Designblog

We were asked to make a colour system.
And in the first phase of assignments, we were asked to go over medieval colour systems that made no sense. I’m not a mathematician.
I even once wrote an article about how little of a mathematician I am.
That’s how little of a mathematician I am. Or am not.
The word system really bugged me.
I thought it had to have a religious structure that made sense and was clever at the same time.
Then I thought, no, It’s okay, it can be anything;
because this is Rietveld and you can get away with a lot.
But then my mind went back to it having to be a system.
System. Mechanism. Complex. Arrangement. Order.
ORDER. Structure. Network. Institution. Rigorous. Mathematical. Detailed. Exact. Accurate. Meticulous. Diligent.
These were some of the words that kept hitting my brain. Some Icelandic ones as well.
Then I thought again, no, this is Rietveld. Everything will be okay.
It can be anything.
Once I calmed myself down, after a week or so,

I thought of a painting I’d wanted to make for a long time. I had never actually made it but the idea of it was in my head.

The idea was to collect every single swatch from a paint colour swatch board in a store like GAMMA or Praxis, and exhibit it.

From that idea, came this one: I took all the colours swatches from the wall at GAMMA, or at least I am pretty sure I took every single one… It was very confusing and I almost went blind while doing it because they were SO many.

After that I had around 500 swatches.
So my next thought was to arrange all of the swatches by preferance.
I played a game with my friend where she handed me a colour swatch and I had to choose
if I liked it, hated it or thought it was “okay”.

The ones I loved went to the top, the ones I thought were okay went in the middle and the ones I hated went to the bottom. Then I layed them down next to each other, forming a rectangle. It was fun, it was fast, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it. It made an interesting mosaic.

[Insert VIDEO HERE]

This idea of arranging colours by my own beauty preferances,
came from another idea I had at the beginning of the assignment.
I drew this picture, below, of colors I liked at the top and the ones I didn’t like at the bottom.

Then, these two ideas formed into one.
I painted different kinds of colour combinations that I liked, hated.
Matthias, my mentor, had shown me this book by Sanzo Wada (1883-1967), it is a really thick book with billions of beautiful color combinations. I was very intrigued by it and it made sense now what I should make, my own preferance of color combinations, in the form of a swatch stick.

So, that’s what I did….
I painted on transparent building plastic because it’s smooth
like a baby’s bottom and it is see through
so when I had painted, I could pile them up
and from there they would form all kinds of different paintings&combinations.

My forms are mildly inspired by Hans/Jean Arp’s paintings and sculptures,
but sometimes I just did what ever, and sometimes the
bigger the colours are the more I loved or hated them.
Depending on my mood.
Here you can see Hans/Jean Arp’s form’s stacked on top of each other
forming a composition.

Meanwhile having this assignment in my head I thought A LOT about colour
combinations, more than I’m used to. It was nice..

Light is paramount for us to see any colour in the first place, so I began creating my colour system with this fundamental thought in mind. I started with our obvious source of light, the sun, noticing the subtle changes in light from sunrise to sunset and how it effects the appearance of colour. I wanted to record this somehow, but then I began thinking about the importance of artificial light and thought it would be necessary to include it in my system. The first source of light I turn on when the sun begins to set is a filament lamp on my desk, from there I began thinking of solution of how I can combine these two essential sources of light and the ways in which they effect one another as the day progresses. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible so I took a white (white to ensure that the interference between the natural and artificial light was clearly visible) piece of paper slightly larger than A4 in size as a surface to reflect the light off of. I placed the paper on my window, positioned the filament lamp above and a camera directly in front of the paper, the time I completed this set up was just before sunset and is when I documented the first image. I was unsure if anything would be captured when photographing the paper, perhaps just a light to dark gradient but unexpectedly I was amazed to see how the colours in the image almost exactly resembled the colours in the sky at that moment in time. I decided I wanted to record the progress of how the light emitted from the sky and the filament lamp interact on this white surface from sunrise to sunset. I waited until the weather was forecasted a day with few clouds and from when the sun came up I took a photo every two hours until the sun set, producing a timeline of photos. After repeating this twice more and observing the sky enough I concluded that my final colour system was not going to be series of images showing a timeline, I found the certain hours which I thought were of most importance to take the images showing the interaction between the two lights on the paper.Sunrise, Noon, Sunset, 15 minutes after Sunset and Midnight.

  7:47, 17:58

  12:00, 17:12

 00:00

COLORBLIND PHOTOSHOP

To a lesson of color

from the German Zur Farbenlehre

Goethe focused his notion of colour on the spontaneous sensory experience. His theory is based on how colors are perceived by human brain. He’s not looking for a material definition as Newton did.

He did a lot of experiment, describing phenomena such as coloured shadows, refraction and chromatic aberration.

After some observation, he deducted that Newton’s theory was missing something about colours. He didn’t see darkness as an absence of light but rather at polar to and interacting to the light; colour is a result of interactions between light and darkness.

Goethe’s studies began with the experiments which examined the effects of turbid media such as air, dust, and moisture on the perception of light. He observed that light seen through a turbid medium appears to us yellow. He took the example of the sun seen through the atmosphere: when you look at the sun rising it appears yellow red, the particles there are, the more the sun is red. Otherwise, when we look at the sky we actually look at the darkness of the space. The blue of the space are the particles from the atmosphere reflecting the sunlight, so we have light on obscurity ( more the layer of particles is thin more the sky is dark blue).

From this starting point, Goethe developed his theory on the polarity of colors: real close from the light there is yellow then red, and real close from the darkness there is blue then green. He also concluded that colour is a dynamic process from his experience with a moving prism. He founded a spectra different from Newton, adding: cyan, yellow and magenta.

Goethe also include aesthetic qualities in his colour wheel under the title “allegorical, symbolic, mystic use of colour”:

red is beautiful,orange is noble, violet is unnecessary, yellow is good, green id useful and blue is common. These six qualities were assigned to four categories of human cognition: the rational (red/orange), the intellectual (yellow/green), the sensual (green/blue) and the imagination (red/ violet).

Goethe also made the “rose of temperaments”, an earlier study (1798/99) by him and Schiller, matching twelve colours to human occupations or their character traits (tyrants, heroes, adventurers, hedonists, lovers, poets, public speakers, historians, teachers, philosophers, pedants, rulers), grouped in the four temperaments: melancholic, choleric, sanguine and phlegmatic.

