Part 1: Colour.

Having complained about the lack of colour sense in most synthetic video I’m doing the required reading. Colour is a rabbit hole, deep and treacherous. I know Johannes Itten, grew up with his Art of Colour in my parents house like the family bible.

He has blue, yellow and red sitting there looking as if they mean business. I don’t know how Itten could run this fallacy so long when ‘yellow’ and ‘blue’ don’t actually make ‘green’. Not using pigments and not in any printing process I’ve used, where yellow, cyan and black are required (and a spot colour more likely). I haven’t yet found where the idea started. I’m halfway through Gage’s Colour And Meaning and he’s not yet decided. He has however dug into an issue that concerns me by blaming Newton solidly for wrapping the rainbow into a circle simply because it recapitulated the octave. And there it is in Itten’s colour wheel, neatly broken into 12 ‘notes’. Newton is looking the cause of centuries of bullshit by that one conceit.

Gage is thankfully free of most philosophical musings although he does jump back and forwards in time to make a point. He turns out to be have been a visitor at my work, but died this year. (Worse still, there was a showing of Ralph Balson’s paintings at my work in the first year I was there and because I am a dumbfuck musician I didn’t know who it was about).

Working at an art college is damn fine for big glossy books about colour theory. But the best book so far turns out to be a very simple and practical one by Hilary Page. She takes you from diagrams of the retinal cells to mixing watercolours in an economy of pages and touches on everything you need to know about the psychology of colour and how to tweak it. This is the text I would force any video artist to read before they start wobbling their rectangles.

Actually it makes me think about interfaces that can get away from Red, Green and Blue faders. Something like Kuler should be the front panel.

Part 2: Reclusive.

A … funny? sobering event – distant family in the USA needed to contact us urgently. Apparently that was difficult and annoying because I’m visible but not easily contactable. By current norms I’m not ‘social’ enough. A recluse.

Vimeo and YouTube and GMail and Windows Live and Linked In (which ended up being the venue) 7 email addresses and a whole host of specialist sites isn’t enough. Being ‘social’ is as programmatic as the days of presenting your visiting card in the drawing room. In lieu of FaceBook I have invites showing up at Linked In that are obviously not about locating next year’s employment damnit.

Look, you spend 20 years with some kind of net address (OK so some of that was fidonet but it still counts) and then you’re not social enough. Screw it. DO I HAVE TO BE ON FACEBOOK?? ADVICE? (If you are one of my creepy stalkers don’t answer that thanks).