Designblog

RESEARCH.

To continue my project I started doing research on various postures students at the Rietveld Academy take during making, creating, building their work. I have made pictures of how people behave in their clothing, the way their clothes work with the body while working and noted that the students don’t dress according to the task they are working on, like for example people working at building sites do. These students just wear what they like to wear!
So is it more image than comfort and protection what they are looking for?
Although the clothes do not seem to really get into their way whilst working, I was especially intrigued by their shoes.
I noted a difference between comfortable and less comfortable shoes for working and I also noted that shoes sometimes are used as some kind of tools. The shoes that attracted my interest the most were the shoes looking far from comfortable.

The black platform shoes are less flexible to the way we move our body. The height of the sole seems to limit adjustment to movement. The platform shoes do seem to be used as “tools” much more than flat, flexible shoes. These white sneakers below look much more comfortable, because of their flexibility. They adjust more to the foot in different postures.

On the first movie can be seen how difficult it is wearing platform shoes going down the stairs. Why would someone wear these shoes I wondered…? As the boy wearing them explains in the second movie it was the design that triggered him buying them. “It was an online buy so I haven’t fitted them. And by wearing I noticed the difficulty walking on them and how heavy they actually are. They are absolutely not comfortable” he remarks. So it looks platform shoes are anything but comfortable. How can it be that these uncomfortable shoes are so popular at the Rietveld Academy.

Read the rest of this entry »

The bag is everywhere on the human body. It is being up, middle and down and even disappears.

In my impression, the bag acts a minor role on the human body wherever it is. Starting to cut a bag into pieces based on observation sketches above and then making collages.

Making collages which have a feeling of extracted elements of the bags in the academy, which are ‘devotion’ and ‘indifference’.

The final outfit:

The black surfaces, which are originally part of the bottom of the bag,
are shaped in some volumes in order to depict an emphasis of its usability.

The twisted form of the shirt and the parts of a T-shirt represents a gap between ‘devotion’ and ‘indifference’ (which is a concept of this outfit). Gray fabric attached to the leg expresses a sense of coldness. It traces my impression of the locations where the bag is in the academy.

My research was about what kinds of socks Rietveld people wear and how they wear their socks. Every day in school I see many people roll up their pants and show their colorful, various kinds of socks. That interests me and triggered me to do this research.

Socks have evolved over the centuries from the earliest models which were made from animal skins gathered up and tied around the ankles. Nowadays, socks can be created from a wide variety of materials like as cotton, wool, nylon, acrylic, polyester, etc. Styles or patterns are innumerable, one color, dots, stripes, argyles, complex patterns…

So I started collecting pictures of different kinds of socks in school, and ask the people questions like  where they are from, where they got the socks, why they roll up pants to show two socks.

Polka dot is a very common pattern, it gives a lively and playful feeling, also the color combination on this pattern is often contrast, vivid, for example, black and white, red and yellow, pink and white, etc. Many Rietveld people wear socks with Polka dots, and they are from everywhere, while the pattern started to appear on clothing in the late 19th century in United Kingdom.

Another common pattern is stripe. They are so common and worldwide popular that I could not even find a convincing origin of them… You can see them almost everywhere in your daily life, also it is a very normal pattern on socks, I am personally not a fan of stripes but I believe I have at least four pairs of socks that with stripes.

One-colored socks are also quite popular in school, there are basically two ways of wearing them: 1. Dark colors, “hiding” in between pants and shoes, they are there but you don’t really notice them; 2. vivid colors, like pink, skyblue, or even neon colors, sometimes they also wear just white socks while their pants and shoes are black, to create this contrast, to catch your eyeballs.

I noticed that many Scandinavian people in school wear socks with argyle patterns, which is kind of interesting because this pattern is originally from Scotland in th 17th century. In Rietveld,  argyles socks are often in combination with aged oldschool sneakers.

I also noticed that some people wear 2 different socks on each foot, when I asked some of them about the reason, they said they simply could not find the other socks.

As for the reason that people roll up their pants and show their socks, the most frequent given answer I got from people was ‘just for the style‘. Some say when the pants are too long, they look lazy and drab, they roll up the pants to keep the energy up. Some people simply love socks, they collect all kinds of socks (one girl I interviewed says she has four big boxes of socks), they are proud of their socks and they want to show them to people.

My idea was to exaggerate the fact that people show their socks, make it a bit extreme.  So I made a huge socks that you put on your head.

For my research  I was walking through the school, and photographing students that stood out to me. Then, I wandered into one of the departments, and started to observe the people that were working there. As I watched, I noticed that they behave differently here then they do in the hallways. So much more comfortable, almost as if they are at home. That’s when I realized that the departments are like save havens for the students, a place where they feel in place. So I started taking pictures.

After taking a lot of photographs, I started to notice that there were connections visible between the students and their surroundings, either in color, shape ore material. So I started documenting the connections that became visible to me. I did this first through photographs, and later also through drawing and 3-D experiments. In the images below, I tried to visualize the connections that I saw between the girl in the checkered shirt and the materials that she was working with (in the pictures above). In this case I did this through drawing and a 3-D experiment.

