industry to social justice.
269

In this article, Hoefler situates Fairchild Semiconductor as a corporate benefactor, uplifting
“those of yellow and red tint.”
270
This phrase was a crude reference to Fairchild’s
Asian/American and Native American employees who worked in various technical and
manufacturing roles beginning in the 1960s. Hoefler contrasted Asian/Americans and Native
Americans to “those with black skins,” and told a story of racial progress, a tale of improvement
for those who have suffered the “white man’s malice.”
271
The article continues to position the
Fairchild microelectronics plant as an opportunity, supposedly long overdue. Hoefler quotes the

267
Ibid, 938.
268
David Laws, “Who Named Silicon Valley,” Computer History Museum, Jan. 7, 2015,
https://computerhistory.org/blog/who-named-silicon-valley/.
269
Don C. Hoefler, “Return of the Red Man,” Views XVI, 1969, Shustek Archives, Box 1, X4348.2008, Computer
History Museum, Fremont, CA. Emphasis mine.
270
Ibid.
271
Ibid.
118
plant manager at Shiprock Paul W. Discoll: “Here at last was a chance for the Navajo to show
the world that they had been wronged, and all they needed was an opportunity to show their
capabilities.”
272
More than simply another corporate manufacturing site, Hoefler framed the
Shiprock plant as a racial experiment and opportunity, to escape the historical conditions of
“downtrodden minorities.”
273

Linking “those of yellow and red tint” under the same schema of racial improvement,
“The Return of the Red Man” suggests that there was a commonality between the injuries and
injustices faced by Asian/Americans and Native Americans in ways that supposedly differed
from “those with black skins.”
274
Written a few years after William Peterson introduced Japanese
Americans as a minority “success story,”
275
Hoefler saw both minority groups through a co-eval
lens of social rehabilitation, despite their asymmetrical histories of settler colonialism and race-
based exclusion. In this sense, he portrays Fairchild Semiconductor, and the American tech
industry at large, as a model laboratory of race-liberal practice.
Corporate photography played an important role in Fairchild’s own narration. What’s
fascinating to me is that Fairchild hired renown railroad photographer Richard Steinheimer in
1962 to spearhead the company’s internal photography department. Revered as the “Ansel
Adams of railroad photography,” Steinheimer is part of a lineage of industry professionals such
as Andrew Russell, who photographed the Golden Spike Ceremony previously discussed in my
talk. As a celebrated photographer of industrial capitalism, Steinheimer’s railroad photography
romanticized the American West as seemingly vacant, expansive, and open frontier land,
anchored by the visual referent of a technologically powerful and majestic train. In an oral

272
Ibid.
273
Ibid.
274
Ibid.
275
William Peterson, “Success Story, Japanese-American Style,” New York Times, January 9, 1966.
119
Figure 3.5: Richard Steinheimer, Westbound Train to Los Angeles, 1952.
Estate of Richard Steinheimer, Robert Mann Gallery.

history interview, Steinheimer accounts that his photographic feats in the field of railroad
photography became justification for his leadership of a tech startup photography department.
276

Playing a role in documenting the railroad industry’s transition from steam to diesel, Steinheimer
was a supposed expert at capturing an industry in transition.

Unlike his railroad photography that mostly featured technology, the images that came
out of Steinheimer’s photography department at Fairchild primarily featured people. With the
transnational expansion of Fairchild’s reach, the photographs imagined the Silicon Valley startup
as, in a sense, a corporate family. Steinheimer’s corporate photography encapsulated the
gendered racial dimensions of microelectronics manufacturing. Lisa Nakamura has argued that
the history of Fairchild shows that women’s work, specifically women of color work, has been

276
“Interview with Steve Allen, Lawrence Bender and Richard Steinheimer,” Silicon genesis: oral history interviews
of Silicon Valley scientists, 1995-2010, Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford
University, CA, Mar. 25, 1995.
120
central to the construction of the digital present.
277
The inclusion of flexible gendered and
racialized labor often relied on perceptions of so-called innate feminine traits, such as docility
and manual dexterity. Most notable is the stereotyped Asian tech worker, fetishized for being
“naturally” suited for the “nimble” and efficient work of electronic manufacturing.
278
While
Fairchild idealized Asian tech workers for their industrial efficiency, their valorization of Navajo
women drew from a settler colonial logic of the “natural.”
To Fairchild, Navajo women represented an “untainted” laboring mind and body whose
perceived position outside of technological modernity made them ideal for microelectronic work.
C.J. Jamesoa, manager of General Dynamics Indian plant also based in the Navajo Nation, noted:
“They don’t have the bad habits people have in more industrial areas…so although they need
more initial instruction, there is no untraining.”
279
Romanticizing indigenous peoples as outside
of technological modernity served to naturalize their proclivity toward digital work. Further,
Fairchild idealized Navajo cultural work as co-extensive with microelectronic work. A
Businessweek article titled “Industry Invades the Reservation” comments: “Fairchild has found
that after years of rug weaving, Indians can visualize complicated patterns they never see until
the rug is completed and are therefore able to memorize complex integrated circuit designs and
make subjective decisions in sorting and quality control.”
280
If the logic of integrated complexity
became a defining feature to the expansion of computational power, as proclaimed by Moore’s
Law, then Fairchild celebrated the interiority of the Navajo creative mind as a cultural proxy for
technical innovation. The perceived “innate” hardwiring of Navajo women workers positioned
their racial and gendered labor as a “natural” rather than exploited component of Fairchild’s

277
Nakamura.
278
Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, NY: Routledge,
1990), 154.
279
Ibid.
280
“Industry Invades the Reservation,” Businessweek, April 4, 1970.
121
corporation vision and strategy. Fairchild mythologized Navajo women as the racial and
gendered “model” of a terra nullius fantasy of the psyche able to be efficiently trained and
cultivated for tech labor. Thus, the discourse of the “natural” situated the high-tech industry as a
smooth continuation, rather than a disruption, of situated cultures and places.

As a “new and innovative model for cheap domestic electronics manufacture,”
281

Fairchild’s manufacturing plant in Shiprock was an early experiment in incorporating a
racialized labor force into a corporate infrastructure that anticipated Silicon Valley’s eventual
westward expansion into the Asia-Pacific. However, Nakamura reminds us:
Fairchild did not employ Navajo women because of these traits. These traits were
identified after the company learned about the tax incentives available to subsidize the
project, the lack of unions and other employment options in the area, and the generous
donation of heavy equipment given by the US government gratis as part of an incentive
to develop “light industry” as an “occupational education” for Indians.

281
Nakamura, 924.
Figure 3.6: Navajo microelectronics assembly worker (unnamed). “Shiprock Dedication
Brochure.” Sept. 6, 1969. Shustek Archives, Computer History Museum. Fremont, CA.

122
Here, I return to Schivelbusch’s observation of American industry’s deference to nature and the
“natural,” to follow and adapt to the winding and circuitous forms of the valleys, mountains, and
rivers. For Schivelbusch, the respect for and conservation of the “natural” encoded an economic
logic sensitive to the labor costs, driving the unexpected directions of American industry. If
Schivelbusch’s comments can be taken as an allegory for the corporate strategies of Fairchild,
then these cultural myths of Navajo women’s innate technical capabilities emerged as a result of,
rather than a precursor to, Fairchild’s corporate strategy for manufacturing expansion.
Understanding Silicon Valley imaginaries as a continuation of railroad mythologies
allows us to see the transnational connections between the Asian and Native tech worker on the
level of corporate representation. Racial myths functioned as an exploitable cultural and
narrative resource for a new high-tech industry experimenting with interchangeable and flexible
labor to power the so-called computer revolution. For Fairchild, the Navajo Nation represented
an early racial experiment in tech labor that it would then try to replicate in other lands across the
Pacific in Asia, reproducing American liberal ideologies of progress and benevolence in a global
frame.

Poetics of the “Imperceptible”
The afterlife of these myths of racial inclusion and technological progress are the
thematic concern of Janice Lobo Sapigao’s poetry collection microchips for millions, published
in 2016. As a Filipinx American diasporic text, microchips for millions unearths the liberal
fantasies of high-tech corporate startups and is part of a critical aesthetic genealogy of
Asian/American media archeology. The table of contents, operating as a type of representational
screen for the collection’s deeper contents, is riddled with seductive terms familiar to
123
information tech cultures, such as “the social network,” “the family tree,” “the research,” “the
games,” “the connections,” “the source,” and many others. The ironic repetition of the use of
“the” in the poem titles exposes the metonymic function of Silicon Valley mythmaking, in which
the abstraction of singular terms, such as the name “Silicon Valley” itself, covers over
multiplicities of complex sociohistorical and geographic networks that make such terms possible.
Sapigao’s poetry exposes Silicon Valley as a technological formation of liberalism, in which the
representational celebration of corporate diversity, inclusion, and intimacies of corporate family
narratives paper over its financial logics of expansion and incorporation.
Invoking a diasporic sensibility, the poems play with the semantic convergence between
many of these terms, drawing attention to how terminology such as “the source” might register
differently from both a computer science and diasporic frame. Most notably, the poetry
collection deploys binary digits—a string of 0s and 1s—to transform the blank page into a
technical domain of code, filled with human-oriented and machine-oriented languages. By
utilizing the avant-garde qualities of code, the textual experience of reading simulates a
computational interface. Often understood as a structural code oriented toward machine-
readability (in contrast the human-readability of source code and higher-level programming
languages) binary code alludes to what cannot be easily perceived in the techno-schematic of
screen cultures and their representational logics. Operating as a type of technical obfuscation,
these binary digits invert the terms of expressive cultures that often rely on claims to subjecthood
by minority writers. Anne Cheng has contended that the de facto mode of Asian/American
literary critique often privileges a visible racial subject, a type of “documentary” mode of textual
engagement that privileges subjective cohesion and interiority. The documentary mode captures
124
a “desire to know and to bear witness as some kind of “redemptive” act.”
282
By turning to an in-
humanist language difficult (but not impossible) for readerly interpretation, microchips for
millions strategically deploys machine code to reconfigure the perceptual frame for reading
historically. Embracing a diasporic lens, the collection asks, what is the “source” beneath Silicon
Valley dreams?
Like Lin’s visual strategy in Chinaman’s Chance that shifts the perceptual frame of
railroad mythologies, microchips for millions dwells in the imperceptible layers of information
technology historiography. Although one can certainly situate Sapigao’s poetry within the
specific frame of Filipinx diasporic cultural production, and be read historically as a Filipinx
engagement with Silicon Valley culture, the text also resists easy categorization. The structural
function of the binary digits often invokes a relational historical mode, threading references
throughout the collection to immigrants from many diverse backgrounds.
Attuning to the legacies of indigenous dispossession and immigrant exploitation that has
operationalized the global infrastructure of Silicon Valley, microchips for millions opens with a
land acknowledgement stating: “Let the poetry of this page serve as a moment of recognition for
the native peoples, the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, whose lands we inhabit.”
283
Lines of binary
code fill the page in testimony while refusing to give language to the inexpressible and
imperceptible trauma of ongoing settler violence done by American industry. The machine code,
thus, functions not simply as obfuscation but as a re-centering of Native peoples and land at the
center of digital platforms and infrastructures. Quite literally placed on the center of the page-
screen, the binary code ends with a statement about migrant workers, alluding to the speaker’s

