This dissertation reframes color as an experiential category that is consistently manipulated and calibrated through technological means, often to the benefit of corporate institutions and global structures of power. “Seeing by Numbers” is organized around what I call “the digitization of perception”: an epistemological mode that equates numbers and measurement with knowledge that emerged in the early twentieth century. I argue that color systems (diagrams or models that organize the color spectrum in visual and spatial terms) emblematize the tension between quantified norms and embodied experience that characterizes much of postindustrial culture. Analyzing examples ranging from nineteenth-century commercial paint charts to the postwar suburban home to Pantone’s Color of the Year and Adobe Photoshop, I reveal how modern color models, which were adapted for industry standards in fields ranging from agriculture to computer interfaces, continue to inform how we use and experience color today. In this way, the project charts a narrative of continuity rather than rupture when it comes to digital and algorithmic technology and contends that qualities commonly linked to digital color—such as numerical representation, modularity, and detachment from form—map onto a way of seeing that has been with us since long before computational technology.

In chapter one, my engagement with turn-of-the-century developments in synthetic dyes and the emerging fields of psychophysics and spectroscopy reveals that the color grid overtook the color wheel as the primary organizational mode beginning in the early twentieth century. Grid configurations such as the Standard Color Card of America taught citizens to see colors as discrete entities that were abstracted from objects, reshaping human perception and patterns of consumption in a rapidly industrializing world. The next chapter moves to the American postwar suburban home. Reading the writings of famed color consultant Faber Birren alongside mid-century color psychology and advertising theory, I contend that the so-called freedom of color choice within the home promoted by color consulting firms and paint companies actually cemented set identity categories, as gender and race became subject to standardization and classification under the guise of personality. I then turn to the period between the 1980s and early 2000s, when color standards initially designed for pigments were adapted for light-emitting digital screens. From social media accounts to installation works, users and artists alike understand digital color as modular and choppy rather than seamless, drawing inspiration from the material aspects of the computer supposedly obfuscated by the screen. The final chapter consists of two central case studies—the Color Factory, an interactive pop-up Instagram exhibition, and Pantone’s Color of the Year—demonstrating how color today cannot be separated from the rise of an attention-based platform economy grounded in voluntary self-surveillance and the commodification of emotions. By capitalizing on the notion that color is nostalgic or “authentic,” both these examples promote color as an escape from the “always-on” mindset of a technologically saturated existence, despite the irony that they depend on this very framework to survive. Ultimately, by taking a critical stance on color systems and diagrams that purport to be objective, I draw attention to the ways in which changing representational strategies continue to play a key role in establishing ways of knowing and constructing both the self and the world around us.