After doing this research and the experiments, I decided that my concept for making an outfit would be ‘connecting to the school’ through clothing. So I started to make try-outs at home, using different techniques. My main focus at first was to let the clothing connect through shapes in it’s surroundings. I made two molds out of fabric, and started to put them on a dummy to create different shapes. On the pictures below you can see a few examples.

When I was done with experimenting with these shapes on the dummy, I realized that I wasn’t satisfied with them. They didn’t make the connections between the clothes and the environment clear enough. So I started to head in a different direction. My next idea was to make the connections clear through photographs. I started with small experiments, by taking a 360 turn in the classroom, and making a snapshot every time I turned. With these photographs, I then experimented with paper and fabric.

My idea now, is to take snapshots like this of the whole entire school, documenting every corner of the building. After that, I want to use the technique from the image above, to create an outfit completely constructed out of photographs, in which every angle of the building is visible, and connecting to it in a very visual way.

When I started to work on the actual outfit, I found out that it is nearly impossible to make a whole outfit out of this self-made grid-like material. So I decided that I would print out the pictures of the school on paper in stead of on fabric, and I proceeded to make the design that you see on the pictures below by sewing the paper onto fabric. After finishing that outfit, I really didn’t like it. It didn’t reflect what I had in mind ore my research. So I decided to make a completely new outfit, using the previous one as a prototype. This is the result.

Looking back on this project, I realize that I changed my mind many times. This started already at the beginning of the research, where I struggled with finding a good way of working. Eventually, I found that the best way for me was to just observe, seeing the connections that became visible to me between the students and the building, and trying to visualize these through drawings and photos. Then I got a bit stuck again, trying to incorporate the connections in forms. So I went into another direction, this is the direction that I stuck with until the end, making connections to the building by simply using photographic images of the school and incorporate them in the fabric of the garment. In this process, I again changed my mind while I was working, by going from using actual paper photographs to drawing the images onto the fabric by hand. The garment now feels as a real result of the research, a clear conclusion after a lot of doubts and changes.

What I basically did was putting my thoughts on paper. I walked around the school and observed the people. While doing that I just wrote and sketched down what came to my mind. Because of this some of the sketches are untrue and some of them are true. I like this part because no one can tell witch sketches are true and witch are not. I choose to dig in to the part of the heads. The hair and hats and this way off dressing. The next step was to photograph the students to discover more.

What I discovered is that a lot of Rietveld students don’t cover their ears, with hair or hats. But why? Is it because most students don’t hear their native tongue and because of that they have to listen carefully? Or is it just a practical thing, for instance when your busy making beautiful art you don’t want your hair in the way. I printed the pictures I took and experimented a bit with it. I covered everything but not the ears.

Then I was looking for the surrounding and how the sound influence us. Where are our ears when we listen?

So I focused myself on the listening part. We hear a lot of things but we don’t listen to all of them. You know when someone says something and you hear him but still you don’t understand and you have to ask him what he was saying. Most of the times this is because your mind is somewhere else. I want to make an outfit that makes you hear better. But how? block all sounds? let all sounds come in? enlarge sound? …….. What I did was making sure your mind is at the right place for listening. This means all senses have to be blocked so you can only focus on listening, like a blind man.

This is the result. It is an outfit made out of sound isolation material and speaker wire. The sound isolation material will reduce noise and makes sound more clear. As you can see I blocked all senses. The only thing you can do in this outfit is: walk and listen.

spring 2013

GRA = Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam
DRESS = Clothing in a broad sense; the way people wear, move around and behave in clothing
INDEX = List arranged usually in alphabetical order of some specified datum (as subject, or keyword)

 

 
Group D students will be tasked to each observe and register dress at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie.
GRA is the context and dress (of fellow students, faculty, etc.) is the subject of this visual research. The focus is on reoccurring patterns in dress. Perhaps a pattern of dress is linked to gesture; e.g. the way jackets are zipped half open in order to easily get cigarettes out of inside pockets. Students have to document a pattern, re-look and arrange, make new connections and draw conclusions.

All individual findings will be posted on this blog, serving as: GRA DRESS INDEX (Spring 2013)

Researchers / editors: Group D students
Initiators / guides: Elisa van Joolen and Henk Groenendijk

Maria Blaisse's explorations of form and matter inspire new visions of symbiosis with our surroundings.

Slow design is a continuing inspiration to the Designblog program. If you slow down and take a minute you will see that there are many entries linking it to interesting “projects” done in the past & inspiring work related to the ideas of slow design. Use the ‘slowdesign’, slowlab’, ‘slowme’ tags, you can easily find them in the pink ‘tag-bar’.

If you want to know what ‘Slow design knowledge’ is, take a look at the video and be inspired by the beautiful images and music in it 😉  Or check out their Facebook organization page [x] slowLab – A Slow Design Network /note that entries are viewable whether or not you have a Facebook account yourself.   They’ve recently posted there about how Maria Blaisse’s explorations of form and material inspire new visions for Slow urbanism, as well as about Pia Lindman’s Slow view of democracy-in-action, Kate Fletcher’s recent ‘Local Wisdom’ event in NYC, and how YOU can be part of designing the first Slow Design Reader.  Take a look. let them know what you think, and share the link with others!

post suggested by Elisa van Joolen

No better way to welcome the students back on the academy after their X-mass holidays. With the end-years fireworks still in mind our color circles accentuated the snowy white carpet of this wintery month

Thanks to the excellent cooperation of the Silkscreen department, printing and routinely sticking the posters to the billboard, so we could enjoy the colorful results of one of the Foundation year’s student latest projects.

