Showing only Notes + Links tagged coloron creativity, art, & design

by Casey A. Gollan

I’m not synesthetic and you probably are not either.

Heinrich-Siegfried Bormann - Visual analysis of a piece of music from a color-theory class with Vasily Kandinsky. October 21, 1930

(via austinkleon)

Got a projector this afternoon and tried playing with the Processing app I put together to take notes about music on an animated timeline.

My projector was stuck low to the ground inside a heavy A/V cart, however I realized it would be ideal to have the projector on the ceiling and pointing down at a table to be able to work horizontally. Drawing on a perpendicular surface fairly low to the ground was no fun. Also, I’d like a jog wheel so I can quickly scrub back and forth.

I kept getting the feeling, as I was drawing, that it wasn’t that revolutionary to have a vertical line and time code scrolling across my page. But once I shut the projector off I realized how much richer the simple animation had made my note-taking experience. I feel like having the soundline was incredibly helpful for understanding the structure of the song (see those thick black lines? they represent different acts in the piece. look how differently they are proportioned!), but as always I wish I was at this point a week ago to see where I could take this into the realm of color, rather than just sort-of-random marker scribbles.

One of the projects I’m currently working on is translating a piece of music into a color relationship, but I’m having trouble unpacking the dense composition.

I was looking for a specific musical analysis tool that I wanted to use today but I couldn’t find it, so I decided to take a shot at building it for myself. It’s a super-simple Processing app (tentatively given the imaginative title of “soundline”) that augments note-taking for time-based media.

How it works

1. Tape a blank piece of paper to the wall.
2. Set up a projector to project the soundline interface onto your sheet of paper.
3. Select the audio that you wish to work with.
4. Press play, listen, and start taking notes or doodling as the projected line and timecode scan from left to right, in sync with the exact duration of the song.

Why use it?

• Imagine that the paper represents the song as a timeline from the start (on the left) to the finish (on the right). The soundline helps you place your notes and doodles in the linear context of the song.
• Want to remember a specific musical transition or recurring pattern? It’s easy and totally painless to capture the tiniest details and then return to them later. Simply make a dot or hatch mark on the page and write or draw a short reminder. When you want to return to this point to study it further, just use your computer to scrub through the song until the soundline is touching the mark. Hit play and observe your notes in sync with the sound.
• Write, draw, paint, use different colors, paste stickers, draw connections, use graph paper. The possibilities are endless.
• If something isn’t specifically related to a point on the timeline, nothing is arbitrarily stopping you from noting it anywhere you want at any time.
• The simple animation transforms your blank piece of paper into a time-based notepad that allows for densely layered, unobtrusive, and organized annotating, second-by-second.

The concept is sort of like Muji’s brilliant Chronotebook, a daily planner with a clock in the center of each page, allowing you to make radial time-based notes about the day:

In fact, maybe a radial interface would be another good experiment! I’m going to actually play with this tomorrow and see if it helps me understand the song.

Juke Green, 1968, by James Turrell
Light Projection

(via David Zwirner)

Crayon colors over time

Velo also calculated the average growth rate: 2.56% annually. For maximum understandability, he reformulated it as “Crayola’s Law,” which states:

The number of colors doubles every 28 years!

If the Law holds true, Crayola’s gonna need a bigger box, because by the year 2050, there’ll be 330 different crayons!

(via austinkleon)

L: Study #1 (154y, 164m at F8 for 4 sec.) R: Study #25 (0y, 100m, at F8 for 15 sec.) from Robert Heinecken Studies by Jason Lazarus

I showed the images above (sans-captions) to my little sister and she thought they were sky or stars! The colors are beautiful. Almost like Carlo Van de Roer’s Portrait Machine Project for the afterlife.

Just received word from Jason Lazarus that he updated his website with a unique new photographic project. Made with a portion of the cremated remains of the artist Robert Heinecken (with the permission of the Heinecken Estate), Robert Heineken Studies is comprised of a set of 25 photograms that were produced sequentially, in one sitting, in a color darkroom at Columbia College.

(via Shane Lavalette)

Around the Corner by David Smith

The Color of 2010: Tuquoise

Pantone has revealed next year’s official color. Almost the opposite of last year’s color, Mimosa.

Smoke Bombs by Olaf Breuning — today and tomorrow

Color challenge: randomly generated or the work of Joseph Albers?

Interaction of Color: New Complete Edition by Josef Albers

Yale University Press is reprinting this as a deluxe, $200 edition:

One of the most influential books on color ever published, Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color is a masterwork. Originally issued in 1963 as a limited-edition set of commentary and 150 silkscreened color plates, the book introduced generations of students, artists, designers, and collectors to Albers’s unique approach to complex principles. While the original publication has long been out of print, this beautiful new edition now brings Interaction back into classrooms, studios, and onto bookshelves, where it will find an eager new audience. Lavishly produced as a two volume slipcased set, this book replicates Albers’s revolutionary exercises, explaining concepts such as color relativity and vibrating and vanishing boundaries through the use of color, shape, die-cut forms, and movable flaps that illustrate his astonishing demonstrations of the changing and relative nature of color. Also included for the first time are new studies from the Albers archive, produced by the artist’s students in the early 1960s.

Getting to look at a hand-silkscreened original edition of this book with my color class was probably one of the best days of my life. I’m pretty sure these are just machine reproductions, but it’s still on my wishlist!

(via austinkleon)