282
Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 143.
283
Janice Lobo Sapigao, microchips for millions (San Francisco, CA: Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc.,
2016), 15.
125
mother: “Let these pages allow empathy for the immigrant women and their families whose
livelihoods are always, always at stake.”
284
Although the poetry utilizes the term “empathy” to
outline an ethical relation, microchips for millions utilizes machine code to disrupt and distort
such intentions for liberal representation. The page, like much of the poetry collection, is an
artifact of what Quynh Nhu Le calls “settler racial tense,” referring to the “ways that settler,
alien, and Indigenous cultural and political articulations embody the spatiotemporal logics and
affective economies of liberal ideologies.”
285
Connecting the “native peoples” referenced at the
top of the page and the “immigrant women” at the page’s bottom, machine code ultimately
configures indigenous and migrant sociality to be central to the infrastructure of the modern
digital landscape. By embracing the imperceptible aesthetics of binary digits, microchips for
millions utilizes machine code to gesture to the Native and migrant lives bound up with
information capitalist platforms, transmuting the pages of the poetry collection into a media-
archeological engagement with the making of Silicon Valley.
In contrast to Silicon Valley’s racial celebration of its diverse corporate network of tech
workers, microchips for millions attends to processes of laboring without the liberal impulse of
representing or visualizing diverse faces. For instance, the poem “the source” reads as a
taxonomy of microscopic quotidian matter, including “dust particles,” “hair strands,” “dirt like
stars,” “fibers,” and “eyelashes:”
sunlight outlines
dust particles,
angles rainbows
from hair strands

we can count
dirt like stars,

284
Ibid.
285
Quynh Nhu Le, Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Americas
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2019), 5.
126
fluttering and floating
in day time.

we drop germs:
oil and grease,
specks and slivers,
cream and polish,

wax and scraps
into the air.
fibers fall from faces,
eyelashes and hands
…
286

Rather than visualize the body of the figurative tech worker, the poem utilizes the
microscopic matter or non-matter of things to give an impression of a scene of laboring animated
by this constellation. Highlighting the microscopic, the poem inverts Silicon Valley’s celebration
of microelectronics that functioned as technical evidence of accelerated computational
efficiency. Rather, the poem’s microscopic lens reveals the lackluster assorted small-scale matter
that serve as a proxy for human labor behind the microchip. We find in “the source” the minutia
and dullness that evidence the machinic incorporation of the body into the infrastructure of
technological production. In many ways quite archaeological in its description, the poem
ultimately brings to question what constitutes “the source”—and the source of what? By
revealing the “source” to not be any visible person, the poem alludes to replaceability and
interchangeability of the worker, escaping textual representation. Like Lin’s Chinaman’s
Chance, which refuses representational recuperation as a form of historical justice, microchips
for millions shifts the focus to the structural forces that produce the act of laboring, exceeding the
scale of the individual subject. Attuning to what another poem titled the “start up” refers to as the
“traumatic scale” of Silicon Valley, Sapigao’s collection gestures to the layered histories of

286
Sapigao, 38.
127
racialized and gendered tech labor that precede temporal and geographic specificity of any
individual’s story.
287

Also featuring an imperceptible laboring subject, Ahree Lee’s Pattern : Code (2019)
depicts an unused loom in a small exhibition gallery at the Women’s Center for Creative Work in
Los Angeles. The loom represents Joseph Marie Jacquard’s loom, a textile machine which
inspired Charles Babbage’s analytical engine in 1837, the early mechanical precursor to a
general-purpose computer. The freestanding loom is threaded in mid-weave with no operator in
site. An absent weaver becomes a lingering presence in the exhibition room. In front of the
weaver’s absence lies a video installation remixing textile craftwork and computation.
Containing archival footage, the video emphasizes the patterns that structure the repetitive,
manual, and mundane labor involved in these fields. Close-up scenes depict women’s fingers
threading weaves and emphasize the mechanical dexterity required for such intricate labor,
which allude to what Donna Haraway calls the “nimble fingers of Oriental women.”
288

Occasionally, a cropped face appears on screen, but the focus remains on the hands that work
seamlessly with the weave. One scene shows an assembly line of woman workers who
rhythmically maneuver a textile machine. The emphasis, however, continues to show the
symbiosis between hand and machine, the face merely in the periphery of this scene of labor.
Interspersed between select scenes of weaving are similar close-up shots depicting the slow and
repetitive mechanics of punched cards.
Like the evacuated workers in Sapigao’s “the source” and Zhi Lin’s Chinaman’s Chance,
Lee’s Pattern : Code also relies on a subjectless depiction of technological labor. The installation
and remix video do not traffic in any liberal ideology of humanist recognition or empathy but

287
Ibid, 47.
288
Haraway, 154.
128
rather emphasize the irrecoverable legacy of women’s work and women of color work as the
infrastructure of information technology industries. The colon in the title Pattern : Code, a
comparative grammar, gestures to the exploitative logic of equivalence that analogizes textile
work and digital work as “natural.” By invoking the relation between textile and technical labor,
Pattern : Code invokes the settler colonial and racial mythologies imbued in the naturalization of
equivalence, which deems certain bodies as suitable to the formal qualities of the machine.
Exemplifying an Asian/American media archeological approach, Pattern : Code meditates on the
invisible actors occluded by the dominant histories of the digital present.
In conclusion, Asian/American media archeology mobilizes aesthetic strategies of the
imperceptible to denaturalize the “naturalizing” mythologies of racial and technological
progress. While Silicon Valley conceptualizes the digital age as a series of technological
innovations or scientific discoveries, these literary and artistic works reveal technological forms,
such as the railroad and the integrated circuit, to be a racial and settler colonial form.
Asian/American media archeology attends to the histories of expansion and exclusion embedded
within technological materialities and digital realities. In doing so, its subjectless orientation
allows for critical relationalities between otherwise differently racialized peoples, forced into
intimate relation by our digital platforms.
129
Figure 3.7: Ahree Lee, Pattern : Code (2019). Women’s
Center for Creative Work, Los Angeles, CA.

130
CHAPTER 4: BLACK BOX

Asiatic Inscrutability and the Algorithmic Imaginary

In her collection Soft Science (2019), Franny Choi’s poem “Kyoko’s Language Files Are
Recovered Following Extensive Damage to Her CPU” presents a glitching of semantic cohesion.
Line breaks give the impression of the fraying of language, in which the expression of meaning
is constantly deferred by its syntactical arrangement, de-arrangement, and re-arrangement:

can they think

animal language

hoof. slug. Enterprise.

can machines, can they

claw. egg tooth. Feral.

an aphorism / anaphora

can mouth, how

in fact, in some languages

algorithm, acronym

maybe dolls & spirits

…
289

Without the interpretive frame of an expressive subject, syntactic play becomes the
governing logic of the poem. Line breaks occasion semantic substitution and replaceability and
draw attention to the grammar of language. “Kyoko’s Language Files” presents a playful and
nonsensical re-arranging of word associations, which frustrate the process of communicative

289
Franny Choi, Soft Science (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2019), 2.
131
meaning. In lieu of any conclusive message or content that could be reassembled into a legible
“language file,” the poem splays the data “innards” of Kyoko’s cyborg body, asking the reader to
probe beneath the screen of racial-technological representation.
Abstaining from restoring the “language files” into subjective cohesion, “Kyoko’s
Language Files” puts on display the processing of syntax that appears to be on the fritz. Through
the deterioration of meaning-based coherence, the poem displays a disorienting array of word
and sentence-parts, the tangled interiority of the Central Processing Unit (CPU) of an Asian
cyborg figure. “Kyoko’s Language Files” portrays an autopsy of a robot, in which a figural
representation of an Asianized robot is not available as a unit of analysis. Nor does the poem
advance an impulse of repair, in which Kyoko can regain a sense of human-like agency. Rather,
what is left on the cutting room floor of the technological laboratory are the technical processes
and operations—the algorithms, the data, and other matters of computation.
The disemboweled cyborg recalls the question of racial personification that lies at the
crux of Rachel C. Lee’s critique of Asian/American studies’ avoidance of biological
essentialism. Lee wonders if Asian/Americanist critique has privileged discursive and social
constructionist approaches to race because “the biological has become a shorthand for something
like fixity.”
290
Lee asserts that the field has yet to acknowledge the ways in which biological
personhood might already require scales of analysis in which the raced subject has been
dissected into parts, fragments, and other de-anthropomorphized scales. By bracketing the
subject as a unit of racial analysis, the field is more readily able to track the distributed, non-
personified forms of the Asiatic.

290
Rachel C. Lee, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian/America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies
(New York, NY: New York University, 2014), 11.
132
The Central Processing Unit of Asian/American studies and analysis has been the subject,
whether in subscription to this paradigm or its refusal.
291
Thus, in the wake of Kyoko’s
disassembled corpse, this chapter asks: what does it mean to consider the Asiatic not as robot,
cyborg, machine, automaton or other technologized figure but as algorithm—the internal
operations of data calculation in an era of information abundance? If Kyoko is a sign of techno-
Orientalist cultural depictions, then what other racial-technological critiques might be possible
when we abandon its convenient racializing frame of the subject? How might we recognize the
Asiatic not as a realized technical figure but as technical process or operation, beneath the
synthetic face of the Asianized cyborg?
Occasioned by the deterioration of “Kyoko’s Language Files,” the following sections
tease out links between the Asiatic and the algorithmic. Instead of considering the Asian cyborg
as a sign of racial dehumanization (i.e. the Asian subject is technologized as “less than human”),
I take this technologized racial figure to mark the anthropomorphizing of imperceptible technical
procedures, in which its “Asiatic” form functions as a racial personification of algorithms.
Thinking through poet Franny Choi’s Soft Science and media artist Ryan Kuo’s File: A Primer
alongside historical conjunctures of racial algorithmic thinking, this chapter examines how the
discourse of Asiatic inscrutability provides the epistemological grounds for a social “faith” in
calculation. It traces how liberal discourses of benevolence and “good intention” are co-
extensive with a technological desire for “better” algorithms.

291
What I suggest that is that even in the poststructuralist framework of Asian/Americanist critique as a
“subjectless” discourse, as described by Kandice Chuh, the field is often anxiously tied to some semblance of a
question regarding the subject (often expressed as: what is Asian/American about a text?). Thus, the presence or
absence of a coherent subject organizationally and conceptually haunts the field of Asian/American studies. Kandice
Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
133
Damaged Language Files
In Choi’s poem, Kyoko is a reference to a character in the science fiction film Ex
Machina (2014), written and directed by Alex Garland. Ex Machina is a narrative rendering of a
“Turing Test,” in which the main character Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is invited to a tech
CEO’s secluded home to see if he can be convinced by the “humanness” of the latest AI robot
named Ava (Alicia Vikander). Caleb is a programmer for the tech mogul’s corporation named
“Blue Book,” perhaps a combined reference to IBM’s “Big Blue” and Facebook. Through the
eyes of Caleb, the viewer eventually meets Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), who is the in-house maid
and girlfriend and is later revealed to be an android as well.