Should your glance on mornings lovely

Lift to drink the heaven’s blue

Or when sun, veiled by sirocco,

Royal red sinks out of view –

Give to Nature praise and honor.

Blithe of heart and sound of eye,

Knowing for the world of colour

Where its broad foundations lie.

—Goethe

watch this movie about light, darknes and colours

A little story about Daltonism
Early in the 18th century, Isaac Newton discovered color spectrum through his experience with a prism.

During his experiences, he discovered that human eye is not capable to distinguish the combination of colors: thus at the intersection of a green and a blue light beams, the human eye perceive cyan.
Then in 1801, the doctor and physician, Thomas Young expose his theory of the trichromatic vision: three colors must be enough to recreate all the colors. In addition, when those colors are mixed in the same proportion, it gives white. Thereby he explains human color perception by the action of three retinal nerves which are excited respectively by red, green and purple. Disorders of the colored vision result from the malfunction of one of these nerves. He also shows that accommodation is ensured by the deformation of the crystalline.

This theory is confirmed by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). He publishes a series of research on color perception and color blindness.
The scientific name of the anomaly is “dyschromatopsia“, but it is generally known as “Daltonism“, a term created by the physicist Pierre Prévost after the name of its discoverer: the English chemist John Dalton. The latter published the first scientific article on this subject in 1798, “Special Facts About the Vision of Colors” in a communication to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, following the realization of his own disability at perceive colors. He had also noticed that his brother had the same abnormalities, without concluding as to a possible genetic origin. It is only two centuries later, in 1986, that Jeremy Nathans locates the genes responsible for color vision and publishes this discovery in his treatise “Nathans, J., Thomas, D., Hogness, DS Molecular genetics of the human vision of colors: the genes coding for blue, green and red pigments, Science 232: 193-202, 1986 »

Thus humanity with the apparition of electronic devices searched for a color system for screens based on his owm perception of colors. The RGB system appears for electronic devices. Indeed, RGB is a device-dependent color model: different devices detect or reproduce a given RGB value differently, since the color elements (such as phosphors or dyes) and their response to the individual R, G, and B levels vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, or even in the same device over time. But still, even if RGB is based on human perception, computer are not working the same as the human eyes.
From this research, I asked myself: what if Photoshop was colorblind? My starting point for the project was photos of colorful flower, that I modified on Photoshop with different mechanism. I based my project on the six differences types of colorblindness depending on which sensors (cones) red, green or blue is touched by the illness and if it’s missing or just dysfunctional.
Applied to the RVB system, if a cone is missing I deleted all the layer corresponding to the color missing cone on Photoshop and if it was only dysfunctional I was only playing with the value of the layer. As if it was “more or less colorblind”. All the experience was a game with the different RVB layers, showing how different a computer and a brain with a missing or dysfunctional sensor or not going to recreate or perceive the same colors even if RVB is a color system based on human perception. It appears to me that the computer was more powerful in a way because it was capable to make up a lot more of colors than humans with different type of colorblindness.

 originals

final works

Color is very important to me. But my fascination of colors has been more unconscious, even though i haven’t thought consciously about choosing colors, it has been playing a big role in my work.
When i started my research into colors i noticed that what i found very interesting about colors, is usually how almost every color is to be found in nature. I am fascinated by how nature is always changing, and by that also changing colors. I started to research into how food changes over time. I find it interesting how the perception of the color, tells us about the ripeness and by that also the taste. As an example, we never buy brown bananas, we usually always try to find the red or yellow mango, trying to avoid the green. it is a knowledge that we unconsciously choose from. Even though that we all know a Banana should be yellow to be ripe, we still have very different ideas on which color is the most perfect for a certain type of fruit. Personally i think that bananas are perfect when they are still green. What i also find compelling is how, the fruit peel has another color than the inside of the fruit. By that the peel somehow is an expression on how the inside is feeling. I find this as a way of the fruit expression itself in the form of colors.

I find it very interesting how food can change to much during time, not only in the same tones of one color, but completely different colors. Milk as an example can go from being white to green, when rotting. In this case, the green color would be a very clear sign that the product would be too old. On the other hand, when a mango is green, it would also be a clear sign that it is not ripened yet.

As a first step of creating my own system, I bought different fruit and vegetables, and placed them in the corner of my kitchen. Here i photographed them each day for a week, and studied how they changed color. Unfortunately, the problem was that the lighting on the fruit in every picture were very different, and by that completely changed the colors in the photographs. I therefore had to redo the whole process again, to make sure that the results could be used for a system. I then build a small photo studio, so i would be sure that the light would be the same, and wouldn’t change the color of the fruit. I bought new fruits and photographed the fruit in the studio for 2 weeks, to see how the colors evolved. I collected 14 pictures of each fruit, but i chose only to use the first weeks pictures.

 
I used the photos to make a digitally color scheme, and i wanted to use the exact same colors as the one on the pictures by using photoshop. After deciding that i wanted to make a color system based on how fruits changes colors, i was looking for a medium to present the final system. I chose to use stickers, because i wanted to somehow bring the project back to where it all started. I thought of fruit stickers, and on how they are always used in a way of advertising. By making one colored stickers, i feel that the sticker as a medium is taken away from being commercial to being something different.

 
Unfortunately my printer wouldn’t take the sticker sheets, so i had to make the colors by hand. I printed out the digitally made color schemes from the photos, and made color test from them, and painted sticker sheets with gouache paint. Of course by using this method you will not get the exact same colors as digitally, but now i feel that it is a blessing in disguise, that the printer did not work. Now the colors of the sheets has more debts than when printed digitally, and also i like that none of the colors are exactly the same, and in nature it is not either.

 
I still have the feeling that the system is not completely finished. I am still thinking about how i can make the final step. But I think that I have to take both the fruits and the stickers back to the supermarket, where it all started. I really enjoyed the process of following something change. When i took the pictures, i didn’t recognize that the colors was changing, but when comparing the pictures, it was very easy to see the change in color.

