Colorimètre

An interactive installation designed to transform the Manuvie atrium with colour bars sampled live from the building and its surroundings.

The feature wall is clad with 561 colour bars, arranged in a vertical grid orientation that presents a constantly-changing gamut of colours. These colour bars evoke the digital palettes found in design software, the calibration patterns used in audiovisual equipment and the pantone colour swatches used in printing. The bars are custom-made digital light boxes, each measuring 1ft x 2ft, containing 54 high-power LED lights for a total 30, 294 controllable lights. The piece uses the colour strips to render very low resolution images with high colour saturation and millions of colours.

A tiny robotic camera with a computerized colour tracking system slowly scans and zooms around the atrium, stopping whenever it finds saturated colours. The live camera view is converted into colour bars, exactly like in Lozano-Hemmer’s piece “Company of Colours” (2009), and fed to the feature wall’s colour bars. The feature wall becomes not so much a mirror of the atrium but rather a highlighter of specific colours, for example, if someone has a red scarf the camera will zoom in and extract the colours from it to be rendered. Because of the low resolution specification of the “display” there are no issues of privacy as anonymity is preserved by the lack of video detail.

When there is no one in the atrium that has any saturated colours, the camera starts looking for them outside the building, through the windows of the atrium. Finally, if the camera is unable to find striking colours it will scan a large mobile, optionally hung in the atrium, made out of transparent resin colour bands that are lit by sunlight in the day and uplights in the night.

Colorimeter is a piece inspired by the long tradition of colour bars in modern and contemporary art. Modern masters like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, the work of the Latin-American geometric abstraction movements like Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Rafael Soto, Canadia masters like Claude Tousignant, Guido Molinari, Jack Bush, Michael Morris or Vincent Irasov, all are examples of the great expression possible within minimalism, geometric abstraction, op and pop, conceptual and Color Field movements. Within the field of media art important precedents include “Experiments in Touching Colour” (1998) by Jim Campbell, “Track Them Colors” Xtra by Daniel Rozin, and all the colour “theatres” by Olafur Eliasson. Within Lozano-Hemmer’s own practice, the usage of interactive colour sampling was already the basis for his 2004 project “Sitestepper,” where virtual environments would inherit the colours of websites. Colorimeter is perhaps best understood as a mixture between the ominous biometric surveillance of “Zoom Pavilion” (2015) with the playful colour bar generator “Company of Colours” (2009).