May 18, 2005

• I sometimes wonder what would happen if I built a TV that used cyan, magenta, and yellow phosphors? Or did offset color printing with red, blue, green (and black?) ink. I obviously have nothing better to do while falling asleep.
• I have always wondered if the colours that I see are what everyone else sees. For example, I look at grass and it's green, but I wonder if when someone else looks at it they see it the way I see red. For them, it's still green but they see it differently.
• No more acid for you young man.
• Either that, or not enough acid.
• To 'know' about color is to know that you can't know. Color is in your head - an illusion. Picasso said as much, adding that the only truth was in value (light vs. dark). To get the inside scoop on how color is actually percieved, quite apart from the experientally irrelevant scientific study, read Josef Albers' "The Interaction of Color" published by the Yale University Press. You will learn that color cannot be memorized, and even when it's right in front of you it can change in terms of hue, value, saturation (not to mention symbolic meaning.)
• Hee, Bondurant, I thought of that question myself! I always wondered if people with terrible taste in colours might just be seeing it differently from other people. Maybe all those horrid puke greens and lurid pinks are soothing pastel shades to their eyes.
• When I was in art school, I took a class in color theory that was modeled on Alber's color course. We spent an entire semester playing with little squares of colored paper and making little square qouache paintings of color. By the end of the semester I was hallucinating colors -- I could just look at my white bathtub at home and see a myriad of hues playing on its surface.
• fascinating factoid: the color marketing group is literally who decides what colors will be "in" for clothing, home furnishings and cars each year. kid you not.
• My favorite site exploring color, Claudia Cortes' Colors in Motion. Warning: Flash
• Bondurant, I have wondered that since I was little, if what I perceive as "blue" someone else might be calling "blue" but seeing "red".... And I've wondered if the '70s were just one long decade of colorblindness, because, man, those were some funky colors, and not good-funky either.
• The interesting thing I realized about "70s colors" is that they're sorta earth tones. Turtle greens, faded yellows, light browns, etc, perfect for all your 70s cars, carpets, refrigerators, and clothes. Maybe it was an expression of guilt-ridden conscience because of the industrial excesses of the sixties.
• Why are things coloured?
• That sounds kind of cool in a freaky way Zanshin
• Um... SideDish... that color thingy you linked to? Frickin' weird. I mean, a group of experts who get together to make guesses as to which colors will be popular next year so that products in those colors can be manufactured, sure, I get that, and I can certainly see how such a thing would be useful. But the actual colors themselves? Here's one typical example of a new "hot" color for 2006: Electric Mud - Visual Communications is stuck on this deep rich brown based on the meeting of Technology and Nature. Why can't they pick a color name that actually evokes an image of a color? I mean, these people are supposed to be experts... Somebody please tell me how Electric Mud is a color. Seriously. Burnt Umber, I can see: you can actually find some raw umber and burn that shit. But Electric Mud?? You go stick a power cord into some wet dirt now, I dare you. You might get a 220V AC shock, but you sure as hell are not going to get anything I'd describe as a color.
• if I built a TV that used cyan, magenta, and yellow phosphors? Or did offset color printing with red, blue, green (and black?) ink. Well the TV would be black, as CMY are used for reflective (subtractive) models not transmissive (additive). CMY subtracts from the source light and there would nothing left of the light As for offset printing, red, blue and green inks are used all time as spot colors (Pantone). But you can't use them to make a full color images. CMY again subtracts from white light souce and white paper reflects back the 'full color' image, you brain does the blending for you. This is why printing inks are semi-translucent, they don't work if you can see paper through them. Pantones however are opaque inks because the color is already mixed.
• rivers of tears run to it sometimes ocean is all cyan overhead a spill of sun through bastard amber watery dimming of magenta coral plunge past the ink-language kicking and stroking the white-light pages shot with words pen pricks hopeful black wholes