Everything around us has a color, from the ground we walk on to the sky above, the world we see is anything but black and white, never achromatic. Some people prefer to wear black clothes while others feel them selfs most comfortable in white, empty spaces. Red light automatically makes us cautious, while green lets us know that it is ok to go. Could the colors you see actually influence the way you feel and the decisions you make in your life? In fact colors can represent many different feelings, moods, and concepts. There is reason why people have certain favourite colors or why some shades become color of the season in fashion. By looking deeply at the colors of the things a person is choosing in their everyday lives, a cognitive perspective could help to understand the reason of this occurrence. Colors are one of the many things that play a part in our daily lives, whether we realize it or not.

nail colour analysis

The starting point for my color project was observing my own personal color choices. I made an attempt to look consciously at my closest, most colourfull surroundings –my wardrobe, my make-up kit and my personal belongings. I was inspired by color analysis, also called skin tone color matching, personal color or seasonal color. It is the process of finding colors of clothing and makeup to match a person’s skin complexion, eye color, and hair color in cosmetics and fashion industry. The goal is to determine the colors that suit best persons natural coloring and it was popular in 1980. My aim was to simply observe how often I would choose certain shade over the other, so to determine it’s importance in my personal color system. The colors that I like to wear most are from variety of pink-purple-blue. I do tend to avoid red items, as I associate it with aggression, except for classic red nails. Interestingly in my paintings and drawings I use a lot of red, usually combined with contrasting blue. When I’m sad I tend to surround myself with gray and brown. In general observing people’s behaviour in context of colors we can agree that colors are communication as well as they have direct influence on us. Many examples show that when people see certain colors they feel different emotions. Bright colors portray happiness and excitement, dark colors are more somber and sad, and those in between trigger all kinds of activity within a person’s mind and body.

wardrobe colours

 When you look at an object, the “color” of that object that you see is actually the wave length of the light reflecting off of the object itself. Color as feature of our vision don’t exist without light. From what we know, the primary colors are, red, yellow and blue. Followed by secondary colors and then more complex color mixtures including green, purple, orange, black, grey. Red expresses passion and draws attention to itself, positive and negative, and it has also been known to cause a rise in a person’s blood pressure. Yellow is the color of happiness, but if it is seen in too large of quantities it can have an ill tempered effect. Blue is the most popular color of mens wear, it is calming and basic and shows to lower blood pressure. Green reminds us of nature and tranquility, purple represents royalty, orange is often very friendly, and white is the color of cleanliness and purity. On the darker side of the spectrum is black which we see as depressing and bold and even grey that can make one have a feeling of loss and sadness. The other significant aspect of colors I focused during my research for the project was color combination and contrast. As I discovered color where never to be alone, there no such thing in nature as perception of a single color without influence of other shades. They can be contrasting or complementary or may appear to change a tone of each other when they are together. A very good example of this phenomenon is glitter. Glitter describes an assortment of small, colourful, reflective particles that comes in a variety of shapes. Glitter particles reflect light at different angles, causing the surface to sparkle or shimmer. Since prehistoric times, glitter has been made and used as decoration, from many different materials including stones such as malachite, galena, and mica, as well as insects and glass or nowadays from plastic.

So it it something that appears somehow consistent but hard to describe as one single colors, more like seeing few colurs at the same time. Something like this may occur in synesthetic experience when sensorial perception can link a colur to a smell or a word. Also people having hallucinations whether caused by substance or medical condition can have problems with describing a color or seeing a single color at once.

14 stones, 12 colours

In my color sytem I decided to extract 12 colors as a basic set of shades of nature. Instead of white and black I introduce metallic colors of gold and silver. A metallic color is a color that appears to be that of a polished metal. The visual sensation usually associated with metals is its metallic shine. This cannot be reproduced by a simple solid color, because the shiny effect is due to the material’s brightness varying with the surface angle to the light source. In addition, there is no mechanism for showing metallic or fluorescent colors on a computer without resorting to rendering software which simulates the action of light on a shiny surface. Consequently in art would normally use a metallic paint that glitters like a real metal. I think it is a great emphasize of unique and variable nature of colors. Metallics are both light and shadow at the same time. By applying seemingly synthetic medium of color to the organic surface of stoned a specimen of colour system is created. A circle of colors is closed and harmonious. The shades remain unnamed as they are intuitively recognised. Together as a part of the project I created an abstract acrylic painting, which tries to represent full range of shades.It is an expressive palette of colours that are dripping, smudging and shining. It it a vibrant landscape with it’s only inhabitants – colours. Created this painting as an exercise for perception of colors and becoming color sensitive.

Untitled, 2018, 80x90cm, Acrylic and spray paint on cardboard

As well as photo book with silver/gold covers that can reflect the photographs in a various tones. It is a publication with no text, just blurred, abstract photographs that focus on the colours in my surrounding.  To experience the colour with metallic reflection I flip the cover to overlap the page.

After I made my research on Michel Albert-Vanels innovative colour-system which pushed processes related to colour forward, I had a very scientific image on colour-systems.
After the announcement of creating our own colour-system, I remained being caught in a very theoretical and scientific image of the function of a colour-system.

When I look through my notes, I see a lot of short-living attempts of different approaches to the assignment.

First, it was mostly notes from already existing colour-systems, which should inspire my own one. The first idea was, to connect our free longterm assignment in mixed media with the colour system and looking back, I should have stayed with this idea. In our mixed-media assignment, we work with texts as a starting point. The text I’ve chosen is an excerpt of a dialogue between two friends: Wolf Singer, a distinguished neuroscientist and Matthieu Ricard which left a career as a molecular biologist to become a Buddhist monk. In their dialogue they discuss meditation-practice and it’s direct influence to the human brain.

I’ve started with the idea of making a series of etchings and silkscreen-prints on the topic.

I thought, it might be handy to break down this dense and complex article with the help of colour by, for example giving both of the positions – Singer and Ricard a certain color. So their points and positions are expressed in a certain colour tone of the print.

That would have created automatically a colour palette which is linked to their positions and a mix of new colours when, for example, they agreed on a point, so that both of their positions come together as one.

I wasn’t fully convinced of this idea and missed the systematical approach to it, which I thought is the centre of a colour system. To select some colours for both of the speakers was more of a colour-palette, rather than a system, through which I could „run“ these prints and which would automatically create a colour-composition.

This wasn’t the last idea which started to crackle when I was thinking about systems and probably it was this image of a programmed application like on a computer, which was standing in my way for a long time.