These circles were part of a project initiated bij Henk Groenendijk and Matthias Kreuzer as a cooperation between the Design and Design Research classes.
An amount of randomly selected color-sytems were distributed among the student after which they researched substantive backgrounds and the possibilities to base a work on that. The objectivity of science (subjective as the sometimes seemed) was used as an impartial starting point. Parallel to that process a color was determined representing the project or an element of the research. This monochrome color was printed in small print run using silkscreen printing technique. Interaction between research and the creative process is documented on Designblog under the “On-Colour-Project” project

For the Open-Day Hansje van Ooijen (chair) composed here own subjective variant, as a backdrop for the Foundation Year’s Open-Day meeting place.

Researchers / editors: Group B students
Initiators / guides: Matthias Kreutzer and Henk Groenendijk
printing / posting: Harmen Liemburg and Kees Maas

What I understand about Ewald Hering is not a vast amount, it’s pretty narrow. I’m no Physiologist as he was but I will try to elaborate on his theory of Color Opponency, which is the idea that the receptors in our eye that make seeing colors possible are capable of taking in two colors at a time and that to each color there is a reaction. When looking at the two colors at the same time, or next to each other, it has contradictory experiences. This creates a kind of optical illusion where the colors seem to glow. Just like when you look at a black dot on a white background then look away you keep seeing the glow of the dot you stared at. This is that same glow. There are many optical illusions that use this formula.

The opposing colors he was talking about were Blue to Yellow (and vice versa), Green to Red and Black to White.
Anytime these colors are put up next to each other, without any intervening colors, it becomes difficult to look precisely at the border between them.

I understood why this combination of two opposing colors creates this illusion.
So my plan was to combine the colors and create an illusion that had its effect within the colors.
First I started with little prototypes with examples of existing optical illusions, but with the opposing colors, since I had discovered that Hering himself had created an optical illusion, namely the Hering Illusion.

Goodness gracious, is there anything Mr. Hering didn't do?

I found two other optical illusions that were of almost the same design as that of Hering’s and combined the colors with the design of the illusions.

It was too distracting, the optical illusions, so I removed these and tried a simple design; a red square within a green background and the opposite of that; a red background with a green square in the middle.
It felt more honest to the colors, rather than taking something that was already meant as an optical illusion and decorating it, so to say.

I liked the prototypes but they were, after all, prototypes.
So I set off to make three big paintings with a color combination of two each just like the ones I had made before.
The optical illusion worked, halfway through the second one, blue and yellow, I had to wear my sunglasses because I started to get a massive headache.

It was funny how the color scheme, blue & yellow, green & blue and white & black are usually set up together. I finally understood why; it was this subliminal optic effect which makes you either love it or hate it.

Not only that, this might be the very reason some people hate Christmas. Eureka!

I had to pat myself on the back for that one.

What I’m interested in researching further after this project is to see which secondary colors have this same effect with each other.
However I don’t want to limit my research to painting, I want to check if the same rule applies with objects in backgrounds with opposing colors.
I’ll try this with myself wearing a red t-shirt and standing in front of a green wall. The opposite as well, green shirt to a red wall. This I’ll do with all the color combinations and if my calculations are correct I should be able to blind you when you see me.

I started noticing that this same optical illusion not only works with these colors, but that it happens with other ones as well. Colors like purple in combination to green, for example, has a similar effect. However I don’t have the specific formulas to the secondary colors, so I won’t elaborate.

As an ending to the Ewald Hering project we silk screened one color each in reflection to our color theory. I chose the brightest neon pink I could find

(Thank God for Magenta, am I right?)

The CMN colour system was created in 1986 in Italy. It shows how colours change. How they can get brighter and eventually become white (bianco) or darker, thus resulting in black (nero). They can also become transparent (trasparente) or reflective (speculare). The CMN-86 colour system is about how colours appear, change and disappear. Going from dark to bright and from reflective to transparent, a specific colour can become very different, this system takes that fact into consideration, as the only one!

This system takes the shape of a tetrahedron, originally met in Plato’s geometrical ideas of colours. It can be combined with other systems in order to not only express the origins of the colours but also reflect the intentions of the observer. C is for “colori” an etymologically interesting word that means “something disguised and revealed”. In other words, something is taken away from white light (original essence) so that the object is revealed.

Synesthesia is a condition in which one sense (for example, hearing) is simultaneously perceived as if by one or more additional senses such as sight. Another form of synesthesia joins objects such as letters, shapes, numbers or people’s names with a sensory perception such as smell, color or flavor. The word synesthesia comes from two Greek words, syn (together) and aisthesis (perception). After some research I found out that synesthesia is divided in different types according to what senses are involved. The specific one concerning sound and color  is called Chromesthesia. I wanted to use that as a base for my work and try to find a way to combine this scientific fact with the colour system I’m working on.