As an example of the Asianization and feminization of the robot, Kyoko invites the well-
worn critiques of techno-Orientalism. Defined by David Roh, Betsy Huang, Greta Niu in their
anthology Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media,
techno-Orientalism refers to “the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hyper-
Figure 4.1: Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) peels back her synthetic human enfleshed face
to reveal her robotic core in Ex Machina (2014).
134
technological terms in cultural productions and political discourse.”
292
While this body of work
has yielded useful cultural analytics for addressing the machinic modes of Asiatic racialization in
the Euro-American imagination (whether on the level of the Asian body or the imagined
landscape of a “Far East”), its prevailing critical position and organizing trope has been to reveal
the dehumanization of the Asian as machine, automaton, or robot and its attendant Asianized
affects as unfeeling, hyper-efficient, or otherwise “inhuman.” As Stephen Hong Sohn writes in
his introduction to a special issue titled “Alien/Asian,” techno-Orientalism often traffics in the
“re-articulation and re-emergence of the yellow peril,”
293
in which “Asian Americans or figures
of Asian descent often have played large parts in tales of alienation.”
294
Recalling David Morley
and Kevin Robin’s assertion that particular genres of cyberpunk and science fiction depict a
Euro-American imagination of Japan as “the figure of empty and dehumanized technological
power,”
295
techno-Orientalism becomes a catch-all and amorphous framework for technologized
and mechanized depictions of Asia as imagined space or Asian as subject/body. Thus, Kyoko is
often presented as part of a long catalogue of techno-Orientalist representations in which racial
and gendered discourses and attitudes are entangled with the technological and the machinic.
Even in Anne Ailin Cheng’s exciting and insightful update to techno-Orientalist critiques, in
which she turns the critical attention to the materiality of the Asian-cyborg figure, the matter of
concern revolves around the question of synthetic personhood, or what she calls an “artificial
ontology.”
296
Thus, for Cheng, she asks questions such as: “Is Kyoko’s nominal Asianness a

292
David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu, Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History,
and Media (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 2.
293
Stephen Hong Sohn, “Introduction: Alien/Asian: Imagining the Racialization Future,” MELUS 33, no. 4 (2008):
10.
294
Ibid, 6.
295
David Morley and Kevin Robins are credited to first publishing the term “techno-Orientalism. David Morley and
Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries. (New York, NY:
Routledge, 1995), 170.
296
Anne Ailin Cheng, Ornamentalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 140.
135
perfect cover and alibi for her hidden artificiality, or is Kyoko’s flawless mechanical servitude
the ideal cover and alibi for her Asianness?”
297
What persists in her analysis and occasions her
questions,
298
and many other similar formulations of techno-Orientalist critiques, is the
figuration of the Asian as the fact of “Asianness.”
Cheng’s questioning regarding the Asiatic “cover and alibi” of Kyoko misses the fact that
Kyoko is also a personification of algorithms, data processes given human form. Returning to
Choi’s poetry, what I find useful about “Kyoko’s language files” is the utter divestment of
locating Asianness as android representation. Choi’s de-animation of Kyoko’s as an Asian robot
presents an opportunity for a critical departure given the “extensive damage to her CPU.”
299

What might Kyoko signify behind her Asiatic face if we bracket the question of agency and
subjective expression, which has often been the primary recuperative mode of Asian/American
critique? In other words, if Kyoko’s “language files” are beyond repair and do not aspire for
subjective coherence, or if Kyoko’s Asianized face is not only what makes the android Asian,
what else might the Asiatic give form to in its technological modality? Kyoko does not only
signify an Asianized fembot subject/object but is an allegory for the “black box” within the
robot. In this sense, the syntactical play in Kyoko’s deteriorated language files in Choi’s poem
invites a consideration of Asian inscrutability as co-extensive with an algorithmic imaginary of
black boxed operations.
Choi’s approach to the form and coherence of her poems in Soft Science attunes to
language itself as the “technology of the poem.”
300
In an interview with The Paris Review, Choi

297
Ibid, 143.
298
For a full and robust analysis of Ex Machina in relationship to the idea of synthetic personhood and the “yellow
woman,” see Cheng’s Ornamentalism.
299
Choi, 2.
300
Spencer Quong, “Queerness, Cyborgs, and Cephalopods: An Interview with Franny Choi,” The Paris Review,
May 21, 2019, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/05/21/queerness-cyborgs-and-cephalopods-an-interview-
with-franny-choi/.
136
describes her remix-approach to visual knowledge through experiments with poetic form: “I
think it’s sort of magic, right? To take an image that we think we’re already familiar with, and to
rearrange it on a language level in order to show something new about it.”
301
Choi’s poetic
interrogation of visual knowledge does not rely on any image-based coherence or expressive
subjectivity but attunes to an algorithmic approach toward poetic expression. For her, the formal
properties of language occasion syntactical experimentation, in ways that can stretch the
representational possibilities of artistic expression. Aware of the “constraints on the liberatory
potential of the achievement of subjectivity,”
302
Soft Science investigates how poetry can help us
unpack what Wendy Hui Kyong Chun calls the “persistence of visual knowledge” in the age of
software.
303
By bracketing the question of subjectivity as an analytic rubric for Asian/American
expressive “content,” the poetry transmutes fragmentary bits into bytes, in which the act of
reading is less concerned with technological representations of Asians (or Asiatic representations
of technology) and more interested in the process of expressive coherence.
Choi’s Soft Science also offers a feminist method for exploring the relationship between
race, gender, technology, and science. The category of the “hard” sciences invokes a masculinist
disciplinary boundary that cleaves the “empirical” and “objective” methods from other modes of
knowledge production, or what Nancy Leys Stepan has described as the gendered “process of
boundary-setting between science and non-science.”
304
Thus, the hard sciences are both
constructed and ideologically motivated, in ways that allow science itself to be impervious from
social and cultural critique. The capacious fields of feminist science and technology studies,
especially drawing from critical ethnic studies, queer theory, and postcolonial studies, have done

301
Ibid.
302
Chuh, 9.
303
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, Or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 18: 2004, 27.
304
Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race, Gender, Science and Citizenship,” Gender & History 10, no.1 (1998): 33.
137
much to denaturalize and de-neutralize the “hard” sciences. In relation to studying histories of
technology, Carolyn de la Peña usefully links the emphasis on empiricism and objectivity to an
unmarked whiteness and a race-neutralizing ideology.
305
As such, the hard sciences fortify ideas
of technological determinism and scientific progress, cleaving the realm of technical and
scientific knowledge production from the social and cultural. Against the impulse for technical
mastery or objectivity, Choi’s collection Soft Science powerfully embraces the softening of
scientific ideologies and historiography through the use of the body, in which embodiment enacts
an orientation and organization of history. Choi asserts, “Poetry helps me to have a conversation
with history. It’s hard for me to understand the past as a series of events. Poetry allows me to
understand history by embodying it from my own subjective position and to track the ways that
those imprints of the past show up in my sentences.”
306
Exploring the entanglement between the
Asiatic and the technological, Soft Science thus renders the body as an archive of racial
knowledge that is co-produced and linked to informatic modes of perception. The poetry attunes
to Sandra Harding’s assertion that “how one interacts with the world around us both enables and
limits what one can know about it.”
307

The poem titled “Turing Test_Weight” is part of the Turing Test poem series threaded
throughout Soft Science. Referencing the famous test for artificial intelligence associated with
mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, the Turing Test series uses the form of a
question to structure the content and context of the poem. Since questioning has played a central
role in shaping scientific knowledge production, the structure of the Turing Test configures the
question as an epistemological and aesthetic form, one that shares the “weight” of embodied

305
Carolyn de la Peña, “The History of Technology, the Resistance of the Archive, and the Whiteness of Race,”
Technology and Culture 51.4: 2010, 926.
306
Quong.
307
Sandra Harding, “Postcolonial and Feminist Philosophies of Science and Technology: Convergences and
Dissonances,” Postcolonial Studies 12, no. 4 (2009): 403.
138
knowledge. While Turing’s questions regarding the natural of artificial intelligence—“Can
machines think?”—operate in the abstract register of cognitive philosophy, “Turing
Test_Weight” splinters open the form of the question as a racializing procedure. Thus, the poem
is inserted within the controlling question “//what is…your country of origin.”
308
Questioning has
often functioned as a racial grammar of Asiatic racialization. Hee-Jung S. Joo writes, “In terms
of racial formation, people of color become racialized through an endless process of questioning,
both formally by state institutions and informally by the gaze of the general public.”
309
Then, if
W.E.B. DuBois’s famously asked African Americans, “How does it feel to be the problem?”,
310

then perhaps the corollary for Asian/Americans might be, “How does it feel to be a question?”
By refraining from punctuating the structuring question (“//what is…your country of
origin”),
311
“Turing Test_Weight” keeps the question open and unfolding. This suggests a
historical reading practice that does not privilege a “hard” lens of answering definitively but
rather attends to a “soft” mode of knowledge production, loosening the boundaries between
technical and cultural histories. Thus, if Turing’s original questions were aimed at probing the
personhood of artificial machines, “Turing Test_Weight” reframes these questions in regards to
Asian bodies. Against the abstraction of scientific-philosophical questioning, the poem uses the
“weight” of the body to carve out a space for history and historicity. The beginning lines within
this structuring question further allude to the cumulative effect of the questioning form, an act of
epistemic suspension that accrues a “weight” through repetition:
// what is (inside each question lies another question—a question of weight

…

308
Choi, 83.
309
Hee-Jung S. Joo, “The Asian (as) Robot: Queer Inhumans in the Works of Margaret Rhee, Greg Pak, and Chang-
Rae Lee,” Journal of Asian American Studies 25, no.1 (2022): 3.
310
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7.
311
Choi, 83.
139

the thought that almost becomes a thought just before dawn) your country of origin
312

In the poem, the questions form a mise-en-abyme and invoke a repetitive effect. Found
throughout cultural and scientific examples, mise-en-abyme refers to a formal recursivity, in
which an element is within embedded within another element. Challenging the desire for
conclusive knowledge underpinning scientific ideologies of mastery, “Turing Test_Weight”
textually splays open the closed form of a scientific question into order to burrow into the
historical depths of epistemological inquiry. If the philosophical nature of Turing’s questions
operated in the disembodied, dematerialized, and cognitive register, then Choi’s “Turing
Test_Weight” emphasizes an embodied approach that attunes to the historical binding of
racialization. As a discursive-epistemic form of violence on the body, the effect of questioning
“accumulate as impressions on the skin,” as Sara Ahmed might say.
313

N. Katherine Hayles reminds us that although Turing Tests appear to substantiate the
fantasy of a disembodied liberal humanist subject, they actually assert embodiment to be central
to Turing’s approach.
314
Turing often operates in the rhetoric of rationalist methods, such as
when he states that the “question and answer method seems to be suitable for introducing almost
any one of the fields of human [endeavor] that we wish to include.”
315
Hayles’ re-interpretation
of Turing suggests that his famous tests do not refuse embodiment but rather emphatically
“create the possibility of a disjunction between the enacted and the represented bodies.”
316
In this
reframing, Hayles helps us understand that the form of questioning, signified by the question and

312
Choi, 83.
313
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006),
9.
314
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1999), xiv.
315
A.M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and
Philosophy LIX.236 (1950): 435.
316
Hayles, xiii.
140
answer, operate as a series of inputs and outputs that produce a delineation between “enacted”
and “represented” body. We can consider the questioning form—invoking an input-output
dynamic—as a mode of algorithmic thinking with material and embodied stakes.
While Turing’s “question and answer method” was primarily interested in the controlled
parameters of ascertaining “personhood” in the context of an imitation game,
317
Choi’s use of the
questioning form introduces the “question” of race into a genealogy of rational inquiry. In
“Turing Test_Weight,” the question “//what is…your country of origin”
318
links the inscrutability
of the Asiatic to algorithmic thinking. Gesturing beyond the hypothetical space of the Turing
Test, Choi’s poem introduces questioning as a racial form that recalls the history of the Asiatic
rendered as algorithm, which is the topic of the next section.

