adam joy: dreamf focus.

Obviously, any exploration into the connection between colour, memory, emotion, and imagination is right up my alley. I could watch this all day long.

“DreamF Focus” is part of an on-going visual investigation into dreams by Adam Joy:

“Color is as much a symbol as is the imagery in a dream. Color appears to represent the emotional conditions that stimulated a dream or dream image. As with any other symbol, color combines with the imagery to form a more complete “meaning” for the dream image.”

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eduardo morais: words and thoughts in rgb.

Even though it’s a scientific fact, there’s one reality about colour that, to me, is one of the most beautiful realities in the universe: white light isn’t the absence of colour, but rather the presence of them all. We can be blinded to see only one at a time, but the birth and basis of every hue is white.

One of my favourite quotes fits into this idea. Da Vinci once said “For those colours you wish to be beautiful, always first prepare a pure white ground.”

The essence of how colour works is like poetry unto itself. I imagine the journey of light is like all nature’s cycles: rain falls into the ocean until it rises again as cloud, the air we exhale is breathed in by plants and made vital to us once again. Perhaps each colour yearns to find itself whole once more. No matter how we refract and split and dye it, those hues are constantly searching to realign into the pure whiteness of their creation. Their destiny is to find themselves together again.

I’ve found a film that merges the science and poetry of colour together. Portugese filmmaker Eduardo Morais has summed up how colour works beautifully in his short “Words and Thoughts in RGB”. Though interestingly scientific, the film also explores our psychological relationship with colour and how, even though we are all dramatically emotional impacted by colour, we have no real way of measuring if we’re all seeing the same thing.

“Words and Thoughts in RGB” has deservedly won a whole bunch of awards, and besides being a film-maked Morais is also a kick-ass blogger. He’s got a wickedly funny and socially relevant take on art, life, technology and more at his blog, If Then Else.

Via evasèe

alexander wiethoff: colour vision.

We all know that our senses are deeply inter-connected, and that the colours we see affect (and are affected by) our mood, and that our mood affects (and is affected by) our body language. What a tangled web colour weaves. Deep inside our brain, there are synapses and nerve endings who’ve got this whole thing locked down, but scientists and colour theorists are just beginning to understand just how complex these processes really are.

German interaction designer Alexander Wiethoff‘s “Colour Vision”, an interactive installation at Rohrbach, Austria’s Museum of Perception (try and tell me that’s not a place you’d like to spend a day in…) is a study of how our body language affects colour, and vice versa. Guests enter the room and based on how they move, sit, or stand, the rooms colour automatically shifts to reflect it. Bouncing up and down creates yellow, while outstretching your arms summons red. Slumping down in the chair in the centre of the exhibit turns the room blue, while green, the colour of creativity, is brought out by tilting the held or placing your chin, like The Thinker, into your hands.