Instead of imagining a color moving and evolving into the tetrahedron, let’s imagine a sound.

thus:
Color = sound
Bianco = high pitch
Nero = low pitch
Transparente = puissance
Speculare = delay

I first decided to work with sounds of everyday-life like opening the fridge, cooking, turning the light on. I wanted so see what could happen to this typical sounds within this new system.
These sounds were finally too complex and couldn’t really make the system clear and understandable, I preferred to use a really simple and pure sound and make it move in the system to reveal its logic. I made a book so, while you are listening, you can see where the sound is located on the tetrahedron and, therefore, grasp the system.

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/1-track-011.mp3|titles=1-track-01]

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/2-track-02.mp3|titles=2 track 02]

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/3-track-03.mp3|titles=3 track 03]

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/4-track-04.mp3|titles=track 04]

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/5-track-05.mp3|titles=track 05]

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/6-track-06.mp3|titles=track 06]

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/7-track-07.mp3|titles=track 07]

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/8-track-08.mp3|titles=track #08]

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/9-track-09.mp3|titles=track #09]

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/10-track-10.mp3|titles=track #10]

[audio:https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/11-track-11.mp3|titles=track #11]

My project consists of the translation of a visual system regarding colour to a visual system regarding sound. The original CMN system shows how colour appears, changes and disappears,  from black to white, across reflection and transparency. This system is a way to apprehend a colour and its nature within a defined scientific tetrahedron-shaped space. Applying it to sound give us a way to approach sounds in a different angle, sounds can become autonomous elements of our environment.
Then, we could imagine to use this system on other matters like smell, touch, feelings, … and give a tangible and reachable reality to the unspeakable.

Research – RGB system

The RGB system [X] is a colour system generated by light. It is based on the light primaries of red, green and blue.When combined, red and green light rays produce yellow, blue and green produce cyan, red and blue produce magenta. Red, green and blue mix to create white (light).[X]

The RGB colour model is additive in the sense that the three light beams are added together, and their light spectra add, wavelength for wavelength, to make the final colour’s spectrum.

The choice of primary colours is related to the physiology of the human eye; good primaries are stimuli that maximize the difference between the responses of the cone cells of the human retina to light of different wavelengths, and that thereby make a large colour triangle.

The RGB system was developed in conjunction with television technology. The surface of the screen is covered by tiny points, each with a diameter of approximately 0.2 mm, containing phosphorescent materials (molecules). Normally, three types are selected to transmit red, green or blue light after excitement by beams of electrons (after they have absorbed energy).

Colours on the television screen are created by a special form of additive light mixture known as a partitive mixture. The partitive light mixture is created because the human eye is incapable of perceiving the many hundreds of thousands of points — the triads of red, green and blue patches into which they are organised — individually, and can only register the mixing effect of all RGB-triads together, with brightness being regulated by the intensity of the electron stream which triggers the phosphorescence.

The cube construction has been verified as the most suitable system for this particular range of colours, with each of its edges being divided into 16 equal parts numbered 1 to 15. These numbers are sufficient to specify the trichromatic composition of each colour.

The eight corner-points of the cube are occupied by red , green and blue, the subtractive primary colours magenta, yellow and Cyan, and the achromatic colours white  and black.

All colours in the RGB system can be concentrated into two subgroups, one centred on white and the other on black. The chromatic form extends from black (0, 0, 0) along the edges of the colours to reach the white tip (15, 15, 15) — the maximum intensity — after passing two corner points.
The RGB colour model itself does not define what is meant by red, green, and blue colormetrically, and so the results of mixing them are not specified as absolute, but relative to the primary colours. When the exact chromaticities of the red, green, and blue primaries are defined, the colour model then becomes an absolute colour space, such as sRGB or Adobe RGB.

PROJECT

& silk-screening

The colour I silkscreened during the progress of my project was connected to the red I used as a starting point for the RGB project. They were not the same red, but still *red“.  The red I used as a starting point for this project (RGB) was on my mind somehow, I’d been with this red for a while so maybe that’s why I still had it in my head, I don’t usually consciously spend this much time with one specific colour.

I was thinking about this RED, so that was the colour I was most curious about to silkscreen. I liked seeing the red in that process. It became tomatosoup red, not like the red in the project, which reminded me more of blood at the time. But maybe it’s also dependent on your mood, how you see red.

The project began with my research on the RGB system, colour made of light. How you see what you see on a monitor. Your eyes are fooled. What they don’t see, is that what is actually on the screen are millions of tiny dots, molecules that change colour when stimulated by electrons, into red, green or blue. Where they overlap we see yellow, cyan or magenta. And all of the hues that can be formed out of these components (read this research for more). So all of the fantastic images you can see on a screen are just tiny dots changing into three different colours and overlapping. Layers of light form the image. White light illuminates or dims the colour.

This was my starting point and this is what I went into throughout my research on colour. Seeing how colour is or can be composed, by  looking at it like a monitor screen. On which you see an image, but you know it’s actually only dots, and you want to see the dots, but if you do that you have to go up to the screen really close, and then you loose the big picture. Is it possible to see the tiny dots as well as the big picture? For humans, on the monitor this is generally not possible, so I tried to explore this „seeing up close, far away“, on a different medium, than a monitor.

