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).
Facebook isn’t all that bad, but it isn’t all that good either.
What I hate the most about it is that it has really lowered my opinion on people I used to have respect for.
Some people will post just about anything. And I mean anything. “Should I have pizza or pasta tonight?”
Of course in real life, you don’t have to be in everyones living room or bedroom or kitchen to hear whatever thought crosses their mind. On facebook you do.
Please for the love of doG do not go on Facebook, Tom! N o t f o r c u r m u d g e o n s !
No, It’s just a bunch of crap. If I want to Make”friends” I go out in the world and make them. If I want to see them I go and see them.
Facebook is Internet rot.
I just left facebook. I’m too anti-social. You’ll hate it. Don’t do it. It’s a shitfest.
Facebook seems to be nothing more than a vehicle for me to embarrass/be embarrassed by tagging compromising photos from my youth. Because of that I have a strict policy of Not Being Social with any family members; it’s not something I need to explain at Christmas. I’m so thankful this wasn’t around when I was a teenager.
I’m also reading Albers’ “Interaction of Color”. Probably beaten to death much like Itten, but worth a look if you haven’t already. I’m sure Work will have it floating around.
Thanks for the mention of Alber. I’ll follow that up. I’m getting the distinct message that FaceBook hasn’t shot rainbows out of everyone’s unicorn. But I’m still interested in counter arguments – before I really slam the door shut.
BTW Gage rambles hopelessly across time and subject. In 40 pages he’s gone past women’s extra colour perception three times on a road to somewhere else.
Finally found a source for red/yellow/blue = Pliny the Elder – The Natural History. GOAL!
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D35%3Achapter%3D32
Facebook is a vehicle .How and what you use it for is up to you in a sense.I was luddite in my approach to it for some time but joined it to help promote my sound design business as well as to promote our music and performances.Yes there is a shitload of crap on it , hey its the internet, whats new.For the anti kamp get over it use it or loose it i say.Don’t over or under rate its uses as a vehicle .IMHO
Cheers
Facebook is pure evil. Smart people are leaving it. It can be useful for interacting with normals eg extended family, but that doesn’t outweigh its downsides wrt privacy and general mind numbing.
Twitter however I’m finding increasingly useful, especially as a news feed. It has almost replacaed RSS for me. But I don’t have many conversations there.
Strangers tend to find my uni email address first. There are also contact forms on my websites. Those provide more than enough avenues for (mostly unwanted) contact.
Sure, FacileBook is great for distant relatives to be able to contact you. But expect to have to filter their “What’s on my Desk” words and images to the point where you’ll block them, and then get complained at for being antisocial.
How many platforms do you want to manage? How many public personas are too many? How many ways do you need to be able to sell yourself or your product?
That said, there’s many curmudgeonly folk on fb. It’s just that even our posts are just as ego-seeking as anybody elses, while masquerading as cool indifference.