In the spirit of Christmas, here's a short video, redeeming the ugliest color in the world. As graphic designer Milton Glaser notes in the video:
"No color can be preferred or not preferred in isolation. Every color is in context to another color."
A Spiral of Color
In celebration of NSK ltd.’s 100th anniversary, the exhibition ‘sense of motion’ has been hosted inside the multi–purpose cultural center of omotesando spiral in tokyo.
At the center, visitors can be immersed amongst the 25,200 delicate flowers aligned in three dimensional grids. as well as being suspended from the ceiling, the flowers subtly rotate because of the NSK bearings and the windmills installed at the top and in turn, the installation produces a gradient of gradually changing color. by using bearings also for the axes of the flowers, visitors can reach out and turn the stalk to feel the spinning motion through color mixing. the scenographic element of the venue creates an artificial garden with the same flower motif used throughout and accentuating the sense of unity.
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Could it be we don't know what color really is?
It's interesting to note that many 'experts' on color fail to define what color really is. Could it be that they don't know?
"Newton himself, who actually introduced the word “spectrum” into the English language to refer to the range of possible colors, eventually dismissed the idea that colors are literally contained in the light. “For the Rays, to speak properly, are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour.” Three hundred years on, what and where colors actually are remains a mystery."
If you're ready for some mind boggling ideas about color, here are more thoughts on the subject, by Riccardo Manzotti, philosopher, psychologist, and artificial intelligence scholar.
The Colors of Le Corbusier
Henry Ford was famous for saying a customer could have any color of car she or he wanted, so long as it's black—a nod to how the industrialist viewed color, all function no fun. Black paint dried the fastest, and that mattered more than the expressionistic qualities of different colors. Many modern architects shared a similar obsession with the sterile white box and dismiss color as mere ornament.
Not Le Corbusier. The renowned Swiss architect believed color was instrumental to orchestrating spatial effects. In a series of wallpapers for the Swiss company Salubra, he rhapsodized about his color theories. "Each of us, according to his own psychology, is controlled by one or more dominant colors," he wrote in a 1931 swatch book for the brand, which was inspired by his Architectural Polychromy essay from 1930.
Color Transplants (2)
Vermeer's Milkmaid in transplanted colors:
Did you guess that the bottom left image is Vermeer's 'real' Milkmaid? A simple survey shows that many people pick another one as the 'real' image.
The colors of these Milkmaids have been transplanted from the following pictures:
Clockwise:
Portrait of Raden Syarif Bustaman Saleh, by Friedrich Carl Albert Schreuel in 1840
Portrait of Maria Theresia of Austria, by Jean-Etienne Liotard in 1747
Portrait of Isaac de Bruijn, by Jan Veth in 1922
The Milkmaid, by Johannes Vermeer in 1658
Below you can produce your own color transplant with an interactive version of the Milkmaid.
Mechanical Colors
It seems we're headed towards a future of mechanical colors. Most of the colors that we are used to, particularly paint colors, are produced in chemical processes. Or we use natural materials that have an innate color, such as earth colors. But in the last few weeks alone, three breakthroughs have been reported on the production of non-chemical colors:
Color-changing graphene bubbles to create ‘mechanical pixels’
Changing the color of your clothes on a whim
Bright colors by nanotechnology
Image of a Graphene Pixel that changes color with shape.