Isamu Noguchi’s Blueprints: Creativity, Race, and Power in the Information Age

In 1964, Japanese American Isamu Noguchi designed Garden of the Future for IBM. This artwork consists of diagrams, circuitry, and algorithms, capturing a new mode of informatic thinking. Yet, for Noguchi, his interest in abstract design stemmed from his experience as a voluntary internee in Poston War Relocation Camp during World War II. He joined Japanese internees as a Japanese American creative in order to enhance the conditions of life through blueprints. Noguchi’s investment in imagined spaces illustrates a faith in the human capacity to exceed historical conditions—a desire channeled into the arts and sciences of the information age.

This paper traces the co-constitutive emergence of information culture and Asian/America since 1942. It explores two instances of information management and design: Japanese mass incarceration and the rise of computational software in the 1960s. I turn to the archive of Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi, a key creative who links these two histories of race and information. Centrally, I juxtapose his Poston blueprints (1942) and his Garden of the Future (1964). These two designs illustrate how US racial ideology transformed from logics of exclusion to inclusion, in which the Asian/American became the racial interface for recoding structural racism. Drawing from key concepts of the information age such as systems, process, and scale, Noguchi embraced an optimism born of making that advanced racial, social, and political critique without identity politics, to varying degrees of success and failure.