Week 3

WEEK 3

Hugh is talking about a project and will address some issues by mentioning and showing examples. Hugh recommends you write two blog posts a week, some are long and some short, some will be better than others. Things to write about are what is discussed in lectures, what inspires you, things mentioned in tutorials and what is mentioned in the readings. This week’s reading is on color and this is what is about to be discussed in the lecture. I looked at the reading by Olafur Eliasson titled “Some Ideas about Color” and some of the key ideas I picked up on were from page one and they were as follows, “The experience of color is related to the experience of light and is also a matter of cultivation. As much as perception is linked with memory and recognition, our relation to color is closely derived from our cultural habitat. The Inuit, for instance, have one word for red but various for white. By the time of Industrialization, when modernity also introduced its dogmas for a healthy, good life, the color white was already deeply rooted in our culture as the only truly purifying color.

There are several other blog posts which are great to see. One discussed the creative process in responding to this task and there are a couple of examples to help.You can hyperlink in your blog, if you don’t know how to do it then come to see me Hugh kindly invited the audience. I recall you saying you might put a brief tutorial up in Wordpress and he realised that most of us use a lot of these tools and hyperlink is slightly more sophisticated than Facebook. It is out of focus, going through the Wordpress interface, when categories was mentioned was it blogging categories, this is not the level of blogging he is asking for. If looking at it at a deeper level, it teaches assumed knowledge, in the media industry it does not matter what level you go in at, it is assumed you will have the basic skills sets. You can frame a shot and even sound and video editing skills are basic across the media industry now. A presenter also needs these skills, we are operating in a  media convergent environment. The news anchor individual is a dying breed and people know there are news anchors and many are being mitigated or boulstered, someone may have a blog but it may not be written by them. Having somebody write up your blog costs money, in an ideal world the individual does it themself. You will notice the channel 9 jobs, go back and edit, it is high quality television vision and from the journalistic point of view you need to be able to do that and from an arts point of view, you are expected to subvert it and this is the perspective we are looking at. You need to know what is happening industry wide, you are responding to the world as it is.

This is the last lecture discussing imagery, light and color, Hugh is going down at a deeper level, he is looking at the materiality of color. In the first lecture we looked at an overview of this course, in doing that, we took a top down hierarchical approach and it was quite linear. Last week was collage/montage and the lecture was like that. Sequential images!! In this lecture Hugh is coming at us in waves as does light and sound and color. Before we discuss color, consider the source of color which is light itself, our eyes have a whole series of rods, in cones, our eyes take the light particles, we don’t quite know what light is, there is so much information here we don’t have. In the seventeeth century, Isaac Newton thought light consisted of waves or particles. Both theories are right, light is waves and particles, this is the nature of quantum mechanics, this is the Copenhagen interpretation. Within the realm of optics, it is confusing, it is two materials, it is particles and waves so getting away from this level of confusion, see the way we understand color. Look at our bodies ,how we receive colour, all colour is from light, it is refracted and colour bounces back at us. The first fundamental media is the sun and the other is through projected light. They are digital or rendered. In the human eye, we have primary colours, these three colours are red, blue and yellow. For us colours can not be reduced further than this. If you mix these, you get secondary colours and mixed again, you get tertiary colours. If you use colour, the way to respond best is in in a standard complimentary way. For example, use this colour, then another and yet another, get a triad of colour, so it is a prominent one at the moment. Last week, he mentioned the digital programs formed the colour ascetics of the nineties. In the case of computers colours were light projected out of a computer screen and today we have a different dogma of colour. Think of Frankie magazine, there is a grey backdrop, such as soft pink and then pale blue and then perhaps a tan or brown, very light, very tinted, so not strong, rather soft colours. Turning to the home page, this image does the same thing, we have a grey backdrop, with pink and brown colours. Another example is the Richard Hamilton collage piece, there are soft colours done in triad formation and the other ways to look at it is analogous colours all of the same scope, meaning there are a whole series of blues or greens, the area of the spectrum.. pantone colours… There are two aspects of hexadecimal colours, so if you look around photoshop, every colour digitally has an alpha numeric.. L.T.U. has a brand, the colour of the seats, a hexadecimal market and that is the colour things should be. La Trobe Univeresity goes from orange to the red of the seats, they are not ambiguous, they are very distinctive one is in print and one is in digital.. CYMK.. We made web documents, we have been doing RBG.. red, blue, green. Pixels which are tiny components of the screen, a pixel has a blue, red and green components and all the colours on the screen are made up of different mixtures, when you have all three, the result is white.. That is how we break light into colours, Newton used prisms.. These are all the meanings we prescribe to colour as well and this is where it is difficult meaning to say that what culture drums in to us and what is part of nature. If you encounter red in nature be careful they might say. Hugh said he eats tomatos all the time, so the theory is not true always, red has oral connotations for us, when we see red, it makes our mouth water. Pizza Hut and Hungry Jacks use it, it makes your mouth water, it is a visceral reaction, maybe back to carnivore origins, it has that level of origin deep in humanity. At another level, we have pink and blue which are themes for boys and girls, it is pervasive and we are all aware of it that children can live in these worlds.

Pythagoras mapped colors to music, he felt everything in the universe could be mapped back to numbers and he thought that everything was made up of numbers, he thought of them in terms of eights, the eight tone musical scale.

Eliasson, Olafur: “Some Ideas about Colour.”

In Olafur Eliasson: Your Colour Memory. Edited by Ismail Soyugenc and Richard Torchia.

Exhibition catalogue. Glenside: Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2006: 75-83.