Soon, I realized, I could look for a Buddhist and neuroscientist colour-system and bring them in a next step together. But how would this look in the end? what would be the product and the outcome of this idea? I remained helpless and moved on from idea to idea until I rediscovered these promising systematics in music.

I’ve heard about micro-tuning systems a while ago in connetion with the Finnish DJ and producer Aleksi Perälä.

Perälä and his long-time friend and collaborator Grant Wilson-Claridge developed a musical tuning system, the „colundi sequence“. Despite that, Colundi has the character of a spiritual entity, which makes Perälä refering to it as the creator of the music he is producing.wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Schermafbeelding-2018-05-23-om-11.20.23.png

It remains a mystery for most of the people, including the journalist from the article I’ve read about it, what the „Colundi Sequence“ actually is, but what was very inspiring to me is it’s origin:

As we know, most western music is based on the 12-tone tuning system. All of these tones have a certain frequency in Hz, based on harmony.

Like other artists did before, Perälä started developing his own tuning systems in his music which resulted in the Colundi scale, a sequence, which is not a tuning system, according to Perälä.

The Colundi scale „is a sequence based on specific frequencies, often not related to each other in a traditional musical way“.

Grant Wilson-Claridge, Perälä’s friend which was mentioned before, came up with the frequencies for the colundi sequence.

“via experimentation and philosophy, each relating to a specific human bio-resonance, or psychology, traditional mysticism or belief, physics, astronomy, math, chemistry.” he told the music magazine „the wire“.

What he meant by that becomes more clear in one of his Facebook-posts:

“E.g. 90-111Hz – Beta Endorphin range. 126.22Hz – 32nd octave of Earth year, The Frequency Of The Sun, Color=Green, Tempo=118.3 BPM, centering of magic, Hara (chakra).” So the frequencies all have a specific origin in something natural.

This approach highly inspired me to do a colour system, which is based on specific frequencies, which then would be transformed into colours.

Around this time, the idea of creating a video came up, in which I would involve certain narratives, which carry the colour of their frequency, so there would be the ocean and the frequency of it’s currents as a narrative, as well as other positions like myself and the frequency of my heart-beat.

On the search of different narratives, I rediscovered a Youtube-Video, I used to watch very often as a child.

It is one of the first Freerunning-Videos I’ve seen, where Latvian Traceur (Word for people practicing parkour and freerunning) Oleg Vorslav climbs up buildings, flips walls down and jumps from roof to roof.

This video was probably one of my first experiences using youtube regularly as an archive. I was watching this video over and over again with my friends and it was very exciting to rediscover it after so many years.

I knew, I wanted Oleg Vorslav as one of the narratives, so I started to cut out short excerpts from the video to use them for mine.

I also started to go through my own video-archive and discovered alot of interesting material associated to colour. At the same time I didn’t know how to continue with my idea of frequencies and this system started to stand more in my way, rather than being a rich addition to the process, what made me decide to drop this idea and naroow it down to it’s essence: producing a video – in anyway.

During the whole process, I had a very thoughtful and conceptual approach to the project which often became an obstacle. At this point of the work, I had a need of a more free and spontaneous approach, so I started soon to edit the video and combine it with animations. I made my decisions quickly and intuitive, which opened up more possibilities for me.

Slowly, a system developed itself, where animations and moving images guide each other through the video, from colour to colour.

Looking back to this process, it was very much about handling disturbing thoughts and bringing me back to motivation in any situation or stage of struggling. In the end, I realized, that I could have trusted more into my own ideas and directions which I was attracted to.

I’m still a bit confused about the video I did, because I can’t really explain what it is and where it comes from. It’s been the first time, where I had to act on my gut-feelings out of emergency and tie-pressure, which was a unique experience. Under circumstances like this, great things have been discovered, so maybe we should appreciate stress and time pressure more as an opportunity to make us explore new grounds of our creative process.

As you look at previous colour systems in history, you can see that most of the colour systems are based on a geometrical shape or a figure. The reason behind that is having a geometrical shape as a base helps you to locate colours in a logical way because of their symetrycal shapes and perfectness.

Many people used spheres,cubes and pyramids for many diffrent colour systems, But nobody used a special shape as golden ratio. What makes golden ratio this special ?

The golden ratio is a mathematical principle that you might also hear referred to as the golden mean, the golden section, the golden spiral, divine proportion, or Phi. Phi, a bit like Pi, is an irrational number. It is valued at approximately 1.618. As a ratio, it would be expressed as 1:1.618. A rectangle that conforms to the golden ratio would have shorter sides equivalent to 1 and longer sides equivalent to 1.618.

The question is, then, why (or indeed why not) do we find the proportion delivered by an obscure mathematical theory aesthetically appealing?

For a start, the golden ratio tends to crop up with surprising frequency within the natural world: from leaf and seed arrangements to aluminium alloy crystal structures. And it would seem that much of the mysticism surrounding the aesthetic properties of the golden ratio are divined from its natural occurrences.

Even if you do find the golden ratio attractive, finding an explanation for its appeal, beyond the vague assertion that its prevalence in nature gives it some kind of mystical property, is hard to find. I’m inclined to suggest that its mythic qualities enhance its attraction. If something is supposed to represent aesthetic perfection and no other reason supports the theory other than its repeated appearance in nature, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, Prof Adrian Bejan, of Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering, has posited a theory pertaining to our preference for the golden ratio that is rooted in his research around the idea of ‘flow,’ and how nature’s designs evolve to enable ever-increasing efficiency of movement. In the case of the golden ratio, it stems from an animal’s need to scan the horizon and quickly apprise it of information. Supposedly the most efficient form for doing this is a rectangle that is approximately one-and-half times as wide as it is tall. This amounts, roughly, to the golden ratio. According to Prof. Bejan: ‘Animal vision should be configured in a way that seeing and scanning should be the fastest and the easiest. And when the proportions allow this to be done, it should be a source of pleasure because of its past evolutionary associations with finding food or a mate.’

