The Coloured Door of Time

We saw this exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney:

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson

It explores colour in numerous ways, including painting, sculpture, and installations, including whole rooms taken up by deceptively simple displays of light, which encourage you to interact and experiment. Plus a room full of white Lego to muck about with! I ended up with a childlike, gleeful grin. I do recommend it. :D

From the brochure: "Individual works find inspiration in the distinctive landscape of [Iceland]; theories of colour and perception; and the recent history of art and its shift from physical object to idea or sensation. Drawing careful attention to the ways in which we perceive the world about us, they invite us to become active agents in the creation of meaning, rather than passive observers."

I read this book last year and posted a bunch of stuff from it over in my main lj. I've been meaning to get back to some of the things it says about colour vision and synaesthesia.

Primates have "thirty areas in the back of our brains" involved in vision. The area called V4 is the one involved in colour vision. Ramachandran describes the effect of damage to V4: if it happens on both sides of the brain, the patient suffers from cortical achromatopsia, or cortical colour blindness; their eyes work fine, but their brains can't see colour.

In his chapter on art, Ramachandran talks about exaggerated figures in art, such as ultra-feminine Hindu statues, or Western political caricatures, in terms of "peak shift": the brain picks out the details that make a woman's body different from a man's, or Richard Nixon's face different from other men's; the more the artist exaggerates those details - big bust, big hips, or big nose - the more the brain notices them. "It looks comical, but it still looks even more like Nixon than the original Nixon." He goes on to apply this "peak shift" idea to colour in modern art by Van Gogh and Monet: "Hence the effectiveness of artificially heightened 'non-realistic' colors of their sunflowers or water lilies." So, because of the way the brain recognises things it sees, those flowers look more like flowers than actual flowers do. Blimey. I can't help being reminded of the Aztec idea that this world is just a "painted book", a poor imitation of the much more intense, but hidden, world of the spirit, in which flowers really would look more like flowers than actual flowers do.

More in a bit.

Colours for sale

More colours for sale

Fictional colours

The first vertebrates were tetrachromats and could see ultraviolet; many still can. Mammals, active at night, lost two of the four receptors - but later, primates evolved a new red receptor, giving us our three-colour vision.

The lens of the human eye blocks UV, but cataract patients who have had their lenses removed can see ultraviolet. Unlike animals which actively use UV (to identify mates, etc), humans don't have a dedicated UV receptor; but our blue receptors are also sensitive to violet and ultraviolet light.

Tetrachromacy: Some women may see 100 million colors, thanks to their genes

Language: Do Infants See Colors Differently?

Good heavens!: Researchers engineer mice to see the world as humans do

Beautiful: Sea Slug Gallery

Pop art: Ishihara Test for Color Blindness