Category Archives: color

RGB Colorspace Atlas and Mantis Shrimp

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RGB Colorspace Atlas, Volume 2 (2011)
As part of Ecstatic Alphabets, MoMA has a set Tauba Auerbach’s colorful books on view. These three thick objects display every color the human eye can see in a three-dimensional, ordered way. The museum plaque probably describes the project best:

“Human eyes typically have three types of color receptors on their retinas, each sensitive to a different range of wavelengths of light. The colors associated with these wavelengths are approximately red, green, and blue. Because there are three types of color receptors, it is possible to map the visible spectrum in a three-dimensional spatial model by assigning red, green, and blue each to a dimension. It is then possible to outline a cube in this space, where the values of red, green, and blue are visible on a gradient scale of 0 – 100% in their respective dimensions. These gradients combine to create the RGB color space cube, a volume in which any color can be located by a set of three coordinates. RGB Colorspace Atlas, both a sculptural object and spatialization of color, consists of three books. Each volume contains the entire visible spectrum mapped out over 3,632 pages, representing the RGB cube sliced in a different direction: vertically, horizontally, and from front to back.”

Of course, the volumes at MoMA were behind glass cases, so no one can flip through them. This video helps you imagine it though: 

Radiolab recently did a fascinating episode on color (bringing in Victoria Finlay, whose book I wrote about, as a guest). As the Auerbach blurb notes, human eyes typically have three types of color receptors (although a few women may have four through a quirk of genetics). However, some animals have many more–and thus see many more wavelengths, and colors, than we can imagine. The technicolor mantis shrimp has 16 kinds of color receptors. Can you imagine what the world looks like to it? Or, for that matter, what an attempt at spatial representation of its color spectrum would look like?

For more about woman with four kinds of color receptors, the discovery of color, whether color existed in the same way to Homer and the ancient Greeks, and much more, I highly recommend the Radiolab episode.

Red, Orange, Yellow

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RED

A new red from the new world once took Europe by storm, as countries vied to find the secret to this mysetrious dye from the Spanish colonies. They did not guess for a long time that it came from cochineals, little white bugs on pirckly pear cacti. These charming little bugs still color nearly everything consumable and red: lipstick, Cherry Coke, etc. Yum.

ORANGE

Orange madder are long roots that burrow deep in the ground, so much so that in Holland there were laws forcing farms to pull up their madder every few years lest it burrow into the dyke. The mysterious ingredient that created the beautfiul orange varnish of Stradavarious violins has long excited speculation.

Not purple, but YELLOW

Fields of purple crocuses create saffron, an expensive golden yellow, first produced by drying the crimson red stamen of the perennial autumn crocus flower. Now most saffron grows in Iran, but once a small, punny town in England grew saffron in the Middle Ages: Saffron Walden. Their coat-of-arms features a crocus… walled in.

All these fun facts come from Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay. One more fun fact: Minium, which was the name for white lead heated turns until it turned “minium” red, was a popular color with Persian, Ottoman, and Indian artists in Medieval times. Their work then became known as “miniatures,” which only more recently referenced size.