The Golden ratio color system is unlimited and can be expanded as required. But in any case, at the beginning of the system there is White and at the end there is black. Between black and White you can see every colour in rainbow orderly located on top of the meridians. There is a fiction in the Golden ratio color system. Each color provides a transition between tones that causes effect on the next color.

tuna colour system

When first introduced the idea of creating a color system, a small panic appeared in me. After studying ‘theory of color’ in my previous studies, I was afraid that it would turn into a theoretical and precise boring system, where the colors are mixed based on a strict formula, very far away from my interests.
What is then what is so interesting about color for me? What will make me excited or what do I need to create a color system for?
After a long process of reflecting, I decide to take a step out and look at color differently and alienate it from any system that I have studied before.
Reflecting on my need, I’ve always looked at color in food, due to my intolerance to sugar, some food is forbidden, meaning, some colors are forbidden. For example, when my friends ask me, what vegetables can you eat? I say, only greens, so it’s easier for them to remember that tomatoes or paprika or others are not good for me.
Thanks to this I started collecting images from the supermarkets, walking around and seeing the difference between what I can eat and what I can’t. All the bright colors from the fruits and some vegetables, were forbidden of course, and all the not so hysterical colors from the rice, beans, meat were fine.

Now the challenge was, what do I do with this pictures?
Something like a guide, a small booklet I could carry around, and I could give to my close friends, similar to a little Bible.
I always carry a small notebook that fits my pockets, so I decide to take that format and create a two sided booklet, where one side has all the food I can eat, and on the other side it has all the food I can’t.
I took the decision to add a small color mark on the side of each page with the exact color, creating a small gradient on the side of the booklet. On both sides, it starts with light colors, and goes to yellow, orange, red, green, brown and darker. The order of the gradient has been influenced by the harmony between colors in the Coloroid system I wrote previously about.

 yes                         no
Because it’s a double sided publication, the gradient is on both sides, and always both pages contrast with each other, one being the yes and one the no.

 The book that inspired me is 9,5 x 15,cm, single pages and glued. The design of it is taken from the notebook ‘Notizen, edition suhrkamp’. (click on both images to access more information about the edition Suhrkamp)

These are the rest of books that this publisher has created and this as well was a part of the inspiration for the harmony in the gradient.

It has a yellow cover first, because of the inspiration I took the book from, and as well because of the color of the lemons, which is the only fruit that I can eat. In the presentation I decided to include some lemons that ill hold the book standing and as well camouflage it and integrate it in the space so it’s not flat.
I am very satisfied with the result as well as happy about how much I learnt about book binding, and the paper. For example, how important it is the direction of the fibers of the paper when you print so the corners of the paper don’t bend. Since it was a very precise color scheme, it had to have specific bleed marks and cut marks that I never used before.

There’s more then just a simple white, the daylight is very different from the morning to the evening, there is warm white light and more cold to very blue light. This warmth in light is defined in the Kelvin scale. Buying a light bulb you can decide the color temperature. What interested me was how light is used in different spaces. Therefore I searched in the internet for extreme examples of light. That’s how they look next to each other:

Even what we think of as white can be different. Some people are very aware of these differences for most of us light is just there and we don’t really care about it. Even if flickering LED’s in offices produce physical stress or candlelight can make someone look more attractive. In my color system I want to make these differences visible. I made a list of places that possibly show them:

Museums, Libraries, maybe private kitchens or restaurant kitchen and offices. I wanted to visit three of each to be able to compare them.

Public spaces are often aware of the kind of atmosphere they want to create. A library wants to be inviting, a museum wants to direct the visitor to the artworks and in other places it could be more about having enough light and not so much about the atmosphere.
I took my camera and started photographing my first stop was not on the list, but close to Rietveld. A parking lot. I saw a lot of flickering LED lights, green lights from the electronic car chargers and blue lights in the elevators. It was day but by night is must feel a bit scary there. Next to photos of light the photos became more and more architectural.

The architecture of the places continued to play a role in the next pictures too. In the Eye Museum it was dark with a lot of projections and also purple light. That was the point where it went away from only the spectrum of white lights. The purple light was nicely cut by the edges of the building and created beautiful shadows.

>

To stick to my list I went to three different libraries. With a lot of warm and yellowish light. The photos I chose in the end where mostly from the central library.
In the end I did not visit all the places but I had a feeling of continuing the collecting without any direction, so I wanted to have a format to put them before taking more pictures. I chose the Leporello. With not much experience in book binding I wanted to try a new format that’s easy to teach myself. The part where I struggled the most was still to come. Making the selection of my photos and arranging them.

I printed the photos out, cut them in the middle and rearranged them. I wanted to select them by a similar place or color, but when I printed them out I found it more interesting to combine the different ones. Now it was a bit like puzzling the photos together and making two rows for each side of the Leporello. Some of the photos from really different places fitted very nicely together. I was happy about the selection, and didn’t want to compromise them more. From the printed photos I went back to the computer and fitted the photos on A3 sheets, so each photo was about a size of 15cmx 21cm. What I realized after the printing is that in this size the photos not really matched the format any more. I still wanted to see how they looked as a finished thing. So I started putting everything together.

Looking back on it now, the Leporello is a step in the process. I found it difficult to find the right frame for it and to make the step after having a selection of photos. I put the Project to the side, because I did not have an idea how to change it. Since I started writing down the process I think about continuing with the color system. I thought to make more pictures that have green, blue and red light. Which are on top of each other white light. I thought about my presentation of the discovery of Maxwell and tried to split one of the photos I liked most into the three basic colors. I printed it on transparent sheets and hold them into the light. The result I liked a lot and I thought to use them as a cover for a new booklet. Maybe not a Leporello and probably a bigger size. The next step is to take my camera and add the missing photos to the selection. What I learned from the last time is to be more selective about the photos and what I missed was to have a specific eye on what photos I’m looking for. To make the book look more finished I want to visit the bookbinding workshop instead of DIYing everything.

When I started my research on colours, I wondered about certain colours that feel special to me and why. It seems that the way I perceive colours is rather deeply emotional response that sometimes tends to be irrational. Yet, power of colours rules my everyday choice from the food I eat to the clothes I wear.

Somehow I was naturally drawn to the traditional Korean colour symbolism and East Asian colour theory as it used to affect my decision a lot in my childhood. I wore yellow clothes on the day of the exam, and I slept in red pajama when I got scared of ghost. I admit that it was rather superstitious at that time, but still, I give special significance to colours in a random, but emotional way.

My first approach to this project was to bring an East Asian perspective on colours.

A week before the project had been started, we researched about 20 existing colour systems and presented them to the class. While watching the colour studies developed by philosophers, psychologists and artists from Western countries, I got really curious about how East Asian point of view on this matter would be different. I took the traditional Korean colour spectrum, also known as Obangsaek as a starting point of my research.

