Color is imagined as a space. This work is one of my earliest, a browser art piece from 2001. It was originally accomplished using frames for the color cells. This version is rewritten for the contemporary browser (in 2024).
We see colors as distributed throughout a cube with black on one corner and white on the opposite corner. Red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow each have a corner. The rest of the colors-more than 16 million of them-are distributed as a gradient cloud in between. When color is a 3D space, where the red, green, and blue components are numeric values, coordinates in that space, mathematical operations govern the relations between colors. Matrix math transforms colors. The metaphor works.
colorSpace is a machine for navigating through the color cube; it is a machine inside the machine of the metaphor of a color space, which is, in turn, inside the machine of our imagination. What we see is the pixel-eye-view from a path through a color cube. We experience the rhythms of the colors and of the algorithms that produce them.
For colors, what is the meaning of distance and closeness, of randomness and systematicity, of same and opposite, of gradual and abrupt motion, of elliptical movement verses linear progression?
Space is currently a dominant and powerful metaphor. It allows us to comprehend and model the nebulous and hyper-contiguous Internet. Space is the intellectual apparatus that enables the consumption and ordering of information. Because there is cyberspace, we can imagine and create the vehicle that allows us to travel within it. We can create the mind that can fathom it ...