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

The origins of the information and digital age can be traced to Norbert Weiner'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.