My first experiment, I did on a white paper surface was my „white light“.

On it I applied a shade of red I mixed out of different reds. I used a small soft roll you would usually use for painting walls, which has a sponge effect, it absorbs and release. With this I felt I had more room to  deal with the white paper as a 3D Object not just as a surface. With this sponge roll I could press colour into the sheet of paper as well as absorb it  depending on how wet/dry the paper and/or roll was.

If I used a lot of water for example, I could  „wash“ the colour out. I would say it was like trying to tear the colour apart, going through all of its layers, and seeing what sort of image this creates.

To this stretching the colour/revealing it’s layers, I added another colour and tryed a more soft approach, using more soft movements to try and get the colours to overlap as they wanted to .

Basically what I did in the next experiments was working with layers. Concentrating on the single colours and how they change, according to the different tiny particles or pieces they are made up of.

At some point I worked with black as well as white, to see how colours react when you add light or dark, above or underneath it or both. Sometimes I would let one part dry longer so the different layers of colour wouldn’t mix to see if it made a difference.

I also tried creating different patterns/structures, to see how a pattern or a structure, for example one made up of dark and light particles underneath the colour, takes an effect when you look at the big picture.

For this I also tried using my lower lip to create a colour pattern to find out if a colour looks different when it is applied in a lower lip pattern.

The last experiment I did, was cutting material things into small parts so I could mix them and when you see it from far away maybe you see a new colour. I made for example, an orange colour out of khaki fruit skin, and an orange velvet textile, both of which I cut into very small pieces and then mixed. After about two weeks it started to rot, and green mold was added to the colour scheme.

With other experiments I got lost in the big picture and it became a more pictorial. Still I was working up close, concentrating on small sections at a time, looking for effects this can have on a colour when you take one (or many) steps back.

Philipp Otto Runge (1777 -1810) was a romantic painter. He’s considered to be one of the best of his time. His interest in colour was the natural result of his profession as a painter. He invented a colour theory which he eventually published, encouraged by his friends, in 1808 in the form of a manuscript. He was pen pals with Goethe and they exchanged their ideas on colour. Goethe also featured him in one of his books.  Sadly he died young and his efforts where soon overshadowed by others.

His goal was to establish the complete world of colours resulting from mixtures of the three, among themselves, and together with white and black. He presented this in the form of a colour sphere, shown below.

Featured are the primary colours red, yellow and blue. They have the same distance to each other. The secondary colours orange, purple and green also have the same distance. The upper part of the sphere is white; the colours become lighter. The lowest part of the sphere is black; The colours become darker.  Red, blue yellow, black and white have the same distance from each other.

The colours shown on the outer layer of the sphere are the most pure. You could, for instance, also cut the sphere. In the middle of the sphere you could see a muddy colour (grey/brown). It’s every colour together so it doesn’t have any characteristics.

—————————————————————–

For my own project I took the idea of three-dimensional color. It’s already there in the original drawings from Runge, as shown above. This idea of three-dimensional color and the way Runge has dealt with showing this already offers some nice problems which I used as a starting point.

For instance:

-You can’t (to a certain extent) show three-dimensional colour in a two-dimensional way, in other words you can’t show the three-dimensionality of the color sphere by making a drawing of it.

– The only thing that works like the colour sphere is the colour sphere itself. For example; if you take the fruit ”mango” you will see random spots of red and green on the outside and yellow on the inside, there’s no order, like with the sphere. There are no logical transitions and grades. From red to yellow is logical. From red to green not.

-The colour sphere cannot be a colour triangle or colour square. It only works as a globe.

I started investigating these thoughts; The problem of three-dimensionality, the problem of the colour itself and the problem of shape.

With this in mind I started investigating different ways of showing color. On different surfaces; paper, textile. With different materials, paint etc. I started looking for objects, things and even animals which I thought could be interesting colour-wise. Taking them apart to see the colour inside. Decomposing and analyzing.

In the end I took an onion. The advantage is it’s simple shape, round, and the way it’s already layered. It has different layers of colour, ready to be peeled off.

Philip Otto Runge was of course a painter. To stay close to those roots I used actual paint to get the right colours of the onion. I painted on the onion itself to see if the colours where alike and for me it was a big part of the project; it’s quite hard to get the exact colors. As Runge used his colour sphere to discover and examine the colour of paint, and how to effectively use it, it was a nice experience to work with this material myself in such a way.

Now I had the colours ready; I could start thinking about the shape, or the application of these colours. I thought about applying the colour to various things, for instance; architecture. In the illustration I made below one can see how this could be done. There are seven rooms that fit into each other. I took them apart and spread them out in the illustration in different layers. The last ”room” is actually a pillar. You can’t go any further.

I silkscreened this colour. It reminded me of the light of the sun at the beginning & end of the day, when it only touches the top part of houses, trees, clouds. A gold, deep and warm yellow with a little bit of mustard. One of Runge’s works, ”morning”, inspired me to choose this colour.

