Article ID: CBB275911498

Isamu Noguchi's Gardens: Yellow Peril in the Age of Information (2024)

unapi

The origins of the information and digital age can be traced to Norbert Wiener's wartime document "Yellow Peril," a yellow-bound book of "perilous" statistics introducing his eventual science of prediction (cybernetics). This essay situates the emergence of "prediction science" alongside the growing sentiment of Japanese "unpredictability," two corresponding experiments in perception in 1942. It also examines sculptor Isamu Noguchi's blueprints to transform Poston War Relocation Center into a garden. 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. Through the case of Asian racialization, this essay contends that the historical formation of the information age is embedded within the historical formation of racial liberalism.

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Authors & Contributors
Chiang, Connie Y.
Shinozuka, Jeannie Natsuko
Beattie, James
Daniels, Roger
Fiset, Louis
Jensen, Gwenn M.
Journals
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
Environmental History
Health and History
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
Pharmacy in History
Terrae Incognitae
Publishers
University of Chicago Press
University of Minnesota
Bloomsbury Academic
Princeton University Press
Rowman & Littlefield
University of Minneapolis Press
Concepts
Race
Japanese Americans
Gardens
World War II
Science and race
Imperialism
People
Britton, Nathaniel Lord
Laughlin, Harry Hamilton
Morton, Samuel George
White, Walter
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century
Early modern
Progressive Era (1890s-1920s)
Places
United States
India
Australia
Canada
Europe
Germany
Institutions
United States. Eugenics Record Office
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