Asiatic and/as Algorithm
In the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the question of the Asiatic was rendered an
algorithmic concern in the American social imaginary. Chapter one contended that the ensuing
atmosphere of racial panic and anti-Asian fear destabilized racial meaning from any stable visual
referent. That is, visible markers of difference gave way to the logics of prediction in an era in
which a “‘new’ vision emerging from informational abundance.”
319
Given the presumed inability
to tell an “enemy” from “foe,” a collective sense of the Asiatic as a racializing category emerged
because facts of ethnicity or loyalty could not be discerned based on visual markers alone.
Informatic techniques and epistemes of racial knowledge slowly replaced “prewar conceptions of

317
Turing’s questioning method about whether machines can think was originally based on an “imitation game” of
gender difference, in which “the object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the
man and which is the woman.” Turing, 433.
318
Ibid.
319
Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2014), 14.
141
truth, certainty, and subjectivity.”
320
The Asiatic, then, was mired in and embedded in a scientific
transformation of vision and reason, evidenced by vexing question of racial uncertainty and
indeterminacy.
As a technical register of inscrutability, algorithms are often understood as “black box”
entities that are definitionally slippery. They can refer to underlying dimensions of code,
programming languages, software, and/or other imperceptible forms and operations beneath the
digital screen. Because of its technical difficulty or the inability to fully name the “thing,”
algorithms are also a site of cultural fascination and imagination. On the one hand, they are
examples of what Margaret Morse might call “cyberculture,” the “personal…and perceptually
elaborated” forms that respond to the inhuman and imperceptible dimensions of information.
321

On the other, especially concerning the technical realms of computer science and mathematics,
algorithms index a set of complex theoretical, practical, ideal, and material assumptions and
consequences.
322
In this chapter, I am not interested in mining a meta-definition of an algorithm
that could cut across social, cultural, and technological registers,” as such a task would fall under
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s caution of overly fetishizing the technical. In her discussion of
software as an ‘“visibly invisible”
323
essence that is both quite ambiguous and highly specific,
Wendy Hui Kyung Chun suggests that the “sourcery” of the code produces a fetish of code, in
which the code itself becomes idealized as the ultimate source of programming power.
324
Chun
describes how this causal relation between the programmer and the code is to some extent an

320
19.
321
Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cybercultures (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana
Press, 1998), 6.
322
See Andrew Coffey’s essay on “Algorithms” for a brief but incomplete discussion of the topic from the
perspective of Software Studies. Andrew Coffey, “Algorithms,” Software Studies: A Lexicon (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2008), 15-20.
323
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On ‘Sourcery,’ Or Code as Fetish,” Configurations 16, no. 3 (2008): 300.
324
Ibid.
142
imagined relation.
325
Further, fetishizing the technical can facilitate a “gendered system of
command and control,” in which programmable agency is linked to an aspirational ability to
perceive the “invisible whole” of technical systems. Yet, we can still find value in
conceptualizing an algorithm within larger social and cultural discourses of calculability
occurring in the 1930s and 1940s, intensified by the military-research-industrial complex of
World War II. Algorithms, nonetheless, proliferated powerful technological imaginaries that
proposed calculability as a precursor to what Sofiya Noble calls “digital sense-making
processes.”
326

Yet, in terms of a working definition, an algorithm connotes a “set of instructions for
solving a problem or completing a task following a carefully planned sequential order.”
327

Shintaro Miyazaki suggests that algorithmic thinking became commonly associated with
scientific computing in the early 1960s, particularly in relation to the higher level programming
languages of the time.
328
Yet, as Miyazaki points out in his deep history of the etymologies and
uses of “algorithm” tracing back to late medieval Europe, algorithms did not always refer to
computation.
329
Denaturalizing this link allows us to think historically about the social context of
calculability, as it was a topic of debate leading up to World War II. Alan Turing, for example,
presented a series of papers on the problem of calculability for theoretical mathematics. While
Turing is most known for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and machine
cognition, Turing’s earlier interest engaged the question of calculability. Before Turing wrote
“Computing Machinery and Intelligence”—in which he asked his famous question “Can

325
Ibid.
326
Sofiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2018), 2.
327
Taina Bucher, If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 20.
328
Shintaro Miyazaki, “Algorthythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures,”
Computational Cultures: A Journal of Software Studies 2 (2012).
329
Ibid.
143
machines think?”—he proposed a paper that interrogate the mathematical limits of
undecidability, in which the formal system of algorithms shaped his ideas of a “Turing
Machine.”
330
Turing was “aware of the perspective of a widening of the horizon of algorithmic
methods”
331
and anticipated the algorithm’s influence in the emerging field of computer science.
Wolfgang Thomas notes, “the work of Turing and his contemporaries…finished a struggle of
many centuries for an understanding of ‘algorithm’ and its horizon of applicability, termed
“computability.”
332
Thus, the power of algorithms emerged in part from the scientific fascination
with the limits of mathematical knowledge, in which complexity was the precondition for a
desire for calculability.
We can locate ideas of algorithmic thinking outside of the technological or research
laboratory, the privileged sites of the information and computational sciences. Here, I draw from
feminist approaches to science and technology studies as well as feminist media studies. These
fields demonstrate how algorithmic power not only refer to technical processes of computation
but reflect a world-making practice that is actively produced in concert with human and non-
human actors in sociotechnical systems. As Taina Bucher writes, “In ranking, classifying,
sorting, predicting, and processing data, algorithms are political in the sense that they help to
make the world appear in certain ways rather than others.”
333
While algorithms are often
regarded as opaque technologies, shrouded in the mystique of its “black box” status, Bucher’s
description of algorithms as a perceptually revealing force is helpful. By making “the world
appear in certain ways rather than others,”
334
algorithms also function as productive processes

330
Wolfgang Thomas, “Algorithms: From Al-Khwarizmi to Turing and Beyond,” Turing’s Revolution: The Impact
of His Ideas about Computability, ed. Giavanni Sommaruga and Thomas Strahm (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser,
2015), 37.
331
Ibid, 38.
332
Thomas, 36.
333
Ibid, 3.
334
Ibid.
144
and sociotechnical acts of imagination. Scholars such as Sofiya Noble and Ruha Benjamin have
provided rich analyses and examples of algorithms perpetuating racism, sexism, and inequality
under the guise of “neutral” technologies.
335
I build from their work to illuminate how a mode of
algorithmic thinking intersected with historical discourses of Asiatic inscrutability.
Considering how the “social sphere invades the laboratory”
336
and condition the
information sciences as a nexus of knowledge/power, we can situate algorithms within moments
of historical emergence in which a social faith in rationale-based calculability circulated as a
mode of racial sense-making. In December 1941, popular American magazines, such as LIFE,
TIME, and Science News Letter, sensationalized the epistemic crisis of the Asian face by
presenting a layperson’s algorithm. For instance, in the Pearl Harbor issue of LIFE Magazine, a
racist article titled “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese: Angry Citizens Victimize Allies with
Emotional Outburst At Enemy” showcased a well-known Chinese and Japanese face for visual
comparison.
337
“How to Tell” features a close-up of Ong Wen-hao (Wong Wen-hao),
Chunking’s Minister of Economic Affairs, next to that of General Hideko Tojo, the General of
the Imperial Japanese Army. Wong and Tojo represented public diplomatic or political figures
who functioned as examples of the Chinese versus Japanese people. Superimposed onto their
faces were a series of facial features and details, noting Wong’s “parchment yellow
complexion,” “more frequent epicentric fold,” “higher bridge,” “long, narrower face,” and so
forth in comparison to Tojo’s “earthy yellow complexion,” less frequent epicentric fold,” “flatter
nose,” and “broader shorter face.”
338
Rendering the face into a set of observable physical traits

335
Noble, 6; Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for a New Jim Code (New York, NY:
Polity, 2019), 39.
336
Brian Winston, Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinema and Television (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 1995),
55.
337
“How to Tell Japs From the Chinese: Angry Citizens Victimize Allies With Emotional Outburst At Enemy,”
LIFE Magazine, December 22, 1941, 81.
338
Ibid.
145
that could be discerned by proper techniques of scrutiny, the article attempts to substantiate a
(pseudo)scientific rationale for measuring not only concrete features, such a “longer, narrower
face,” but even features harder to interpret, such as the exact color-tone of ones forehead (is it
“parchment” or “earthy” yellow?). As a set of dissected features, the Asiatic face functioned as
an interface in which the ideas of national allegiance and loyalty could supposedly be discerned
by an amateurly trained eye.

Scholars of Asian/American studies have discussed how contradictory depictions of
Asians in the US has been inextricably linked to American international relations with Asia, in
particular East Asia. In this sense, Colleen Lye has asserted that “the domestic signification of
Figure 4.2: Article appearing in the December 22, 1941 issue of LIFE Magazine after the
attack on Pearl Harbor and before the declaration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
Executive Order 9066.

