Description
Color as Material
In Chromatic Algorithms, Carolyn Kane discusses what color means in the digital era: “Whether through its ochres, its minerals, or its silicon graphic chips, color’s dirt and matter connects us, however reluctantly or ambivalently, to techniques and artifice, just as it does to metaphysics and theology, politics and ideology, and the depths and darkness of the earth, the world of chaos, eroticism, and Dionysian ecstasy […] Color must therefore be seen as something deeply historical, material and ideological, at the core of the always already Other that perpetually threatens to unveil and undermine the notions of truth, purity, origin and order that underwrite Western culture.” There is a joke that goes: “What’s red and tastes like blue paint? Red paint.” But, in fact, a different chemical produces red and blue, so they may not taste the same. Each color is, and always has been, a physically different construction…