Nice style of the videos. Also the content, of course, but it's nice seeing them so chalkboard-like.
Why we're blind to the color blue
121–130 of 218 posts
Re: Why we're blind to the color blue
#122Interestingly, many ancient text sources do not speak of blue color at all, using other expressions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)
(Non-rhetorical question). I don't understand why the article writes off κυάνεος / κύανος as "later stages of Greek", when it's already present in Herodotus [0]. Just how a big of a sample size do they have between Homer and Herodotus, that they can interpret the evolution of such a minor, infrequent word? Isn't Homer basically "before written literature" Greek anyway?
edit: Also, wasn't Homer supposed to be a blind dude?
[0] https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecbatana#Historical_descriptio...
>"The battlements of the first circle are white, of the second black, of the third circle purple, of the fourth blue [κυάνεοι], and of the fifth orange:"
Re: Why we're blind to the color blue
#123One of my favourite series in art is Yves Klein's blue work. For anyone unfamiliar, he found a blue that he considered the bluest possible blue [1], and went on a journey painting everything in that blue. I loved that he did this, and then eventually managed to get to an exhibition of his work at the Tate Modern and was absolutely blown away by it - it really needs to be seen in the flesh to appreciate it. There's so…
Great anecdote! Reminded me of the short story Zima Blue by Alastair Reynolds (which was adapted into an animation short on Netlifx's "Love, Death and Robots").
I found that episode very moving. It captured the feeling I suspect many of us experience, of having started out with simple, blissful naivety, before slowly accreting layers of grown up, professional bullshit until a craft loses its joy. The desire to strip it all away, not just the ways in which your work has changed over the years but also the ways in which it has changed you.
I had no idea Alastair Reynolds was behind the story, I’ve enjoyed his work quite separately.
Re: Why we're blind to the color blue
#124One of my favourite series in art is Yves Klein's blue work. For anyone unfamiliar, he found a blue that he considered the bluest possible blue [1], and went on a journey painting everything in that blue. I loved that he did this, and then eventually managed to get to an exhibition of his work at the Tate Modern and was absolutely blown away by it - it really needs to be seen in the flesh to appreciate it. There's so…
As someone who hasn't seen it in the flesh yet, and doesn't "get" modern art unless someone explicitly spells it out for me, could you elaborate more on why it's so spectacular? For example, Blue Monochrome [1] seems to my uneducated eye to be just a layer of pure blue that every wall painter recreates every time they paint a wall blue. Why is the Blue Monochrome piece more than just a wall painted blue? [1] https://…
There's some great answers to your question below, but I'll add mine anyway. Because of the way our eyes see blue (as highlighted in the OP), and especially Yves Klein blue, it has some slightly magical properties in art. The flat blue canvases are absolutely uninspiring at first glance, but stand in front of it for 30 seconds and it starts to recede - it becomes hard to tell how far away the canvas actually is. You're unable to make out texture on the surface because the brain is struggling to actually work it out. It's most striking on the sculptures though, they almost entirely lose their depth and become a flat thing that changes shape as you moved around it. Imagine a 3d rendering of a gallery scene where there's one model that is untextured and unlit - it's like a brilliant blue silhouette.
I took my then 5 year old daughter to the Tate for the exhibition and it had the same effect on her, while almost everything else on show had no effect at all. The only other thing she loved was Bridget Riley, and I think Yves Klein's blue work is somewhere in the same realm - the art is in defining something that makes the viewer's brain do some of the work, that is going to be experienced slightly differently by everyone who sees it.
Re: Why we're blind to the color blue
#125One of my favourite series in art is Yves Klein's blue work. For anyone unfamiliar, he found a blue that he considered the bluest possible blue [1], and went on a journey painting everything in that blue. I loved that he did this, and then eventually managed to get to an exhibition of his work at the Tate Modern and was absolutely blown away by it - it really needs to be seen in the flesh to appreciate it. There's so…
Yes!! The lack of green-blue distinction is prevalent enough in linguistics that the term "grue" has entered the lexicon. Paul and Kay (1969) argue for a linguistic universal which posits that the set of which colors a language has is a function of how many colors it has. (Stealing from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... ): 1. All languages contain terms for black and white. 2. If a langu…
Fantastic post, thank you!
Re: Why we're blind to the color blue
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who hasn't seen it in the flesh yet, and doesn't "get" modern art unless someone explicitly spells it out for me, could you elaborate more on why it's so spectacular? For example, Blue Monochrome [1] seems to my uneducated eye to be just a layer of pure blue that every wall painter recreates every time they paint a wall blue. Why is the Blue Monochrome piece more than just a wall painted blue? [1] https://…
Consider the time period and the historical context. It's modern times, Cold War is occurring, and WW1 and WW2 left scars across Western Europe and caused major changes in the art world, including being a boon to abstraction and fragmenting styles into many eclectic directions. Chemistry has DRASTICALLY altered painting from the Renaissance to the World War era. New pigments have been constantly highlighted and displ…
There’s a really great short story by Alistair Reynolds about an artist that’s obsessed with a certain Zima blue (name of the story) which is essentially an extended meditation on the above, I think you might like it. :)
Re: Why we're blind to the color blue
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got dry eyes some time ago. Dryness gone but now I see starburst at night in headlights, neon signs and stars. Being unable to see stars as flickering dots anymore hurts me the most. Neon signs in particular if blue are totally whacky and unreadable until I go too close. I went to optometrist recently and they didn't understand why blue in particular and recommended a color blindness test which I obviously passed.…
Wait, stars are flickering dots for most people?
From atmospheric distortion they can appear to flicker, or “twinkle” as the song goes.
Re: Why we're blind to the color blue
#128I don't believe the blurred images at the end have anything to do with eye focus, as the author suggests. After all, chromatic aberration is blurring of only a very, very small amount. The demonstrated seemingly negligible perceptual effect of blurring blue to a huge degree in a multicolor image doesn't seem to have anything to do with that, but rather the fact that we perceive primary blue as a much darker color tha…
I agree. Further, almost all of the blue channel in this image is from the white clouds or nearly black water. There's no other major source of blue.
What would be the result if you flipped the colors, so that the sharp elements are blue and the ocean is red or green?
Re: Why we're blind to the color blue
#129It's no big surprise given that the fovea, which is responsible for detailed vision, contains no blue cones.
[0] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.ht...
Re: Why we're blind to the color blue
#130I don't believe the blurred images at the end have anything to do with eye focus, as the author suggests. After all, chromatic aberration is blurring of only a very, very small amount. The demonstrated seemingly negligible perceptual effect of blurring blue to a huge degree in a multicolor image doesn't seem to have anything to do with that, but rather the fact that we perceive primary blue as a much darker color tha…
It also matters a bit that the blue channel is only 2% of all color-sensitive cones in the retina. That has a lot more to do with poor spatial resolution int the blue channel than the optics.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.ht...