1. Art and design often explore relationships between humans and non-humans, the environment and ecology. How can contemporary art and design propose new possibilities for imagining the ‘human’ and the environment?
Assessment task one explored the ecology between the viewer and the artist or creator, reflecting on their interaction, communication and collaboration to produce a certain experience. I demonstrated this relationship through comparing the sense of touch and sight to understand or intellectualise the work, emphasising on the two, very different ecologies and how that may affect the way they interpret the artwork and the world around them. Extending from these ideas, I decided to focus on ‘colour’ as a basis to further explore the ecology of the human senses and the differing perceptions that we may have according to that particular sense.
The question that was asked for assessment task two was simply, ‘what is colour’? Colour is an intangible concept that is most commonly perceived through the sense of sight, but I wondered whether there were other ways we could ‘see’ colour. I aimed to subvert the traditional mode of using the sight senses to perceive colour and introduced or suggest other and different ways that we could experience colour. I wanted to ‘test’ colour through the other ‘realities’ or worlds, such as, through the digital technology. Ultimately, I aimed to unlock our other senses when perceiving colour to re-discover and re-define its very notion.
Neil Harbisson is a British contemporary cyborg artist. His rare medical condition, achromatopsia, which is total colour blindness has led him to design an antenna that transmits colours into vibrations which he perceives as sound. Harbisson is an example who has utilised a different and unconventional sense (hearing) to perceive colour.
“Colour is basically hue, saturation and light. Right now, I can see light in shades of grey, but can’t see its saturation or hue. The eyeborg detects the light’s hue and converts it into a sound frequency that I can hear as a note [wavelength is inversely proportional to frequency, so it can easily convert the wavelength of the light into a sound frequency]. It also translates the saturation of the colour into a volume. So if it's a vivid red I will hear it more loudly.”
During this research, I discovered the Munsell Colour Notation System and the Sonochromatic Music Scale. The Munsell System divides and categories colour into three attributes of hue, value and chroma whereas the Sonochromatic Scale allocates a specific to a musical note. I utilised these systems to quantify and ‘measiure’ colour so that I could work with a tangible representation and translate it into the various sense ecologies.
I started off by recording simple phrases, such as ‘hello’, using the app ‘HumOn’ which allows the user to translate vocal sounds into musical notes. I then matched each note according to the Sonochromatic scale to produce a colour chart that visually represented the notes. ‘Hello’ was a very simple phrase that did not produce many notes, resulting in simplistic colour charts, hence, I worked with more complex sounds in the subsequent experiments. I decided to focus on the horizontal sequence, bringing it into Adobe Illustrator and creating corresponding shapes to represent each primary colour to be matched with the Sonochromatic scale. Lastly, I brought the shapes into Fusion360 to be extruded to create a three-dimensional form.
My final series of work encompasses three forms that allow perception through sound, sight and touch. All represent a uniform concept, but by extruding it into the different sense ecology it has resulted in very different forms. Colour is an innate thing that most of us have experienced through sight since birth and which has naturally become the established sense for perceiving colour. This is a speculative work towards subverting this traditional, attempting to imagine a world where colour is perceived through means of another sense. Colour is universal but not uniform. This is another element that I was also exploring as each of us see colour slightly different from one another. Additionally, while trying to alter the representations of colour, I found myself unintentionally altering the other sense, demonstrating that ecology exists within our senses and have a symbiotic relationship with each other.
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