terri timely: synesthesia.

This is officially one of my top ten favourite short films of all time. And I’ve seen a lot of shorts. That’s just how kick ass this is.

So, this isn’t news to anyone who know me, but I’m obsessed with colour and all of its effects on us; in art and motion, and also psychologically and emotionally. I’m totally fascinated with Synesthesia, a “neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.”

It’s an incredible sensory mix-up. Some people can hear colours. Some taste words. Some read in sounds. Terri Timely (made up of directing duo Ian Kibbey and Corey Creasy) have created an absolutely stellar film interpretation of synesthesia. It’s quirky, lush, imagination run wild. Fascinating at each step and totally unpredictable, this is totally up my alley and blew me right away.

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quentin carnicelli + charles klipfel + jean-françois jégo: reulf.

I love this so much.

I totally relish the thought of little chromatic robots sneaking out from our most boring everyday cracks and corners and slowly transforming us into colours. I want to carry them all around in my pocket.

Université Paris VIII graduate students Quentin Carnicelli, Charles Kilpfel, and  Jean-François Jégo imagined a drab, greyed out Paris where miniature painters come to our visual rescue. The beginning sort of reminds me of Sony’s famous Bravia spot “Bunnies.” Plus, Ihave to admit, I get nostalgic for any sort of benvolent little robot things because it remind me of one of my fave childhood movies, “*batteries not included.”

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superbien: patachromo.

I’m obsessed with the emotion of colour. The connection between colour and our psychological being is intrinsic and undeniable. Based on the theories of chromatherapy, this magnificent, multi-coloured LED installation by France’s Superbien makes people feel as good as it looks.

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The photography documenting the project is equally sleek, stunning, and multi-hued. So fresh.

Via Fubiz™

mystery photo.

I found this incredible snap on Design You Trust™. Unfortunately, the post there doesn’t give any info about the pic. It’s from a site called Zamin Online, which is mostly in Arabic. Does anybody have any ideas on where the pic might be from? I would love to know if it’s some kind of colour-based cultural event, or what the purpose/history (if any…) is behind the amazing vibrancy everyone is sporting.

Click on the pic below to enlarge and see it in its original context at Zamin Online.

bastien roger: milk.

Too much of any good thing is poison. And in a world covered and corrupted in meaningless colour, the beauty of colour itself is lost. More than just an interesting visual study, Bastien Roger’s short film “Milk” is a look at the vital importance of opposites; no good thing can be beautiful taken out of its context. Light only has meaning as the polar of darkness, music only has meaning becuase we’ve also know the sound of silence, and colour only has meaning in contrast to its absence. The brilliance of a blue sky is only so because the horizon it rests upon isn’t also blue.

So the protagonist runs away from colour, searching for whiteness, not to rid himself of colour but to rediscover its true meaning. Which could really be a metaphor for anyone who has garnered so much of something that they need to leave it behind in order to find it again.

For me, the purity sought after here isn’t the absence of colour but the culmination of it. Pure light is made up of every hue in the spectrum; it takes our prisms and dyes and pigments to break it down into it’s component colours in a way that our eyes can recognize. His search is really to find the most elevated form of colour and truth. In a very real way, though we can’t see it, white is the most colourful entity of all.

You can check out the first half of the film below on Vimeo, and if it’s your thing then you can watch the full (frustratingly slow-loading but worth it in the end) film by clicking here.

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eric lerner: gong.

The connection between colour and emotion is intrinsic in all of us. Universal and without language, there is a common, almost synaesthetic understanding of how different hues reflect what feelings are held within us. In his brilliant short film and unofficial music video for “Gong”, by one of the world’s best bands ever, Sigur Rós, film-maker Eric Lerner explores not only the correlation between colour and emotion but what would happen if these colours were on display for everyone to see. Like a gigantic mood ring on our bodies.  Stripped of the ability to hide our emotions or reveal only what we choose, how do people react to us when they can see our true inner-feelings so easily? And how do their reactions in turn, like the beginning of a cycle, affect our emotions?

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gemma smith.

At her recent show at Sarah Cottier Gallery in New South Wales, Australia, artist Gemma Smith showed off her eye for contrast and colour. On top of her painted works, my faves are her large, multi-faceted acrylic sculptures, which she calls “boulders.” I want to lick them; they look like the top of a gigantic ring pop. It might be tempting to think this type of modern graphic art is simple, and I know we’re into a big “My Kid Could Draw That” phase right now, but don’t be fooled. Visual interest like this isn’t just an accident. There’s a balance here that takes talent to create; an almost asymmetrical symmetry, where the angles, planes, and colours chosen by Smith create a fascination when you stare at this gargantuan gem. Usually, the things that seem the simplest are the hardest to do well…

Via NOTCOT

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

todd falkowsky: revealing urban colours.

In an interesting and lovely cultural colour project, Todd Falkowsky, co-founder of the kick-ass Canadian design collective Motherbrand and one of the forces behind the must-visit Canadian Design Resource, set out to capture the visual identity of Canadian cities through simple Pantone colour palettes in his article “Revealing Urban Colours” for Walrus Magazine.

Using computers to figure out the predominant colours from landmarks and landscapes from each Canadian capital city, he then built individual palettes to create a kind of chromatic identity for each city. The end result is a multi-faceted colour theory study, with results similar to the palettes created by people on one of my fave sites, COLOURlovers,

As with the work he contributes to at Motherbrand, there’s an intrinsic simplicity to this whole project that I love. I’m a colourphile, and any work of art or science that examines our relationship with colour gets me going. On top of that, there’s something very Canadian about it. No huge fanfare and glossy pictures of monuments and other stereotypical urban signifiers (“oh, look, the CN Tower, they must be talking about Toronto…”), the colours and the entities they represent are all subtle and true. More so it’s that these are the shades of the things that make up a place but don’t necessarily overwhelm it. These are the hues of things seen and known but not always looked at or thought about…

Sometimes hockey and football, sometimes water and rock, these colours represent natural pulls to the land where these cities lie, to the cultures fostered there, and each one is chosen not for it’s glitz but for it’s purity of presence. These are real things. Solid things. Look at Whitehorse and you first see “Aurora Borealis” and “Fireweed” – it doesn’t get much more elementally beautiful than that.

Each palette has been personalized out of a genuine reality and not out of an urge to impress. Being a Torontonian, I can’t think of any colour more omnipresent than the slightly annoying sanguine red of the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission). Pretty? Not necessarily. Affection-inducing? Most people’s opinion of the TTC lies somewhere between detestation and apathy. But it’s presence is undeniable and a visual colour-thread for anyone that lives here – and capturing that reality is, I think, exactly what Falkowsky set out to do.

Thanks to Hannah + Matt.

pantone matching @ flickr.

My inexorable march towards total design geekdom becomes shockingly apparent when I find stuff like this and it entertains me to a point that I almost want jump up and down and call my Mom. At least it also proves that there are others like me out there…

Just like creator RIVET_sf says on his hilarious Pantone Matching Flickr Set, “Everything has it’s own Pantone colour. It’s just a matter of finding it.” If you’ve ever wondered what the Pantone code was for a can of Dr. Pepper, now you know. Finally!