146
Asian Americans has its counterpart in the global signification of Asia.”
339
This domestic-global
connection is particularly intensified in the figure of the Asian precisely because, as David
Palumbo-Liu suggests, “the history of Asian America demonstrate[s] the centrality of Asia to the
imaginary of modern America.”
340
As I have discussed previously, on the level of figural
representation, Lye terms the contradictions of racial representation the “Asiatic racial form,” in
which differing representations of Asians as “yellow peril” and “model minority” are the result
of “stereotypical attributes…located in the shifting dynamics of social relations and social
conflicts.”
341
According to Lye, the Asiatic racial form explains how “yellow peril” and “model
minority” representations can exist simultaneously, as they are simply the cultural manifestation
of an anxious economic link between the United States and East Asia.
342
In the realm of cultural
representation, Lye, Palumbo-Liu, and other Asian/American studies scholars help clarify the
Asiatic as an racial abstraction, simply a personification of an underlying economic modality and
relation. The economic conditions subtending America’s dual ambitions of imperial expansion
and nation-making produced the Asiatic racial form as a perpetually anxious mode of racial
meaning and relation.
When the Asiatic face became an intensified, urgent concern for a paranoid American
public during World War II, the longstanding economic anxiety that defined America’s relation
to Asians/Asia translated into a problem of racial inscrutability. The epistemological terrain of
Asiatic indeterminacy provided the preconditions for visual techniques of seeing and knowing,
harkening back to what Orit Halpern has termed “communicative objectivity.”
343
The LIFE

339
Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005), 3.
340
David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999), 2.
341
Lye, 4.
342
Lye, 5.
343
Halpern, 1.
147
article used a set of approximated descriptive measures to transform the perceived inscrutability
of the Asian face into a set of socially usable datapoints. These “objective” measures aimed to
turn ontological unknowability into a calculable question. The inability to tell Japanese from
Chinese demonstrates how Japanese unknowability was not an ethnically specific concern but
impacted broader perceptions of Asian/Americans. Thus, the question of “how to tell” between
“yellow races”
344
was promoted as a national problem. In effect, the LIFE article translated
Asiatic inscrutability into an algorithmic formula for public consumption.
I contend that the LIFE article “How to Tell” is an example of a racial algorithm, in
which the indeterminacy of the Asiatic is coded into a test of algorithm faith within the social
sphere. In the atmosphere of racial panic and paranoia following Pearl Harbor, the racial question
regarding the presumed unknowable Japanese became a matter of urgent concern not only on the
level of US national security but also as a matter of civic duty. Targeting the average white
American reader, “How to Tell” not only vilified the Japanese but also attempted to humanize
Chinese and Chinese American people by constructing them as unfortunate victims. The
propaganda aimed to both condone “justified” civilian anger toward Japanese Americans while
simultaneously veiling racist vitriol under the aspiration of protecting Chinese Americans,
ensuring the “innocent victims”
345
were not caught in the crossfires:
In the first discharge of emotions touched off by the Japanese assaults on their nation,
U.S. citizens have been demonstrating a distressing ignorance on the delicate question of
how to tell a Chinese from a Jap. Innocent victims in cities all over the country are many
of the 75,000 U.S. Chinese, whose homeland is our stanch ally. So serious were the
consequences threatened, that the Chinese consulates last week prepared to tag their
nationals with identification buttons. To dispel some of this confusion, LIFE here
adduces a rule-of-thumb from the anthropometric conformations that distinguish friendly
Chinese from enemy alien Japs.
346

344
“How to Tell.”
345
Ibid.
346
Ibid. Emphasis mine.
148
Despite the lack of scientific credibility to these anthropometric means, “How to Tell” reflects a
social desire for a reliable mode of calculating, sorting, and differentiating between racialized
ethnic groups—Japanese and Chinese—in a way that put faith in a set of rule-of-thumb
measures. This propagandistic article demonstrates how the act of racial dehumanization and
white benevolence were bound up by a turn to a proxy method, here signified as a socially
available and usable “rule-of-thumb.”
347

By conceiving of “How to Tell” as an example of the Asiatic rendered as algorithm, we
can begin to understand how a data proxy became a method to offload racist and racial
sentiments. Aimed at a white American readership, these rule-of-thumb instructions represented
a publicly available “dataset” that could be utilized by supposedly well-meaning citizens.
Dissecting the Asian face into a set of qualitative measurements, the algorithm functioned as a
racial proxy, which, as Leslie Bow reminds us, “calls forth not only approximation (almost the
same) but proximity (a contiguous presence).”
348
Despite its scientific inaccuracy even admitted
by physical anthropologists, the proposed anthropometric dataset allowed readers to participate
in the collective racial algorithm on a national scale. In a heightened “discharge of emotions,”
349

the Asiatic rendered as algorithm demonstrates how racial and racist feeling could be encoded
into a seemingly “objective” data-proxy.”
350
If Ruha Benjamin has suggested that “the
outsourcing of human decisions is, at once, the insourcing of coded inequity,”
351
then the racial

347
Ibid.
348
Leslie Bow, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasure of Fantasy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2022), 4.
349
“How to Tell.”
350
Further, the casting of the Asian face in question as either threat or victim recalls what Saidiya Hartman has
called the “augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons.” Saidiya V.
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 21.
351
Benjamin, 30.
149
rule-of-thumbs demonstrates how a belief in a collective social algorithm could re-code explicit
racism as a project of white benevolence and sentimentality.
Recalling what Donna Haraway terms “a conquering gaze from nowhere” that presumes
an unmarked white and masculine subject-position,
352
the LIFE article constructed a witnessing
public that could embrace the “How to Tell” algorithm as a measure of good intention. Asiatic
inscrutability became the grounds for white morality and sympathy to emerge. In his description
of morality and vision, Zygmunt Bauman asserts that “morality conform[s] to the law of optical
perspective. It looms large and thick close to the eye.”
353
“How to Tell” transformed the Asian
face into a possible sentimental resource (“innocent victims”) that necessitated delineation from
an “enemy” Japanese. Invoking a pervasive problem in “cities all over the country,”
354
the
racially charged “rule-of-thumbs” attempted to corral a collective faith in rationality-based
approach to an indiscernible problem. By making the suffering of Chinese victims central to the
logic of the racial algorithm, the rule-of-thumb measures and datasets could be recoded as
benevolent rather than violent extensions of public outrage. Finally, the LIFE article hoped to
offer a rational means for stymying the irrational “discharge of emotions” erupting across the
nation, thus imbuing an algorithmic approach for simultaneously managing white anger and
Asiatic indeterminacy.

352
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), 188.
353
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 192.
354
“How to Tell.”
150

Along with similar articles published by Times and Science News Letter, “How to Tell”
drew from the pseudo-scientific practice of physiognomy. Scholars have traced the historical
relation between anthropometric race science and digital facial recognition technologies in the
age of surveillance and security technologies.
355
Dating back to Aristotle, physiognomy was an
“early form of racial classification” in the ancient Greek world. As a practice and belief,
physiognomy probed questions of subjectivity interiority (or questions of the “soul”) through

355
Nikki Stevens and Os Keyes, “Seeing Infrastructure: Race, Facial Recognition, and the Politics of Data,”
Cultural Studies 35, no. 4-5 (2021): 833-853.
Figure 4.3 (left): Article appearing in the December 1941 issue of TIME Magazine.
Figure 4.4 (right): Article appearing in Science News Letter on December 20, 1941.
151
observable traits and signs.
356
This legacy was renewed during World War II when the matter of
Japanese subjectivity and loyal became a matter of national concern. An article published in
Science News Letter included commentary by Ales Hrdlicka, an established physical
anthropologist of the Smithsonian Institution. Serving as an official advisor to Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Hrdlicka was a prominent spokesperson who represented the larger discipline of
anthropology on the scale of national and international affairs, demonstrating how the discipline
and methodologies of anthropology played an important role in World War II and postwar efforts
for managing racial, cultural, national difference.
357
Known for his racist beliefs in which
anthropometric measures became justification for racial inferiority,
358
Hrdlicka’s ideas on the
question of “Far East Complexity”
359
affirmed the assumption that the Asiatic marked a limit
case of scientific knowledge. Science News Letter concluded that “even anthropologists are
unable to distinguish them by looking at their faces.”
360

Kate Crawford has traced the role of physiognomy in relation to contemporary AI
projects that aspire to categorize “universal” human affects and sensations.
361
These articles by
LIFE, TIME, and Science News Letter offer further evidence of the links between race pseudo-
science, facial recognition, and AI algorithms, or what Simone Browne might call “digital

356
Kate Crawford describes how the practice of physiognomy was an “early form of racial classification” in the
ancient Greek world. Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Cost of AI (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2021), 161.
357
Ales Hrdlicka is also known for advancing the anti-Indigenous and racialization claim of Asian migration to the
North American continent through the Bering Strait. Jodi Byrd has contended that the “orientalization” of
indigenous peoples, characterizing them as a proto-“yellow peril” migration, enacts a violent rehistoricization of
Native claims to land and sovereignty. Jodi Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2011), 201.
358
M.K. Johnson, “‘No Certain Way to Tell Japanese From Chinese’: Racist Statements and the Marking of
Difference,” Explorations in Ethnic Studies 18, no. 2 (1995): 159.
359
“No Certain Way to Tell Japanese From Chinese: Even Anthropologists Are Unable to Distinguish Them By
Looking At Their Faces; Far East Racially Complex,” Science News Letter 40.25 (1941): 394.
360
Ibid.
361
Crawford, 151-179.
152
epidermalization.”
362
In the realm of biometric information technologies, digital epidermalization
refers to a computational mode of securing racial “truth” to visuality, “where algorithms are the
computational means through which the body, or more specifically parts, pieces, and,
increasingly, performances of the body are mathematically coded as data.”
363
Predating the
disembodied, immersive gaze of contemporary surveillance technologies, the dissection of the
Asian face into data parts demonstrate an algorithmic mode of responding to racial inscrutability.
The “How to Tell” articles illustrate how a collective sentiment of anti-Asian fear and
white benevolence could be simultaneously coded into a national algorithm, despite its
“reliability” being called into question. As two sides of the same coin, data-based optimism and
racism operate as reflexive structuring forces that continue to seek “better” data as the solution to
algorithmic racism. Together, these two sides constitute the race-neutralizing ideologies of
black-boxed algorithms.

Race-Neutrality and the Algorithm
One of the most powerful ideologies surrounding the algorithm is its presumed race-
neutrality. Scholarship at the intersection of critical race studies and digital studies often
elaborate on the ways in which algorithms are seemingly “benign, neutral, or objective…[when]
they are anything but.”
364
As such, Ruha Benjamin argues that “tech fixes often hide, speed up,
and even deepen discrimination, while appearing to be neutral or benevolent when compared to
the racism of a previous era.”
365
Algorithms, thus, align with the fundamental ethos of
neoliberalism, in which promises of post-racialism and colorblindness abound. Tara McPherson

362
Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015),
109.
363
Ibid.
364
Noble, 1.
365
Benjamin, 8.
153
has persuasively argued that the development of operating systems like UNIX in the 1960s
encoded an “emerging system of covert racism”
366
into the US cultural mainframe of racial
thinking. Within this context, algorithms both reflect and facilitate the disavowal of race’s
relevance. Benjamin connects the “race-neutral technologies that encode inequity to the race-
neutral laws and policies that serve as powerful tools for White supremacy.”
367

Complementing these racial critiques of contemporary algorithms and other technical
black boxes, this chapter has traced algorithmic thinking to an era prior to the formalized anti-
racism of the postwar era, in which we see discourses of Asiatic inscrutability and algorithmic
thinking operating in plain sight. The popular discourse and beliefs surrounding the circulation of
“How to Tell” publications, I suggest, demonstrate a collective appeal to rational methods of
calculation (despite its publicly acknowledged unreliability). Yet, in the social milieu of racial
panic and paranoia, the “good enough” mentality of these race-propaganda documents link data-
based approximation to social benevolence. As algorithms promise a race-neutral myth as
proxies of human decision-making free from bias, the imagined evacuation of such bias is what
allows an unmarked liberal subjectivity to enter in its place. Thus, the debates regarding the
reliability of these methods index an aspirational faith in data in the face of complexity and
unknowing. To quell the “discharge of emotions”
368
that erupted in response to the paranoia of
pervasive Japanese threat stationed across the West Coast, the Asiatic algorithm of “How to
Tell” constructed a liberal subject in its center, a personification of data co-extensive with white
social benevolence.
The liberal personification of datasets persists in the contemporary era of algorithmic
imaginaries. Data is not only rendered benign or neutral but deemed capable of possessing an