/In progress/

Moses Harris [entemologist engraver 1730 – 1788] examined the work of Isaac Newton, and tried to discover all the variety of colours that can be determined from principal colours : red, blue and yellow
Harris presumed that these colours, when are mixed with each other can form all the colours and tints (660) in the nature.

Nature was his guide and assistant , as the arrangement of the principal colours is systematized according to those reflected by the prism, where we find the orange colour lays between the red and yellow, green between yellow and blue and purple between blue and red.
These colours coming in continues succession gave him the first idea that they should be placed in a circle. He thought that this order agreed with what seems to be demanded by nature.

The nature of the thing divided the the whole into two parts: prismatic and compound

He noticed that
PRIMITIVES – red yellow and blue are most common especially in wild nature
MEDIATES – orange green and purple are the colours that mother nature decorated most of the flowers

To show all the variety of colours Moses Harris created segmented circle and its identification system.
He applied water colours in layers what allowed the subtle transition between colours and shades.
According to Harris explanation, the primitive prismatic colours each use the use three parts of a single color (red, yellow, or blue) while the mediate prismatic colors are two-to-one combinations of the primaries, determined by their position on the circle.reference. From this information, we can assume that each compartment received at least three washes or layers of color and perhaps as many as twenty, the number of shades or tones Harris designates within his circle. It is unlikely that Harris used as many as twenty color layers to create the deeper tones in these plates, however: It simply was not necessary. The narrowing size of each arc gives the perception of color darkening, and Harris may have taken advantage of that effect, just as he relied on the white paper surface to aid representation of the lighter shades. It is likely that Harris used some smaller number of color washes—three or six, perhaps—for each of the eighteen colors in each of the two circles.

He linked colours with some pigment, fruit or flower

PRIMITIVES:
Red – Vermilion – Wild poppy
Yellow – Kings Yellow – Butter flower
Blue – Ultramarine – Corn flower

MEDIATES:
Orange – Red orpiment – garden Marigold
Green – Sap green – Leaves of the lime-Tree
Purple – Hairy sheep scabius – flower if the common Judas tree

COLOURS CIRCLES

PRISMATIC:
Red, orange-red, red-orange, yellow-orange, orange-yellow, yellow, green-yellow , yellow-green green, blue-green, blue-green-blue, purple-blue, blue-purple-purple, red-purple, purple-red

COMPOUND
Orange, olave-orange, orange-olave-olave,gren-olave, olave-green-green, slate-green, green-slate-slate, purple-slate, slate-purple-purple, brown-purple, purple-brown-Brown, orange-brown,brown-orange

equal amounts of red + blue + yellow = black
equal amounts of purple + green + orange = black

white is seen as the lack of colour

Contrasting colours lay on the opposite sides of the circle
According to Harris his colour system has both practical and philosophical uses. He mentioned an experiment in which blue arises from the orange of the candle flame. These are the contrasting colours that lay in the circle opposite to each other

There is nothing known of the contemporary use of these color circles.

MY research OF THE MOSES HARRIS COLOUR SYSTEM

Moses Harris presumed that these colours, when are mixed with each other, can form all the 660 colours and tints  in the nature.
The ones that he himself actually found in the nature were just 6 of them (red yellow blue green orange purple).

Where this small amount of examples comes from? Moses Harris lived in the XVIII century, when there were not many ways of transport and traveling was not easy and common. He was most probably, just looking around in his surrounding.

Nowadays, we live in the globalized world and traveling is an everyday thing. We have planes,  cheap flights and we can reach any place of the world.
Moreover we can also travel in the cyber-space through the internet. Internet is an enormous source, all the world is there. Its a very big source of information. Most of the people use it daily, to search for different kind of info, to  check our email and also for the social networks among which the most popular is Facebook.

Facebook is a huge personal (but not only) information area. Members post

photos from their journeys.  Next to the photos of people and architecture one of the most popular are photos of nature.

I find this modern world and digital media a very interesting topic, that is why I decided to search in the photos of nature taken by my Facebook friends posted during their whole existence on Facebook

I found many photos of nature  in a bunch of different tints, but still many are missing.

I was thinking what would be a great way to present them and decided to make collages  that  take a way a bit the realistic look of plants. make them more abstract ( each 10 tints ) .

blue- purple   / purple-red  /  orange-yellow  /  yellow    / yellow-green


I am still in the process of creation. At the moment there are many parts of the Moses Harris circle to be filled in. It leaves the open space for other people. If any of you is interested to search for the nature photos of their friends, please do that and send it to me : a.d.radzimirska@gmail.com
I am pretty sure that together we can fill in every segment of the whole circle of Moses Harris.

