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Abstract
Chromakey has historically served as a promiscuous interlocutor between the real and virtual in which color anticipates a thing yet to exist. In this sense, chromakey performs as a placeholder that denies fidelity to either physical or virtual arenas; instead conjuring new spaces of contradiction superimposed with multiplicitous agencies. This essay examines the genealogy of chromakey while conceptualizing placeholders as spaces that leave room for something that might change, transform, and transverse. The popular usage of chromakey is tracked alongside artists whose work subverts the technology to inform an architectural design studio that critically examines the techniques, visual regimes, and cultural manifestations of contemporary digital spaces.
Notes
1 Carolyn L. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics After Code (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).
2 Justin Grandinetti, “‘From the Classroom to the Cloud’: Zoom and the Platformization of Higher Education,” First Monday, 2022, https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i2.11655; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
3 Suzanne Lettieri, Arch 4101/4102/5101/5115.502–F22, Foregrounding Background: Perceptions, Identities, Space, Cornell University Advanced Architecture Option Studio (2022).
4 Stephen Prince and Wayne E. Hensley, “The Kuleshov Effect: Recreating the Classic Experiment,” Cinema Journal 31:2 (1992): 59, https://doi.org/10.2307/1225144.
5 George Méliès and other pivotal filmmakers experimented with black mattes, using a partially black painted lens, to hide and reveal moments within a scene; RocketStock, “Visual Effects: How Matte Paintings Are Composited into Film,” Pond5 blog, June 29, 2023, https://blog.pond5.com/30867-visual-effects-matte-paintings-composited-film/.
6 Birk Weiberg, “Functional Colors: The Varied Applications of Complementary Hues,” Film History 29:2 (2017): 91, https://doi.org/10.2979/filmhistory.29.2.04.
7 Additional colors were employed as well including a yellow screen or sodium vapor process employed by Disney in films such as Mary Poppins, in which its characters share the screen with cartoon animals and sets.
8 Alvy Smith Ray. Alpha and the history of digital compositing - researchgate. Accessed January 3, 2024. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2336688_Alpha_and_the_History_of_Digital_Compositing#fullTextFileContent
9 Smith, Alpha, 7.
10 Abrons and Fure discuss the popularity of James Bridle’s Tumblr blog, partly attributed to the review of the SXSW event by author Bruce Sterling in Wired titled “An Essay on the New Aesthetic,” Wired, April 2, 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/04/an-essay-on-the-new-aesthetic/.
11 Ian Mamontov, “Virtual Backgrounds: Real-Time Deep Semantic Segmentation on Mobile,” Grid Dynamics (blog), November 20, 2023, https://blog.griddynamics.com/virtual-background/.
12 Sondra Perry, “Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One,” accessed November 22, 2023, video, https://sondraperry.com/Lineage-for-a-Multiple-Monitor-Workstation-Number-One.
13 Megan Driscoll, “Introduction to No Template: Art and the Technologies of Race,” Media-N | The Journal of the New Media 18:1, accessed November 28, 2023, https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/928/772; Maithani quoted from Charu Maithani’s “Blan/ck Screens: Chroma Screens Performing Race,” Media-N | The Journal of the New Media 18:1, https://iopn.library.illinois.edu/journals/median/article/view/844.
14 Charu Maithani explains in “Blan/CK Screens: Chroma Screens Performing Race” that “How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOVFile (2013), Hito Steyerl explores the politics of the visibility of images and proposes that chroma screens can be a way to hide from over-visibility by becoming a part of the image.” Maithani, Charu. “Blan/CK Screens: Chroma Screens Performing Race.” Media-N 18, no. 1 (2022). https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v18i1.844.
15 Meredith Broussard,“Machine Learning: The DL on ML,” in Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019).
16 Barbara Fox, Barbara, introduction, to Fillers, Pauses, and Placeholders, Nino Amiridze, Boyd H. Davis, and Margaret Maclagan (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2010).
17 Makoto Hayashi and Kyung-Eun Yoon, “A Cross-linguistic Exploration of Demonstratives in Interaction,” in Amiridze et al., Fillers, Pauses, and Placeholders.
18 Anish Kapoor: Memory, Deutsche Guggenheim, October 21, 2009 - March 28, 2010.
19 Umberto Eco, The Open Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
20 Guy De Mallac, “The Poetics of the Open Form: (Umberto Eco’s Notion of ‘Opera Aperta’),” Books Abroad 45:1 (1971): 31–36, https://doi.org/10.2307/40125003.
21 Eco, The Open Work.
22 Eco, The Open Work.
23 Kane, Chromatic Algorithms.
24 Carolyn L. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
25 Tom Jennings, Dead Media Project, accessed November 22, 2023, http://www.deadmedia.org/notes/index-cat.html#tv, based on Bruse Sterling, Dead Media Manifesto, accessed November 22, 2023, http://www.deadmedia.org/modest-proposal.html.
26 Kane, Chromatic Algorithms, 204.
27 Jay Kirby and Lori Emerson, “Media Genealogy| As If, or, Using Media Archaeology to Reimagine Past, Present, and Future: An Interview with Lori Emerson,” International Journal of Communication [Online] 10 (2016): 14, https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4764.
28 Kirby and Emerson, “Media Genealogy”: 3223.
29 Eco, The Open Work.
30 Eco, The Open Work.
31 Florian Cramer in What is ‘post-digital’ discusses this as the “fiction of agency” or an illusion of control over a medium. Florian Cramer, “What is ‘Post-Digital’,” in D.M. Berry and M. Deiter, eds., Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation, and Design (Palgrave, Macmillan, London, 2014).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Suzanne Lettieri
Suzanne Lettieri is a coprincipal of Jefferson Lettieri Office and an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. Her work tackles a range of scales and seeks to bridge the gap between aesthetics and socially conscious design. Lettieri was a Michigan-Mellon Design Fellow in Egalitarianism and the Metropolis at Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she was the lead instructor for ArcPrep. Additionally, she served as an assistant professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she initiated the pilot program Inclusive Recruitment Strategies and previously held a visiting critic position at Cornell University. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Detroit, and Boston, and published in Project, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, The Plan Journal, and Plat. She received a residency fellowship at MacDowell and a Graham grant with Kunlé Adeyemi for the book African Water Cities (NAi010, 2023). Lettieri is a coeditor of the forthcoming book Junior Architects.