366
McPherson, 36.
367
Benjamin, 35.
368
“How to Tell.”
154
artificial interiority and subjectivity. IBM’s recent endeavors in the realm of artificial
intelligence, facial data sets, and algorithmic thinking exemplifies the continuation of this liberal
ideology. In 2019, IBM released the “Diversity in Faces” (DiF) dataset with the aim to “create
AI systems that [were] more fair and accurate.”
369
Researchers at IBM attempted to address the
inherent bias within facial recognition technologies by gathering a more inclusive dataset
representative of the diversity of contemporary American society. The DiF dataset was the
proposed solution by offering a large array of annotations pulled from approximately one million
publicly available images (mostly culled from the photo-sharing website Flickr). IBM
researchers saw this not only as an isolated initiative but presented the data as a model project for
other research institutions to follow. As industry leaders, they framed the issue as follows:
“The heart of the problem lies not with the AI technology itself, per se, but with how the
systems are trained. For face recognition to perform as desired - to be both accurate and
fair - training data must provide sufficient balance and coverage. The training data sets
should be large enough and diverse enough to learn the many ways in which faces
inherently differ. The images must reflect the diversity of features in faces we see in the
world. This raises the important question of how we measure and ensure diversity for
faces.” (Emphasis mine).
370

This statement shows how liberal discourses anthropomorphize the complex system of AI
algorithms as well as set the terms of how to approach the question of ethics in the first instance.
We might ask, for instance: why does this problem have a heart?
The IBM Diversity in Faces project arbitrates a false distinction between systems training
and the “AI technology itself.”
371
By situating implicit algorithm bias as a problem of dataset
training,
372
the idea of the “heart” imbues AI technology and algorithms with liberal interiority

369
John R. Smith, “IBM Research Releases ‘Diversity in Faces’ Dataset to Advance Study of Fairness in Facial
Recognition Systems,’ IBM Research Blog, January 29, 2019,
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/01/diversity-in-faces/.
370
Michele Merler, Nalini Ratha, Rogerio Feris, and John R. Smith, “Diversity in Faces,” IBM Research AI
(Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, 2019), 2. Emphasis mine.
371
Ibid.
372
Nikki Stevens and Os Keyes offer a thorough critique of this delineation. See Stevens and Keyes, 845.
155
and subjectivity. Through a logic of inclusion and recognition, the IBM project contains the
question of ethics as a problem of representative data while cordoning off the “AI technology”
as ideological pure or neutral. As a hallmark of neoliberal multicultural rhetoric
373
, “diversity”
functions as a central organizing principle of the dataset while “accuracy” and “fairness” serve as
aspirational aims. Jodi Melamed has put succinctly, “the primary function of racialization has
been to make structural inequality appear fair.”
374
Diversity, thus, operates as a formalism of
liberalism that translates and encodes identity within a regime of desiring accuracy and fairness.
The technological horizon of accuracy and fairness are thus fundamentally connected to the
abstracted promise of social benevolence. Even while we do need better datasets, I am fascinated
by how liberal subjectivity—marked by the “heart”
375
—shapes algorithm imaginaries. In doing
so, the abstraction of “diversity” operates as a race-neutral ideology, framing race as a symptom
rather than a central operating logic of the Diversity in Faces project.

373
Here, I follow Jodi Melamed’s insightful lexicon of race-liberal discourse, which links “diversity” as a prevailing
terminology in the era of neoliberal multiculturalism. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence
in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2011), 14.
374
Ibid, 13.
375
Merler, et al., 2
Figure 4.5: An IBM graphic depiction of the Diversity in Faces project
found on the IBM Research Blog.

156
In June 2020, IBM abandoned DiF. After the murder of George Floyd and during the
collective uprising in June 2020, IBM Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna wrote a public
letter to the United States Congress renouncing the tech corporation’s pursuit of general-purpose
and publicly available facial recognition software and datasets. Krishna’s letter stated the
corporation’s opposition to the use of facial recognition technology “for mass surveillance, racial
profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent
with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency.”
376
While IBM at this time had
already experienced legal obstacles with its scraping of facial data from unknowing members of
the image hosting and sharing platform Flickr,
377
the letter continues to situate the corporate
decision within IBM’s long industry leadership in American civil rights. Krishna’s letter refers to
past IBM President Thomas Watson, Jr.’s “equal opportunity” hiring practices. The letter
comments, “Watson backed up this statement with action, refusing to enforce Jim Crow laws at
IBM facilities. Yet nearly seven decades later, the horrible and tragic deaths of George Floyd,
Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and too many others remind us that the fight against racism is
as urgent as ever.”
378
While IBM’s recognition of the dangers of facial recognition technology in
the U.S security and surveillance state is a needed step, its public relations “speak” often invokes
values of liberalism and rights in a belated manner, always after the fact.

376
Arvind Krishna, “IBM’s Letter to Congress on Racial Justice Reform,” IBM THINKpolicy Blog, June 8, 2020,
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/policy/facial-recognition-sunset-racial-justice-reforms/.
377
Approximately a million Flickr photographs were scraped and compiled to form the basis of the DiF dataset. The
images were then coded to form the training data for use not only by IBM but, presumably, any other AI research
firm could also have access to the data to build more “ethical” technologies. As a “model” dataset, the research
initiative generated much critique. For example, Expose.AI published an article summarizing IBM’s violation of
privacy and consent practices. In the article, they mention a class action lawsuit against IBM and offer the public a
reverse image search to see if one’s Flickr images were unknowingly extracted for Diversity in Faces
(https://exposing.ai/search/). Adam Harvey and Jules LaPlace, “IBM Diversity in Faces,” Exposing.AI, 2019,
https://exposing.ai/ibm_dif/.
378
Krishna.
157
Written from the perspective of a South Asian tech executive, Krishna’s letter to
Congress demonstrates how liberalism is baked into the form and operation of technological
corporatization and innovation. Terms such as “diversity,” “inclusivity,” and “human rights”
facilitate a computational logic of encapsulation that offloads racial logic and effects as
symptoms of technological misuse rather than central to its logic of innovation. Krishna’s
recalling of Watson’s “refus[al] to enforce Jim Crow laws at IBM facilities” brings up Charlton
McIlwain’s critiques of IBM diversity initiatives. McIlwain has written on how IBM’s numerous
racial minority recruitment initiatives of the 1960s and 70s targeted primarily Black and brown
people (mostly men) for tech work. These diversities programs, such the IBM’s training program
at Ford Rodman,
379
not only inadequately prepared tech workers for life-sustaining careers but
they also actively obscured IBM’s partnership with local, state, and federal governments.
Alongside their race-liberal corporate diversity programs, IBM actively provided the information
technology infrastructures and databases for helping “imagine, develop, and deploy carceral
technologies that became known as “criminal justice information systems.’”
380

Despite its project’s eventual failure, IBM’s Diversity in Faces provides a glimpse into
Big Tech’s utopian dream of a “datafied” liberal subject as co-extensive with its algorithms. DiF
illustrates the technological imaginary of personifying data in ways that can be traced back to
mathematical debates on calculability in the early digital era. In reference to the Diversity in
Faces project, tech articles often use titles such as “Combatting facial recognition bias with better

379
In 1964, IBM along with the Federal Government’s Job Corp ran a technology training program at a former army
base known as Fort Rodman. The aim of the program was to provide hundreds of men of color high-school dropouts
in order to help them gain access to entry-level positions in tech companies. For more on the desires and failures of
the Fort Rodman experiment, See Charlton McIlwain, “The Fort Rodman Experiment,” Logic Magazine 12,
December 20, 2020, https://logicmag.io/commons/the-fort-rodman-experiment/.
380
A good example of these partnerships with local, state, and federal government is IBM’s “ALERT II” system
launched in 1968 in Kansa City, Missouri during a year of civil uprising. Ibid.
158
data.”
381
While the previous section’s discussion of Asiatic rendered algorithm relied on the
faulty methods of physiognomy, the desiring regime for “better data”
382
can be found even in the
overt racism of the “How to Tell” articles circulating after the Pearl Harbor attack. In “How to
Tell,” a collective white American readership was the technology, relying on the set of
approximated “rule-of-thumb” data points for operationalizing a national “discharge of
emotions.”
383
Racism was algorithmically on display. The black box of automated racism was
not hidden from view but circulated and distributed in plain sight. In IBM’s Diversity in Faces,
race is encoded into the organizational logic and expansive desires of the algorithm. Put into
historical relation, conceptualizing the Diversity in Faces project alongside the “How to Tell”
articles illuminate a race-liberal genealogy of algorithmic thinking. If, as Tara McPherson has
suggested, the rise of computation largely accompanied the “process[ing of] race and other forms
of difference in more covert registers,”
384
then IBM’s “Diversity in Faces” represents an
assimilated, neutralizing abstraction of race as algorithm that demonstrates how race is “an
epistemological category of white supremacy.”
385
These “new” and “old” forms of algorithmic
thinking reveal how the unmarked liberal subject continues to occupy the imagined interiority of
AI technologies.

Asian/American Procedural Arts
At this point, we may notice that the status of the Asiatic we have been tracking has been
assimilated into the non-perceptual abstraction of “diversity,” featured in the data

381
Susan Miller, “Combatting facial recognition bias with better data,” GCN, January 30, 2019,
https://gcn.com/data-analytics/2019/01/combatting-facial-recognition-bias-with-better-data/298312/.
382
Ibid.
383
“How to Tell.”
384
Tara McPherson, Feminist in a Software Lab: Design and Difference (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2018), 60.
385
Junaid Rana, “Race,” in Keywords for Asian American Studies, ed. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Linda Trinh Võ, and
K. Scott Wong (New York: NYU Press, 2015), 202–207.
159
multiculturalism of IBM. The “rule-of-thumb” dataset that circulated around Asiatic
indeterminacy has gave way to the aspirations for “diversity,” “accuracy,” and “fairness.” Racial
inscrutability is the precondition for a desiring regime for more accurate and reliable data, the
expanding “heart” of an AI-driven algorithm of recognition. This “heart”—indexing an
aspirational “freedom” from bias that can never be obtained—is also a data proxy for whiteness.
Whiteness as a technoliberal desiring structure is the primary subject of Ryan Kuo’s
media art. Throughout his many projects since 2007, Ryan Kuo has used software, computation,
and other information technologies to give texture, presence, and form to the race-neutrality of
whiteness. His work illuminates race as a procedural technology, an epistemological mode of
categorizing, differentiating, ordering, and compiling the social world. Through racially
nonrepresentational works of art, Kuo’s media art are procedural in the sense that they are
“process-based and diagrammatic.”
386
Building from Janet H. Murray’s formulation of the
“procedural,”
387
Ian Bogost has used the term “procedural rhetoric” to describe how rule-
oriented processes of computational and programmatic execution shape the experiential and
sensorial world of user experience, especially in relation to video games.
388
Through various
artistic strategies, Kuo’s work reflexively illuminate the affective and aesthetic contours of race-
neutrality in the age of algorithms.
From the perspective of Asian/American cultural studies, Kuo’s work is particularly
important because it demonstrates an artistic approach that critically interrogates whiteness. The
primary mode of Asian/American critique has been through what Viet Thanh Nguyen has called
the “defensive position,” in which Asian/American criticism often reads for either resistance or