Obangsaek is the colour scheme of the five Korean traditional colours of blue, red, yellow, white and black, and each colour is related to certain elements in the world, including various virtues, emotions, and even the celestial motions.

Our ancestors used these colours to make decisions because following the Obangsaek was equal to following the way of nature.

I  found that the five colours are also associated with the five elements (or the Five phases; water, fire, wood, metal and earth) in Yin Yang , which are the core concepts of Chinese cosmology.

Blue: wood

Red: fire

Yellow: earth

White: metal

Black: water

I got fascinated by this cosmology as it sees the world as an organic whole where everything can be grouped into the five categories according to its nature.

In the table below, you can get brief examples of how it works.

Next idea was to make a series of image collages just to experiment the idea with visual elements.

My interpretation of this idea was to show the connection between the colours and the elements and, by extension, the world we live. Then, I decided to make three dimensional objects using the five elements as materials because I thought it would be great if I relate the colours to something material in our everyday life.

After creating a concept for my system, I wrote a short introduction to it.

——————————————————-

In Korea, traditional colour symbolism is based upon the five elements and the five basic colours (blue, white, red, black and yellow). These five colours reflect the traditional principle of Yinyang (umbral and bright) and Wuxing (Five Phases: water, fire, wood, metal, and earth) which are the core concepts of traditional Chinese cosmology.

This cosmology perceives the universe as an organic whole, in which the spiritual, natural, and human worlds are ordered into a single, infinitely interconnected system.

It groups phenomena into the five categories, in which relationships are held to be relatively regular and predictable. Eventually, all things in the universe are categorized and correlated, and everything affects everything else.

Entities, processes, and classes of phenomena found in the human world (the human body, behavior, morality, and historical change) are set according to various entities, processes, and classes of phenomena in nature (time, space, the movements of heavenly bodies, seasonal change, plants and animals, etc.).

FEWWM is a new colour system invented by myself. It is rooted in the existing idea of Wuxing and Obangsaek (Korean traditional colour spectrum).

FEWWM, however, differs from the traditional East Asian colour theory in that it has a three-dimensional material feature.

Using found objects, I created a series of sculptures in correspondence to the five elements; wood, fire, earth, metal and water.

Possible colour mixtures are represented in a form of two mixed materials and the colour of the background indicates what a combination of two produces.

FEWWM expands its range into objects of our daily life, spreading the idea of the correlation of all.

——————————————————-

By making these drawings, I tried to merge two different elements into one object and show how the combination of colours could be represented in this system. Then I collected the materials around my neighborhood and started to make a series of objects. Then, I photographed them to show our class mentor as the original sculptures are extremely fragile to carry.

I struggled a lot to come up with an ideal way to present my system, and my initial thought of the final result was to put a fabric mat with a diagram like below on the floor and place the small objects according to the position of the five elements.

However, I could not be satisfied with the idea as I felt something was still missing. That was the moment where I took one step back to the photographs and decided to bring colours back to my system.

Thinking about a way to invite colours to photograph, the background seemed to be an interesting material for me to work with colours (like Joel Meyerwitz’s photographs of objects). I tried different colour paper and took photos of them. The result was amazing; the photographs really capture the synergy between the objects and colours. When I first saw the photographs, I got absolutely convinced that I should make a publication with them.

I took the first letters of each element and named it ‘FEWWM’. I like it when it is with exclamation points (!) because then it looks like a sound effect (FEWWM!). For the covers, I made a drawing of fire, earth, wood, water and metal. I used grayish colours for the covers since the inside was pretty full of colours. have a look…(click here)

I found that the way I write down the five elements keeps changing in the publication. Sometimes it is fire, earth, wood, water and metal, but sometimes it is wood, fire, earth, metal and water. Also, I was not aware of the fact that prints on this kind of paper get more finger prints and scratches. However, I really liked the assignment and result. From the oriental cosmology to printing/binding technics, I have learned so many things and had a lot of fun doing it. It was also a great opportunity to introduce Korean and East Asian culture to the school project.

FEWWM is a complete colour system as itself, but there is a lot to explore.

For the next step, I am thinking about making sculptures with more than three different materials referring to mixtures of three or four colours. There are as many as possibilities there are colours.

For many people colours have stark connotations related to their moods. Think of sayings like “feeling blue”, “being green with envy”, “seeing red” or think about mood-rings that supposedly change colour every time your mood changes. Undoubtedly moods and colours are intertwined in one way or another.

Thinking of mood swings related to colour makes me think of my mother, who has bipolar disorder. Bipolar disorder causes swings in mood, energy, and the ability to function throughout the day. It is known for alternating periods of depression and mania that can last from days to months. Thus she has experienced extreme mood swings. How does she relate her moods to colour? She personally doesn’t clearly remember what happened during her manic episodes, I however do and noticed how her mania and depression greatly influence her way of dressing. She has a wardrobe filled with exotic clothes in all colours of the rainbow and lot’s of different prints and styles. When being manic she dresses herself as an artwork before going outside, making heads turn wherever she goes. When being depressed she doesn’t really dresses herself, but instead stays in her grey pajamas’s at home all day. I think that a lot of people might experience that they wear more colourful clothes when feeling happy and wearing more neutral toned clothes when feeling sad.  I decided to create a colour system based on my mothers way of dressing, and not on people’s way of dressing in general or on people with bipolar disorder’s way of dressing. I thought it would be generalizing people’s experiences too much and I think that especially dealing with people who have a condition like bipolar disorder one must avoid that to avoid stigmatizing the disorder. Not every person with bipolar disorder has the same behaviour towards their wardrobe, or the same experiences in general.

After having decided to make a colour system based on my mother’s way of dressing, I read a lot of general information about bipolar disorder, which didn’t bring me any further in the development of my project. I could also hardly ask my mother any questions about it, as she doesn’t remember how she was when being manic. I later found an interesting article written by someone who also has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, about what having this disorder means for their gender identity. The writer of the article identifies as a non-binary person, and thus I shall refer to them as “their” and “they”. They experience that when being manic they feel more feminine, and when being depressed they feel more masculine. This shows itself in many ways, one of them being the way they dress. When feeling manic, they will wear a dress, when feeling depressed, they will wear baggy clothes. This made me realize how my mother’s way of dressing doesn’t only change in colour when her mood does, but also in how traditionally feminine versus masculine her clothes would be. When being manic it wouldn’t be a bright yellow sweatpants she would put on, but a bright yellow dress. When being depressed she wouldn’t put on a grey miniskirt, but grey oversized sweatpants instead. This was something to keep in mind in the development of my colour system.