Introduction

Herman Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) was a German psychologist, who pioneered the experimental study of memory, was the first one to talk about the learning cube and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and spacing effect. He has also discovered a color system, based on a double pyramid colored Red Blue Green and Red after Leonardo da Vinci’s idea. The idea was that due to the variation of brightness, those four colors can be separately distinguished. He strongly believed that being aware of the physiologists discovery,  in the eyes retina there are only three photo-sensitive substances who are responsible for the phenomenon of colored vision and its anomalies. He published in 1893 in the Journal of Psychology in Germany, a “Theory of Colour Vision” – in which he mentioned that humans perceive colors through higher mental processes. He had then discovered that if one of the combinations of pyramids, red and green or yellow and blue have a common base in a three dimensional space and that base spins (as seen in the image), two white hues are produced and the brightness is linked to the speed of the spin. It is a purely phenomenologically oriented portrayal of colors in which the complementary pair does not find a place opposite one another. The double-pyramid has then came to be a stronghold of phenomenology, an era in which colors were simple came to a close. After Ebbinghaus discoveries physics could never be certain again about the nature of light and it’s wave and particles properties that have also been discovered at the same time by Albert Einstein.    

The Machine

It really got me by surprise me that i couldn’t find any other source or any other image besides one website. All about this color system is theoretical, it hasn’t been applied into action. So i was curious to see this phenomenon happening. My first attempt was to create a physical machine with two rotated round edge squares, one would fit into the other and with the help of two air blowers, it would turn.The machine didn’t have much success as i realized immediately, it was an interesting shape but the squares didn’t turn fast enough therefore the phenomenon couldn’t appear. After creating the machine i wondered whether a digital form could be more efficient.

  Read the rest of this entry »

James Clerck Maxwell, physicist, created the first color photograph, theorized, and experimented with kinetic theory of gases, electromagnetism, and additive color. Maxwell’s theories and research into these several fields commenced other scientists to define the physical description of the human color perception and to further delve into this subject. He created various equations, which explain how light waves travel and the first triangle color system, which plays a large role in many color systems such as CIE and Hermann von Helmholtz’s Curve of Spectral Colors. Maxwell demonstrated in his experiments that when he mixed red, green, and blue together they create white.

Each color in his triangle is the result of the combination of two or more of the primary colors. Within the triangle, Maxwell hypothesized any two color combinations will lie opposite of each other. In Maxwell’s triangle, he translated the geometrical shapes and space between colors defined in Newton’s color circle to measurements of the colors physical stimulation and resulting mental states and sensations. Digital screens all use the additive color system, which emits certain colored lights to create the image on a screen. These controlled light waves still cannot be completely measured in computers or televisions, which cannot distinguish different colors. The additive color and electromagnetic waves experiments done by Maxwell all contribute to the visual aspect of computers and television, as well as radio.

Athanasius Kircher, is the man behind de Coloribus (1646). The basis for all combinations is a linear construction which, apart from white and black, operates with three colors (yellow, red and blue). The special position of green is red also placed in the center. Green is located at the overlap of yellow and blue.

The diagram of the theory shows that all colors (yellow, red, purple, green, and blue) are derived from mixtures of black and white. This had a big influence on the color theories in that time and remained influential until Isaac Newtons’s experiments with light refraction. The prism, and its effect on light, was something already known to Kircher. He accounted for his colors by noting that the brightest occur after passing through the thinnest side of the glass, and the darkest after passing through the thickest side of the glass. But newton was the one who defined the right order of the rainbow colors. And Newton also discovered that colors are light of different wavelengths and that white light is a mix of all colors in the rainbow spectrum, something that Kircher didn’t find out.

In Kircher’s book that contains eight chapters which deal with the multitude of colors, investigate the colors of transparent stones, or colors of plants and animals. For example, he questions himself why four legged animals do not seem to be golden, and why insects and birds adopt all of the colors.  And why the sky appears blue, but he never reached a satisfactory answer.

*

During the research on Kircher’s color-system I was looking for an answer that wasn’t there. The color system was just a view from one guy, a long time ago and there wasn’t that much to understand about. It was just what it was. So for that reason I chose to just leave the colors for what they were and chose to use the image search option in Google. The first time I used a white to green gradient, and the second time a black to green gradient.

Green to white

and the second time a black to green gradient.

Green to black

It was pretty interesting that the images weren’t any photo’s, but all gradient or flag like images. I found it very interesting how the different images or flags float into each other, and wanna to combine pairs of images which should create a new image.

I made a JPEG from every color in the color-system in Photoshop, using the RGB colors to create the colors. I dragged the colors in chronologic order in the image search-bar and made some more screen captures of all the results.

What was even more interesting were the titles of the images found in Google. Titles like: "2334452-90081-a-tightly-woven-yellow-and-black-stripes-texture-that-works-as-a-seamless-pattern-in-any-direction.jpg" or "The Colour Green.jpg"

Because of that I had the idea to make a book with all the found images, ordered in chronologic order with the title of image. But because of the big amount of money, what I needed for the book and the idea that the images where from internet. And so belonged on the computer, I decided to create a slideshow of the images and use the voiceover function in Mac for the titles. I did everything in chronologic order (except for the color green) I decided to put the red before the color green (as you can see in the color scheme it wasn’t really in the middle, so I had to choose if I putted it before or after the color red.

During editing the video I tried to make a kind of system using a different style for each type of file. And also the same slide in the Color that I used to find the images.