386
Ryan Kuo, Artist website, accessed April 15, 2022, https://rkuo.net/About.
387
Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1998), 71.
388
Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2007), ix.
160
accommodation and consequently idealizes the former.”
389
While the intellectual project of
Asian/American studies has illuminated the many possibilities for political solidarity and
oppositionality, the unintended effect of this critical frame has led to a lack of attention to
Asian/America’s proximity to whiteness. By taking up the subject of whiteness as it manifests
through the race-neutral logics of software, interfaces, and other processes of information
technologies, Kuo’s media art demonstrates a diagnostic form of Asian/Americanist cultural
critique that is not overly wedded to political idealism.
390
Thus, although Kuo does not readily
identify his artistic intentions within the frame of Asian/American art, his distance from the
conventions of Asian/American cultural production are what I find uniquely instructive for
developing new directions for Asian/American media art. Referring less to an identitarian,
representational, or critical subject, the matter of “race” within Kuo’s media art is thus more
closely aligned with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s formulation of “race and/as technology,” a
guiding concept that has generatively informed the set of nonrepresentational literature and art
assembled in this project.
391

389
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 9.
390
Christopher Lee has identified as the “idealized critical subject” as an organizing figure of Asian/American
cultural criticism. Christopher Lee, The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature
(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 9.
391
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Race and/as Technology or How to Do Things To Race,” in Race After the Internet,
ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 38.
161

In Kuo’s media artwork File: A Primer (2018), the viewer encounters a video of a
software development program. Made using the automated presentation tools available in
Keynote, File: A Primer presents a set of procedural instructions for “attaining whiteness.”
392

File: A Primer is about a generically named software tool named “File” and presents a series of
technical platitudes (recalling the simplified, direct-address rhetoric typical of Silicon Valley
tech-speak) accompanied by diagrammatic animations. Kuo’s use of the verb “attaining” casts
whiteness as an aspiration horizon, which situates his media artwork of procedurality as a
technical manual for assimilating into whiteness. Read through an Asian/Americanist lens, File:
A Primer functions as a process-oriented software for minority modeling, in which race is

392
Ryan Kuo, “File: A Primer (2018),” accessed April 1, 2022. https://rkuo.net/File-A-Primer.
Figure 4.6: Stills from Ryan Kuo’s File: A Primer (2018)
162
rendered simply “graphic phenomenon,” as discussed in chapter two, and merely skin-deep or
screen-deep. By constructing the viewer as a generic “user” through the interface of the artwork,
the work reflexively exposes the desires of liberal subjectivity lodged in the heart of technical
systems. Thus, in an artist interview, Kuo describes digital interfaces as “result[ing] directly
from the logic of whiteness, and they indeed demand complicity or resistance.”
393
This phrasing
invokes an Asian/Americanist critical position through its framing of “complicity or resistance.”
Kuo stages the user-interface relation in similar terms that have occupied Asian/American
criticism, which has spent much analytical energies reading for either complicity or resistance in
the cultural canon. Even as Kuo does not frame his work as an explicitly Asian/Americanist text,
its diagnostic mode implies an Asian/Americanist position, in which proximity to whiteness
allows for a closer view into its mystifying claims to neutrality.
File: A Primer offers interpretative strategies sensitive to the race-neutralizing operations
of whiteness and liberal subjectivity. It presents a series of technical instructions, a seemingly
nonracial modality, in order to strategically ironize the procedure of whiteness. File: A Primer
uses technical descriptions of the ambiguously named “File” to enact a racial critique. Taking
visual form as a square that modulates and transforms in size and scale throughout the video, the
File operates as a minimalist rendering of whiteness that evokes multiple associations with
containment, affective flatness, graphic representation, and scalability. These attributes of the
“File” suggest how issues of social difference and identity are aestheticized and
“dematerialized,” as Jodi Melamed might say. The descriptor “file” also operates as both a noun
and a verb, in which the file is a repository (the “file”) as well as a means of documentation (to
“file”). This noun-verb function recalls the dual meanings of the term “black box” that Frank

393
Ryan Kuo, “Alien and Sedition (Interviewed by Kent Szlauderbach),” BOMB Magazine, July 18, 2018,
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/alien-and-sedition-ryan-kuo-interviewed/.
163
Pasquale alludes, which refers to both a recording device and a technical object shrouded in
secrecy and complexity.
394
Casting whiteness as both an occulted abstraction as well as a process
of data recording, File: A Primer simulates the racial project of whiteness as software
development maintenance.
Central to File: A Primer is the use of graphical representations. Simple and sleek lines
and shapes pile onto one other to visually accommodate the technical narration of File: A
Primer. Here, the “graphic” contains two relevant connotations. One refers to visual depiction or
design aesthetic, usually through disinterested calculation and measurement. The other suggests
the viscerally explicit, grotesque, or transgressive. Taken together and in tension, the sleek,
clean, and purified graphics of color convey an aesthetic tone that belies its sociohistorical
legacies of racial violence, always in excess of any abstracted marking as “color.” Bruno Latour
has used the term “graphism” to describe a type of visual inscription that is “mobile but also
immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another.”
395
These two-dimensional
“inscriptions,” such as grids and diagrams, conjoin modernity’s scientific episteme of rationality
with legacies of colonial expansion and conquest. Through a clinical coolness of technical and
graphical depiction, the critical mode of File: A Primer lies in its expository function,
indoctrinating the viewer into the procedurality of whiteness.
Kuo’s media art begins with a series of user-directed statements focused on resolving a
“technical” issue:
You can easily recover your sight.

The answer is in your File.

394
Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
395
Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Drawing Things Together,” Knowledge and Society Studies in the
Sociology of Culture Past and Present, ed. Elizabeth Long and Henrika Kuklick (Greenwich, CT: Jai Press, 1986),
7.
164

File an issue to quickly improve outcomes.

Stack your file with those of your collaborators.

Now your interests are aligned.

You are indivisible from your file.

Life resembles File.
396

As the central guiding metaphor, the “File”—saturated with qualities of neutrality and
ambiguity—frames the related issues of visuality, resolution, optimization, and collaboration
through an allegorical whiteness. It’s use of a simplified rhetoric of technical instruction ironizes
the longer sociohistorical project of whiteness coded as a faith in visuality (“recover your sight”),
technical rationality and fetishization (“the answer is in your File”), aspirational optimization
(“improve outcomes”), structural power (“stack your file with those of your collaborators”) in
order to construct a digital present indistinguishable from whiteness (“Life resembles File”).

396
The first seven statements presented in Ryan Kuo’s File: A Primer (2018).
165

The “File” indexes a larger faith in data optimization that I have been tracking throughout
this chapter. Aspirations for more reliable, proximate, accurate, fair, or “better” data often
become a proxy for a white liberal subject-position. These appeals to the rhetoric of “intention”
are also ironized in Kuo’s File: A Primer. In one sequence, the video renders the phrase “good
intention” diagrammatically through two different files. By connecting the files through a forked
path, File: A Primer critical exposes how the liberal coding of “intention” also inscribes a logic
of decisions, locating the ideology of intention within its external expression as a choice-effect.
Thus, by situating good intentions as, quietly literally, a structuring force conditioning the appeal
for more and more “files,” the media artwork accounts for how a technoliberal aspiration of
abstracted “intention” is absorbed through the proxy of more data. Here, we can also harken back
Figure 4.7: More Stills from Ryan Kuo’s File: A Primer (2018).
166
to the “How to Tell” social algorithm that, despite its unreliability and explicit racist science, still
fortified the moral consciousness of the white American reader. We can also recall IBM’s
Diversity in Faces project that discursively framed its extraction of facial datasets through the
desiring regime of good intention (for AI to be “accurate” and “fair”
397
). In File: A Primer, this
point is emphasized as the “intention” sequence progresses, when “great intentions” and “best
intentions” appears as a mise-en-abyme of files. Depicting file within file (or file on top of file),
File: A Primer dramatizes the exaggerated state of liberal intention, which finds its technical
corollary as a desire to accumulate more and more data, or “files.”
Kuo’s File: A Primer concludes that algorithmic racism is not only evident in social
effects and consequences but also made possible by the bastion of “good intentions” that
constructs a liberal subject as the “heart” of data. By diagnosing the procedural operations of
whiteness, File: A Primer places the analysis on the valences of race-neutrality that often shape
the imaginary of technical systems and functions. While the “files” that constitute Choi’s poem
“Kyoko’s Language Files” point to how the Asianized face has been rendered into calculable
parts, the “files” in Kuo’s File: A Primer ironize how liberal “intentions” shape the desiring
regime of “black box” operations. Both reflexive and recursive, these literary and artistic works
find their critical import in the procedural modality, suggesting how attention to spliced bits and
bytes can move Asian/Americanist critique beyond the subject as a unit of analysis.

397
Merler, et al., 2
167
CODA
Cybernetic Openings

Perhaps it is fitting, in a writerly feedback loop, to take up the beginning in order to begin
anew and to explicitly address the question of politics. This project began in the heyday of
cybernetics when this emerging field of prediction science was unruly and undisciplined. Its
multitudinous openings, knowledge formations, and social forms demonstrate its reverberating
effects and make it a valuable site of study for understanding the digital present, as Orit Halpern
has so aptly shown.
398
This is not to overly valorize cybernetics as an originating source or
moment in time but to think through its perceptual mediations of racial meaning in the ongoing
structures of US liberal capitalism. Cybernetics, after all, emphasized a temporal convergence of
past and futures through a rationalist worldview in which the link between seeing and knowing
combined into a material layer of “information.” No longer tethered to ocular proof or
ontological certainty, race more closely resembled a second-order aesthetic materialization and
form, a cognitive mapping that could be shaped, molded, reconfigured, and made interactable in
the histories we tell of the present.
The Asian/American literature and art that make up this project all provide a glimpse into
this casting of race as a second-order aesthetic regime, a virtual interface on top of perceived
reality. Through a nonrepresentational mode, these cultural works do not turn away from the
question of race and sociality but rather attune to the proxied effect of race. Unmooring “race”
from the raced subject, these texts address race’s persistent virtual expression—as
“unpredictability,” as a “model,” as “technology,” and as “algorithm.” Thus, the virtual attends

398
Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2015).
168
to the informatic translation of the world that organizes and orders social life through the logic of
processes, systems, and other combinatory arrangement of forms. This is one of the primary
lesson I hope can be gleaned from the assembly of works I consider: Isamu Noguchi’s blueprints,
his Garden of the Future for IBM, Nam June Paik’s digital arts, Zhi Lin’s Chinaman’s Chance,
Janice Lobo Sapigao’s poetics in microchips for millions, Ahree Lee’s media installation, Franny
Choi’s Soft Science, and Ryan Kuo’s procedural art.
A guiding racial proxy in this project has been the minority model, which is a powerful
example of race expressed in a second-order aesthetic register. While it often draws from
Asian/American narratives of trauma, self-reliance, and perseverance, the minority model
provides a perceptual mapping of race, a type of information visualization of the U.S. racial
regime under liberal capitalism. It is a model that reduces racial meaning to “merely” aesthetic
difference while promoting the extractive capacity for laboring as a vehicle for national
inclusion, citizenship, and assimilation. If Kate Crawford has suggested, drawing from Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri, that abstraction leads to extraction,
399
then the minority model is a
powerful racial abstraction that arranges life worlds under racial capitalism and the digital
present. While Asian/American studies has often worked to anxiously cleave the
Asian/American subject from the minority model form, this project has pressed into the modeling
effects of race, an interfacing of histories, subjects, and power that does things.
400
What race
does is largely undetermined.

