Color Yourself Inspired™ (2016)
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The pervasiveness of corporate language that frames our world view is questioned in the multimodal poem Color Yourself Inspired™ a collaborative project developed with James Proctor. The piece is a generative artwork that analyzes and combines Benjamin Moore’s paint color name database to create unpredictable poetic phrases. Instead of labeling visual perception with names to evoke desire, pleasure, or memory as selling point as the company does, I subvert the process to construct a multimodal poem to playfully spotlight the inescapable nature of commercial interests in our lives.
The program uses the entire database of names through a program we developed to analyze parts of speech and phonetic content of the language, they are then recombined using a set of generative rules, employing linguistic principles to create infinite combinations of sound, graphics and text. By twisting disciplinary barriers between language, images and sound, I aim to make strange the taken for granted language that subtly frames our ways of seeing.
“While it may be easy to get lost in the pleasant, occasionally discordant colors and sounds, the cheeky trademark symbol in the piece’s title reminds the viewer that each cute color name was produced by a slew of marketing experts at a large company. Though the random color/ sound/name combinations seem whimsical and organic, they still retain a level of artificiality and marketability. Not even colors are safe from capitalism.”
Sarah Boudreau and Annie Raab, Editor’s Note for The New River spring 2020
The custom designed computer program maps the hue, saturation and brightness of the selected colors to specific areas on the 2-D screen. The hue is mapped to the horizontal axis like a color wheel unspooled across the screen, the reds are on the left blues and greens in the central part of the screen and rose colors towards the right. The color’s saturation is mapped to the vertical axis with more saturated colors positioned lower on the screen and the lightness of the color controls the size of the radius of the circle, the brighter the color the wider the radius.
The musical notes map a twelve-tone chromatic scale to the hues of a 360o color wheel. The brightness of the color shifts the pitch over 5 octaves, while the saturation controls the duration of the note. By focusing on the language we use to describe visual sensation, Color Yourself Inspired™ (a marketing slogan from the Benjamin Moore website) explores the interplay between perception, psychology, economics, culture, chance and language.
Installation view during artist talk of Color Yourself Inspired™ at Galerie Anhava, Helsinki, Finland 2017.