Lights! Race! Gender! Adrian Piper and the Pseudorationality of Data

This article engages with the work of Adrian Piper in order to explore relationships among visuality, data, race, and gender. It specifically pairs Piper's multimedia installation Cornered (1988) with her conception of pseudorationality, which she develops in her philosophical work on Immanuel Kant, and brings this pairing to bear on current discussions in software and critical algorithm studies. Cornered's exposure of the pseudorationality of racist perception and its visual grammar contributes to our understanding of the racist and gendered conditions of data's appearance, particularly in terms of data's reliance on the visual. Ultimately, I argue, Piper's work provokes us to call into question the stability of “data” itself.