My dissertation tracks the convergence of aesthetics and cybernetics across the life and work of four midcentury Asian American avantgardists raised on the tenant farm, concentration camp, and segregated ethnic enclave under the Alien Land Laws, Japanese American internment, and Chinese Exclusion: sculptor Ruth Asawa, weaver Kay Sekimachi, calligrapher Bernice Bing, and architect Helen Liu Fong. Underscoring the significance of anti-Asian legislation for the production of both modernist art and postwar technologies, I argue that even as Asian American populations were expropriated for their labor and instrumentalized as test subjects for cybernetic technologies of governance, they engaged in counter-techniques of democratic living that extended the political stakes of artmaking as systems-thinking to the present. By reconstituting the avant-garde art object as a technology of social transformation from below, Asian American modernists rerouted midcentury technologies of life through an alternative genealogy ground in the ethics of twentieth century Asian American labor culture.