I’m very happy with the end result, although it went in a different way than I expected to be. But I’m fine with that. With this I learned to accept the results that you find during the research, and not to manipulate or change it. But deal with what you have, and only change the medium if necessary. Why not use video or why relate nothing to the computer if your material is found on the computer. But this depends on what the images try to say, or what the images say to you and what you want to do with it. I really have to take some more distance of the results in my research, most of the times I try to be too much in it, because of that I lose the reflection on, and the actual core of, the collection of images or results of what I’ve made. And because of that I sometimes do too much with the things that I’ve made. I kind of ruin the core of the images in that way.

The color that I silk screened as part of the process has something to do with the fact that the colors between black and white are derived with mixtures from green according to Kircher’s color system. I decided to add a little bit of neon

green in thewhite, so it became almost white but also green. It almost look like a glow-in-the-dark circle as you can see.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German Writer, artist and politician. Goethe devoted a large part of his life to the study of natural phenomena. Although Goethe especially was known as a poet, he saw his own scientific work as his greatest merit. Yet few had appreciation for Goethe’s scientific work, though some modern scientists, like Henri Bortoft and Reinhold Sölch, get greater understanding of Goethe’s learning.
Johann Wolfgang Goethe analyzed colours from a physical perspective. In his views, there are two basic colours: cyan and yellow. Cyan originates from viewing dark through light, like you view the sky during the day. Yellow originates from viewing light through dark, like you view light in a dark area. Goethe based his colour theory on this interaction between light and dark.
The intensification of the basic colours leads to other colours. If the colour yellow is intensified, it leads to red. If blue is intensified, it leads to violet. This can be seen in the sky when the sun goes down. This is also an explanation for the categorization of cold and warm colours. According to Goethe green is the neutral colour between cold and warm, like the colour of plants. Magenta, or purple as Goethe calls it, is the balanced connection between light and dark, because it carries light as well as dark elements.

The colour theory of Goethe can thus be seen as the star of David. Two similar shaped triangles lapping over each other: a triangle that faces down and an overlapping triangle that faces up. The triangle that faces up has cyan in the lower left corner, yellow in the lower right corner and magenta in the upper corner. The triangle that faces down has violet in the upper left corner, red in the upper right corner and green in the lower corner. Smaller triangles can be extracted from the two large triangles that show alternative possibilities. In these smaller triangle Goethe pays attention to secondary and tertiary colours. He also analyses colors in relation to psychology. Colours ranging from yellow to red are analyzed as the plus-side, whereas colors ranging to blue are referred to as the minus-side. Here Goethe connotes the plus-side with warm, positive associations and the minus-side with more dark, negative associations. This is what he calls the sensual-moral effect of colours.

The German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe describes a journey through the Harz Mountains in a very compelling manner, in the middle of the winter. The reader will be absorbed by his writing, like he would be walking around in a painting, when he writes about vague violet shadows of a group of trees and overhanging rocks in the noonday sun lighted by a yellow snow. As the hours pass, these shadows deepen from a deeper blue to a dark yellow-orange tone sunlight. As the sun reaches the horizon and a purple light covers the entire landscape in a red glow, the shadows turn green. Goethe describes almost a fairy-tale like landscape painted in the colors red and green. The story is part of Goethe’s color theory and is a typical example of the empirical experiences on which this theory is based.

Goethe’s color theory was published in three sections: If Beiträge zur Optik I (1791) and II (1792) (part III, Von den Farbigen Treasures remained unpublished), if Didaktischer Teil in 1808 and finally in its entirety, under the title Zur Farbenlehre in 1810. It is an extensive work with a special status in the world of culture and science. From the beginning there were numerous outspoken advocates and critics. Present day Goethe’s color theory is not considered scientific, i.e. not in accordance to the scientific physical principles based on Newton. In the Romanticism around 1800 science was viewed in a much broader sense. Natural philosophers intermingled empirical research with their own vision and passion, based on literature and art. In their views colors were not only physical wavelengths, but also individual observations with the sentimental values and emotions.

Artists, especially landscape painters, felt a deep connection with this way of reflecting on colours. They viewed colours and reproduced them in a manner that the viewer could relive this observation. Pure scientific facts are not enough to describe the color world, in their views.

Twilight sinks down from above us,

Swiftly all the near is far:

But first shining high above us

Radiant is the evening star!

Everything is drifting vaguely,

Mist steals upwards to the height:

And the still lake mirrors darkly

Black abysses of the night.

Now in all the eastern distance

I suspect moon’s gleam and glow,

Slender willow’s trailing branches

Dally with the neighboring flow.

Through the play of moving shadows

Trembling lunar magic shines,

And a soothing coolness follows,

To the heart now, through the eyes.

When I started reading his poems, I immediately linked the poems to his colour theory. The romantic way of describing the natural phenomena inspired me to collect all sentences that actually describe a specific light of the day in different landscapes. His words spoke to my imagination and it naturally formed the idea to search for the landscapes, which refers Goethe to. I found a big collection of images and made a selection out of it. Because Goethe’s Theory was based on the light we see in nature I have chosen a film projection. In this setting the viewer can immediately disappear in the meaningful words centered in a similar surrounding as a sort of meditation.

The moment I had to make silkscreen-printed colour, I was compelled  by the appearance of the moon after reading this poem and tried to bring this feeling back in just one colour.