399
Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2021), 18.
400
Here, I recall both Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Beth Coleman’s formulation of “race as technology,” shifting
the question from what race “is” to what race “does.” Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Race and/as Technology or How to
Do Things To Race,” in Race After the Internet, ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (New York, NY:
Routledge, 2012); Beth Coleman, “Race as Technology,” Camera Obscura 24, no. 1 (2009): 177-207.
169
I close by considering this indeterminacy of race—rendered aesthetic proxy—through
two contemporary examples with diverging political ends. Both draw from the legacy of
Japanese internment, a historical case study that accompanies the technical origins of cybernetic
thinking that began this project. The first example is the Nakamoto Group, a private firm based
outside of Washington D.C. that specializes in facility management and operations logistics. The
Nakamoto Group has actively maintained a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) since 2011, in which the financial sum of their 2018 fiscal year contract was
approximately valued at $116 million.
401
Specifically, the Nakamoto Group ran logistics,
surveillance, and quality control inspections for ICE detention facilities and is a stark example of
the intersection of Asian/American entrepreneurship and what Jackie Wang has called “carceral
capitalism.”
402
The President of the Nakamoto Group was Jennifer Nakamoto, a Japanese
American woman and direct descendent of incarcerated Japanese Americans during Executive
Order 9066. While many Japanese American and Asian American activist organizations (such as
Tsuru for Solidarity) rightfully criticized Jennifer Nakamoto for any involvement with ICE and
the violent US settler carceral state, Nakamoto credited her family’s experience in internment
camps as justification for her firm’s ability to successfully execute its contract with ICE.
despite.
403
Invoking her family’s past experiences under Japanese incarceration, Jennifer
Nakamoto writes in her response letter that “the detained immigrant population as a whole has a
better life because of what Nakamoto does.”
404

401
Yuki Noguchi, “‘No Meaningful Oversight’: ICE Contractor Overlooked Problems at Detention Center,” NPR,
July 17 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/07/17/741181529/no-meaningful-oversight-ice-contractor-overlooked-
problems-at-detention-centers.
402
Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
403
Noguchi.
404
Jennifer Nakamoto, “Letter to Senators,” December 4, 2018, linked in NPR article by Yuki Noguchi, “‘No
Meaningful Oversight’: ICE Contractor Overlooked Problems at Detention Center,” NPR, July 17 2019,
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/17/741181529/no-meaningful-oversight-ice-contractor-overlooked-problems-at-
detention-centers.
170
These words eerily and powerfully resonate with Isamu Noguchi’s desires to “make
[Poston] more human.”
405
While it would not be accurate to historically collapse Nakamoto’s
aspirations and Noguchi’s actions in Japanese internment (Noguchi, for one, eventually
acknowledged the immeasurable violence of Japanese incarceration), the similarities between
their words demonstrate how these narratives of racial perseverance, betterment, and uplift are
abstracted and subsumed by the “race-neutral” processes of facility logistics, data management,
and administrative state violence under its private entrepreneurial arm of the Nakamoto Group, a
self-described “small, disadvantaged, minority-owned, woman-owned business.”
406
To fully
account for how race is operating in the case of the Nakamoto Group, it would not be enough to
simply name Jennifer Nakamoto a model minority, or what Asian American intellectuals would
call a “bad” Asian/American subject.
407
Rather, the Nakamoto Group exemplifies how race
operates as a type of modeling, in the procedural and informatic sense of logistical ordering that
facilitates the ongoing violence of the US carceral state. The fact that Jennifer Nakamoto named
her company the “Nakamoto Group” underlines the relationship between the model minority
(Jennifer Nakamoto) and minority modeling (the operations of the Nakamoto Group), the
ultimate assimilation of race into the logistics firm’s infrastructural, managerial, data, and
surveillance operations. Resonating with the cybernetic ethos of “chaos” into “order,” the
Nakamoto Group represents the abstraction of race as the material force of information’s
bureaucratic and procedural violence. Nakamoto Vice President Mark Saunders’ words
emphasize this exact point: "we have made it abundantly clear that we are in no way political,

405
Isamu Noguchi, letter to Mr. Yasuo Akibo, Feb. 23, 1979, The Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY.
406
Nakamoto.
407
Viet Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 6.
171
and we have no agenda other than to do our work."
408
Considering Nakamoto’s embrace of racial
histories, here race is further transmuted to become “work” itself, evacuated of all political
consciousness and emptied of racial meaning. Further, this becoming-work reflects an
abstraction of race into informatic logistics, indexing the valences and violences of race-
neutrality done under the name of the Nakamoto Group. Tara McPherson has argued, “Capital is
now fully organized under the sign of modularity. It operates via the algorithm and the database,
via simulation and processing.”
409
Under information capitalism, race does things beyond its
identitarian markings or its individual scale. Race is capable of being abstracted into a second-
order materialization as logistics, procedures, and bureaucratic regulations. The Nakamoto
Group powerfully illustrates how past and future collide in the present and how race is quite
literally materialized as a form of informatics, facilitating the ongoing carceral violences of the
U.S. nation-state under the face of a Japanese American woman-owned business.
In contrast, my second example showcases the political energies of Japanese American
activists who also draw from the legacies of Japanese incarceration. For example, Nikkei
Progressives have regularly practiced multi-generational, grassroots, and relational approaches
for protesting the U.S nation-state, expanding the definition of race-based activism in capacious
ways across identitarian, temporal, and geographic boundaries. Nikkei Progressives is currently
based in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles and was formed in 2016 at the beginning of the Trump
Administration to protest the “Muslim Ban.” In the final months of writing this project, I
encountered Nikkei Progressive’s performance art-activist project in Little Tokyo, which was
part of their larger nation-wide “Never Again is Now” campaign. In the Japanese Village Plaza

408
Mark Saunders, as quoted in Yuki Noguchi, “‘No Meaningful Oversight’: ICE Contractor Overlooked Problems
at Detention Center,” NPR, July 17 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/07/17/741181529/no-meaningful-oversight-ice-
contractor-overlooked-problems-at-detention-centers. Emphasis mine.
409
Tara McPherson, “U.S Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX, Race After the
Internet, edited by Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012), 34.
172
with bustling tourists and locals, the Nikkei Progressives put up posters with the bolded title:
“Instructions to All Unhoused People Living in the Following Area.” These posters dramatically
recall the orders ushering in Japanese forced relocation titled “Instructions to All Persons of
Japanese Ancestry Living in the Following Area.” This performative statement interpellates
passersby as historical subjects while configuring the physical space as historical immersion,
conjuring and reanimating the declarations of Japanese incarceration in plain sight.
By evacuating the racial content in their “Instructions to All Unhoused” poster, Nikkei
Progressive reveals the evacuation of space that is evident in the ongoing forced removal of
unhoused folks by the joint efforts of City Council District 14 and the Los Angeles Department
of Transportation. Subjectivity and interiority are not the identitarian markers of race in this
Figure 5.1: Poster for the coerced relocation of Japanese and Japanese American peoples
under Executive Order 9066; Figure 5.2: Poster for the Never Again Is Now Campaign in
Little Tokyo, Los Angeles by Nikkei Progressives.

173
document, and this bracketing allows race to be cast as process and procedure, a cybernetic
dynamism binding past and present in its call for future action. “Instructions to All Unhoused”
refracts historical and present violences, condensing in the public space of Little Tokyo.
Transforming the physical environment into an ephemeral interface, if only in an instant for the
passerby, Nikkei Progressive’s artwork train the viewer-participant into a new way of seeing and
knowing—and ultimately sensing and perceiving—the long durée of dispossession,
incarceration, forced removal, and state violence that saturate the everyday infrastructures of the
Los Angeles. As Caroline Levine reminds us: “The past shows us what is possible—and we
return, again and again, to its arrangements: the ordering of bodies and spaces, hierarchies and
narratives, containments and exclusions.”
410
In a different register, race does things, and its
scopes and scales proliferate through the information aesthetics of the built environment. The
“interiorized” historical trauma of race is externalized as interactive urban infrastructure,
exposing the programmatic computation of lived experience through the technocratic rationale of
coordinated sweeps. As the inverse of cybernetic’s temporal logic and formulated in the
negative, Nikkei Progressives’ campaign slogan “Never Again is Now” refuses the “condition of
systemic, collective forgetting…that makes the continued development of actual camps
possible.”
411
“Instructions to All Unhoused” powerfully illuminates how “race” can help us see,
know, perceive differently. This vision reveals the multiplicities of histories and temporalities at
play in urban space. The built environment is transformed into an interface for many unfolding
presents and futures.

410
Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017),
xi.
411
Naomi Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (Chapel Hill, NC:
The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 7.
174
What has become of race under information capitalism? Race has been technologized not
only as machine, automaton, or robot but also on the level of data, algorithms, and software. The
Asian/American literature and art considered in The Racial Interface attune to race’s informatic
and computational modality. They reveal underlying racial logics, forms, and processes. As a
diagnostic tool, these aesthetic works attune to how racial forms, ideas, and beliefs are encoded
within historical developments of the digital, shaping the dynamics between subjects,
technology, power, and resistance under the powerful myths of US liberal capitalism. By
bracketing the a priori knowability of the raced subject, this project has collected interpretive
strategies for attuning to the distributed and proxied incarnations of race as modeled in a variety
of literary, artistic, and historical media. Further, it has contributed to a racial history of the
digital present not simply by uncovering and including raced subjects into its narrative fold.
Instead, by tracking the mutability of the Asiatic form that has emboldened techno-utopian
narratives, visions, and imaginaries, The Racial Interface holds open the possibility to imagine
and innovate racial logics anew. Interfaces, after all, are never fully determined artifacts but
material mediations of desire, perception, and power. They construct regimes of seeing and
knowing that can be retooled for critical, divergent, and potentially liberatory ends.

175
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Asset Metadata

Creator He, Huan (author)

Core Title The racial interface: informatics and Asian/America

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/24/2024

Defense Date 06/06/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art & technology,Asian American culture,critical race studies,digital studies,histories of technology,information technology,OAI-PMH Harvest,race & technology

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee chair), McPherson, Tara (committee member), Rowe, John Carlos (committee member), Shah, Nayan (committee member)

Creator Email huanh@usc.edu,huanhe91@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111375308

Unique identifier UC111375308

Legacy Identifier etd-HeHuan-10950

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights He, Huan

Type texts

Source 20220728-usctheses-batch-962 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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