After researching I figured it was time to start working hands on. I collected all the traditionally feminine colourful clothes and the traditionally masculine baggy neutral toned clothes from my own wardrobe. I realized that I order my clothes by colour in my wardrobe, in some way I was thus already working on this project of making a colour system before it even started. With the clothes I tried making a small installation without damaging the clothes, this was very frustrating. Somehow nothing I tried seemed to work for me and I soon decided to quit trying. I felt like the best ways of displaying clothes without damaging them already existed and happens all the time and everywhere, which is putting them on mannequins, on hangers or folding them neatly. I didn’t feel like playing clothing store, so this was not the way to go. I took a step back from the whole process, let some time pass to then later come with new insights again. I concluded that the colour system I was trying to create already existed and just needed to be documented. I decided to make a video with my mother, of her wearing two bipolar outfits.

The filming went very smoothly, my mother and I enjoyed putting the outfits together and enjoyed spending time together, which to me makes the video feel genuine too. We tried to make the contrast between her two outfits/moods very clear, but still true to reality. This lead to us filming her depressed outfit inside on the couch, and her manic outfit outside in a field of flowers with more movement. I later also edited the video to be slowed down when her depressed outfit was shown, and sped up the video when her manic outfit was portrayed. When presenting the video, I went back to trying to make an installation using my own clothes but now including the video shown on a tablet. I felt like just showing the video on a big screen would not fit how personal and tangible someone’s clothes, and thus my colour system, are. To make it even more personal/intimate, the viewer of the work needs to wear headphones to hear the sound of the video.

Here are some stills from the video:

You know how, when you have a bag of sweets, the yellow one is going to taste sour like a lemon, the green one tart like a green apple and the red one will taste the sweetest, like a strawberry.

Have you ever had a blue sweet? They do exist but often don’t represent a certain familiar kind of food. The blue is “odd-tasting”, the blue one is often considered the least tasty of these four colors or at least the least familiar. This is because we are used to associating dark colors, like black and blue, with rotten foods.

Different research over time has proven that color can affect the (sense of) taste of different kinds of food. Even if the food doesn’t actually taste sour but is yellow, our brain will respond to that colour and tell you that this food tastes sour.

“we taste with our eyes long before we taste with our mouths”. Here is a short video of an intelligent looking man telling you more about this phenomenon.

I know there are a lot of interesting turns on this “color” theme but this topic of color in connection to taste and/or the expectation of taste  is one I found particularly interesting because apparently we can change each others senses of what we see just by changing a colour which is pretty spectacular!

So; I did some research and wrote the basics of what I found down in my notebook.

Certain colors stand for certain tastes as well as the perception of the freshness and/or ripeness of the foods we see. Our brain creates this link between color and taste and/or smell and also just the expectations of the taste of certain foods.

For example; we expect a red apple to taste more sweet in comparison to a green apple that would have a way more sour taste (which is ok because we know that red is sweet and green is sour).

I wanted to somehow capture this occurrence and I figured that the best way to let the colours speak would be on a photograph because this way the look of the food (where you say “this shape looks like a banana”, or “this shape looks like a lemon”) is the only thing determining your expectations of the food and not the smell, consistency etc which I felt would not make my point stronger.

The next step was to take pictures of a banana, a cooked stake and a tomato, putting them on a differently-coloured background in each picture.

I didn’t feel this worked at all. Looking at these pictures, my perception of the food didn’t change. It looked flat and the only thing that came up with me was how much the bananas looked like an Andy Warhol print.

So then I read about this one study (click “download” in the link. p.22 of the downloaded file) that took place in the 1970’s where investigators had put participants in a room with a colored light and a plate containing cooked meat and fries. Because of the dimmed colored light the participant wouldn’t really be able to determine the color of the food.

Once they had half way finished the plate the light in the room would slowly go back to a normal color which revealed that the meat was blue and the fries were green. As a reaction to this, a lot of participants refused to finish the plate and/or immediately felt sick.

I think this was a strong investigation because it shows very clearly that the color of the food is very important to our brain. It has to work. Our banana simply has to be yellow and our apple red or green, otherwise your brain will definitely warn you not to eat it and it will look way less attractive to eat.

Some extra ideas that came up

So I figured this was what I did wrong with the banana.

This is where the idea of colouring the actual food lured me in. It made total sense that when it would work in this study, it might also work on my photograph.

This way the shape of the food would not cooperate with the color it had which might not work for our brains.

I chose new foods that have a clear taste in our head. So a lemon, a hamburger, a vegan burger and a banana.

And then I painted them which made me decide to let the vegan burger go because this was near to impossible to do and it didn’t have the look that I wanted it to have.

I took these photo’s from above (see above) and thought it was too clean which food isn’t. To me, making the pictures from above made the images look flat, less like real (eatable) foods but rather like something fake, non-existing.

This is why I decided to take the next pictures from the side rather than the top, like the food would be laying in front of you when you look at the image. I used two different background colors for two reasons; To further convey a spacious effect (rather than flat) and to experiment further with the color perception at the same time. The latter conveyed by trying to make the changing perception with different colors more clear in one single image. You could put your hand on the top part of the image and the experience would be different than when you would cover the bottom part, just like it would be different looking at the image and the colors as one whole.

Then I would have to make a next, maybe final, step. What images/image should I use as my final work or should I just continue experimenting until the end result will automatically present itself to me?

Should it be a book? A print? A collage? Everything? A lot of times a photo (series) is displayed in a frame on a wall and maybe also sold in a booklet or on postcards on the side. Is that how it should be with this work? And if I would put work on the wall. Would that be one photo or a series of photos and how would that work since all the works have different colors with the possible result that the colors don’t go well together on the wall.

There are a lot of possibilities but for now I found one way to present the final work I was particularly happy with because of the overall composition of the images I was content with made above but also, to be honest, kind of based on intuition and the general feeling some of the pictures gave me.

I think that, in general, the pictures are very well able to work by themselves but I also think that the images have the ability to amplify/strengthen the general notion of this work, the changing perception of food depending on color.

So in this instance I chose, as perhaps a final work (for now), a collage of different images working by themselves, together.

Aim: I need to combine two words which I found very different from one another: ‘system’ firstly appears to be very restricted while possibilities seem to be unlimited with ‘color’.

FIRST CONCEPT: Connect the situation in which you currently find yourself to music thanks to colors.

Process: You’re heartbroken and alone in the shower.
Find the key words: heartbroken, alone, shower.
Each key word is associated to one color: heartbroken = purple, alone = blue, shower = grey.
In the system, clic on the key words’ fitting colors « purple, blue, grey», it will send you a playlist matching your current needs.

Questions: How to realize the system? Do I use the computer or do I make it by hands? If computer, which site or application should I use? Need to select key words: how many, which ones and why? Do I use common key words or specific ones?

Issues: Want to use computer (better quality of colors, easier to extend the visibility and good way to classify data), I could find a specific application or website. I’ve been told by a classmate, who has studied computer science, that applications she knows are not for amateurs like me but professionals.

Conclusion: Because of a lack of knowledge and no skills in code I can’t bring this first concept to a successful end. I’m better to modify my system so I could create a new realizable one.
I still want to use the computer as my main tool.
However, I want to make this project more personal and subjective, meaning that I want the color system to depend on me. I will set my own rules.

Transition
I’ve asked to a friend of mine, a singer, if he was associating people with music, he answered he wasn’t and return me the question. Then I realize: I’m not associating music to people but colors. Indeed, when I paint someone the association of colors I choose come from what this latter inspires me, what he radiates out.
What if I would connect colors to something else than people? About me? (reminder: want to make this project more personal and subjective). I could write about my personal life? What occurred to me during the day? And connect this specific moment with a color?
From this developed the idea of my second concept: associate situations to colors.

SECOND CONCEPT: Connect a situation in which you have found yourself to colors.

Process: I’m going out of the cinema, touched by the movie I’m lost in my mind. Which color do I see at this current moment?
1) Visualize the color you’re seeing at the current moment
2) Find the color on internet
3) Save it on your phone
4) Give the color a name
5) Write a short sentence describing the situation linked to the color
6) Write the date and city

Questions: Want to use the computer but no code, what should I do? Where should I publish this system? Find a reachable application? Which application would fit the best?
 

 Answers: Instagram

+ Concept: share simultaneously what you’ve done with your followers.
+ Design: matching the concept (edit an image, description bellow, location, share…).
+ 1 Square 1 color: focus on the main theme ‘color’, interesting visual aspect (variety of colors).
+ # ‘hashtag’: to be seen and share data.
+ Follow or be followed by similar accounts

Ideas to complete:
1) Account’s name: ‘What i saw while’ = @whatisawhile
It refers to which color I’ve seen while a daily situation occured to me.
2) Profile picture: The color I identify myself with.
3) Short sentence to describe the account’s theme: ‘I associate everyday situations in which I find myself to colors’.

4) Description bellow image: for each image the description will start the same ‘What i saw while’ to give the account a rhythm and an identity and for the viewers to remember the account’s name.
Always the same plan for each publication: 1 color as an image – 1 title as color’s name – 1 sentence to contextualize – 1 date – 1 town – few hashtags.

FINAL PROJECT

WANT TO SEE MORE OF WHATISAWHILE‘S COLOR SYSTEM?

GO follow @whatisawhile on Instagram to discover other stories hiding behind the colors!! 🙂

After researching information about different color systems, I realized that all the systems try to approach questions of color always in relation to something. Color in terms how we describe it in language, color as light, color as pigment, color as sound. As for the color in relation to human body there is a Chakras system. But it is all fixed, and doesn’t explain movements of the body. I see human body as a constantly changing system, it is changes every second, and I wanted to develop during this project I wanted to create color system which describes movements of the human body into the color, in the real time. I wanted it to be really interactive and visual.

So I split whole process into two steps. First step was to find a sensor which will “read” movements of the body. There were several ideas possible, but after some try outs with heart rate monitors, ultrasonic motion sensors, I ended up using HC-SR501 Passive Infrared Motion Sensor (PIR) sensor. The module features adjustable sensitivity that allows for a motion detection range from 3 meters to 7 meters.  The device will detect motion inside a 110 degree cone with a range of 3 to 7 meters. I was using raspberry pi computer to program reactions of the sensor.

Second step was to find the way to represent the data from the motion sensor. I wanted to work with light. There were some ideas to use projectors. But in the end I was using Philips Hue lamps because they have open API and it is easy to program them.

There were some challenges with Philips hue lamps. They do not work by independently. If you want to communicate with lamps there is a physical device which called a bridge. . The Philips Hue bridge is the heart of the system. When you are programming, your are not communicating with lamps directly, you send commands to the bridge, and the bridge sends messages to lamps so they know, which hue and saturation apply to the lamp. Problem is that this bridge should be connected to wifi network. In school wifi network is secured, so you can not that easily add new device to it. This lamps are meant for use at home, and not really designed for the usage in the public locations.  So basically the solution to this problem was to create my own network. Raspberry pi computer became dhcp server and was assigning IP address to the bridge. It is very important to know IP adress, because than you know where to send your commands in program. So the whole system do not depend on the network connection and know can work on any location.

About the transformation of the movement to color. I built the whole system and tried it on the spot in the school. Originally it was working from the simple lamp. I installed the lamp in school and was observing people behavior how they react on the lamp. First setup was like this whenever someone pass by or approach the lamp it will switch on and start changing colors. This was clear, I noticed that once people realize how it works, they lose their interest in it. Like puzzle is solved. And usually it take 30 seconds for them to realize and they move forward. And also there were not so many people who will notice it in the first place. So I added blinking to get an attention of the passing by people. And once they approach lamp it will start changing colors, but with 5 seconds delay. After this changes there were more people discovering the work. And they spend way more time with it. Puzzled, and trying understand what action trigger lamp.

Next step was to put everything together in one container. So the whole system can work as portable device and can be shown in different locations.

As for the next steps I think it would be interesting to add more sensors. After some tests in library, I realized that people want to touch the object. It would be nice to add one more reaction to touch. And make more tests in different spots: Library, cafe, train station.