Color Knowledge

Words, experiences, and learned attention

John Casey’s essay “Color,” written in response to Roland Greene’s Five Words, begins with a difficulty inside the apparent familiarity of language. If blood is described as red, what kind of fact has been stated? Casey follows the question through early-modern accounts of substance and perception, then through rhetorical uses in which color can disclose feeling or disguise it. A code assigning meanings to particular hues does not settle the matter: color also organizes trade, status, desire and embodied judgment. His eventual challenge is methodological. A history of usages has to reach beyond written language into practices and experiences that language does not exhaust.⁵

This is a useful provocation for reading lives. It prevents a division in which scientists handle what color really is, while artists and humanists subsequently attach meanings to it. It also prevents the reverse division, in which every physical distinction is dissolved into a cultural interpretation. A name can direct attention toward something that remains to be learned. The significance of calling a palette “natural,” “neutral,” or “Morandi” lies partly in what the speaker is asking another person to recognize or do.

In Yeh’s 2021 dialogue, for example, his discussion of a muted palette for cinnamon-roll packaging draws on impressions of people he encountered in a tea class.⁶ This is a designer’s situated judgment about address: what kind of person might feel invited by this object? The trained discrimination of tones does not supply the answer on its own. It enters a judgment involving imagined users, forms of sociability and a commercial setting.

Another profiled designer, Fang Hsu-Chung, recalls a university color teacher who sent students to observe people in Ximending and asked them to discuss their clothes. His later practice retained that attention to street life. For a whisky event, he approached “black” through memories of a small light in a dark room, developing a passage through contrasting scales and degrees of darkness rather than simply applying a black surface.⁷ A color word became a question about time, movement, apprehension and expectation.

The educational difference matters. If color knowledge were only a stock of associations, the teacher could supply a list: this hue means this mood, that combination addresses that audience. Such observation can expose the learner to the instability of such assignments. Clothes belong to people doing things in particular surroundings. A darkened passage unfolds as someone enters it. Knowledge has to become attentive enough to notice when an inherited association is useful and when it obstructs the work.

Yet a vocabulary that remains wholly personal would be a poor basis for printing, display engineering or laboratory analysis. Other people need to reproduce, inspect and sometimes challenge the result. The next question is therefore not how to replace experience with numbers, but what a carefully constructed numerical account makes possible that an evocative description cannot.

Matches, coordinates, and executable instructions

A beam of light and a seen patch are not interchangeable objects of inquiry. The radiation reaching an eye has a spectral distribution; its appearance belongs to a viewing situation. CIE terminology preserves this distinction between the stimulus and perceived color, whose conditions include its surroundings and the observer’s adaptation.^{8, 9} This is already more demanding than the everyday question “What wavelength is that color?” Many ordinary stimuli contain radiation across a range of wavelengths.

One of colorimetry’s powers is that it need not reconstruct that entire distribution to make certain comparisons useful. Under specified matching conditions, physically different spectra can be equivalent for the task. In their chapter “Perspectives on colour space,” Jan Koenderink and Andrea van Doorn develop color matching through such equivalences and ask what remains unchanged when coordinates or primaries change.¹⁰ The abstraction is productive. It makes it possible to work on relations among matches without treating every physically different beam as an entirely unrelated object.

Something has been set aside, but something has also been gained. The familiar criticism that measurement loses the richness of experience is too quick here. A disciplined reduction can reveal a structure unavailable to unaided inspection and make a result transportable across instruments, calculations and collaborators. Its usefulness depends on knowing which task the equivalence serves. Two stimuli that match under one specified arrangement need not behave alike under another.¹¹ The CIE standard observer is a definition through color-matching functions, not an assertion that every actual person is perceptually identical.¹²

RGB brings a related lesson into everyday making. Three numbers are not a freestanding color instruction. Their meaning depends on the defined space and its conventions. The same numerical triple interpreted in sRGB and Display P3 need not specify the same color; an unchanged color can require different coordinates in different spaces. Stored values also involve transfer functions, so arithmetic on encoded values is not automatically arithmetic on emitted light. The W3C’s current draft color specification distinguishes coordinate conversion from gamut mapping, which becomes necessary when a destination cannot reproduce the requested color.¹³

Knowing these conventions changes the object someone is working on. A designer who sees an unexpected result can ask whether the intended relation was converted, clipped, remapped or interpreted under different assumptions. The problem becomes investigable. That does not abolish visual judgment; it gives judgment more precise questions and more possible interventions.

Ben Eater’s educational work makes a different part of this infrastructure available. His VGA project approaches the visible image through a buildable circuit and the timing of a video signal.¹⁴ The familiar screen becomes evidence of an arrangement that can be inspected. Its opening is specific: someone who formerly encountered a pixel only as an output can begin to understand an operation that produces it. The intellectual pleasure is partly the reversal of scale. A small visible result makes an otherwise elusive electronic process graspable.

The same reversal can occur in scientific work, with different responsibilities. Paul Tadrous’s image-analysis practice begins from laboratory images already prepared to make tissue distinguishable to human observers. His 2010 stain-separation paper proposes a method for extracting components from ordinary digital images without specialized hardware or pre-established pure-stain colors; the accessible abstract states the aim and method at that level.¹⁵ His own BiaQIm documentation offers a more inspectable account of working with color. It provides RGB and HSV views, separate channel thresholds and a worked example selecting a stained reaction product. Controls make it possible to adjust the distinction and inspect its consequences.¹⁶

The passage from seeing to computation raises a further question: which features of a prepared image can become the basis of an operation. That question belongs to someone who understands both what laboratory preparation has done and what an algorithm can distinguish. Tadrous’s separate argument about objectivity warns that repeatable execution does not eliminate human choices in preparation, selection or design.¹⁷ Some choices become explicit enough to examine and dispute.

Alongside Eater’s work, this suggests how color can become an entrance into a different object of knowledge. In one case, a pixel opens onto a circuit. In the other, a stained field opens onto a set of computationally adjustable distinctions. The opportunity comes from learning to treat an appearance as something one can work through, while retaining a sense of what the procedure does and does not establish.

What a standard can become

Adrian Piper’s Color Wheel Series gives a standardized palette an unexpected purpose. Her 2004 statement assigns Pantone colors to three “Acting Heads,” joining variations in skin color with a Vedantic inquiry into the projection of caste, color and status onto the self. The palette generates a serial procedure across different media. Its precision supplies no warrant for the social classifications being examined.¹⁸

Piper credits successive instruction in offset printing, photographic methods and digital production from 1991 onward. A sustained philosophical project acquired new means through training and collaborators. Her statement places color among secondary qualities located in the perceiver, a position distinct from Chirimuuta’s perceiver–environment account discussed below. The work’s practical development does not require those accounts to agree.¹⁹

The example changes the significance of the preceding technical discussion. A reliable description can be used to investigate assumptions rather than merely reproduce an intended result. Yeh’s comparison samples, Eater’s circuitry and Tadrous’s adjustable views likewise give formal knowledge different tasks. What travels among such practices is a capacity to perform certain operations, accompanied by decisions about why they matter. A successful operation leaves those decisions open to argument.

This helps explain why acquiring a technique can alter a vocation without supplying a new identity overnight. A person may possess a question long before having the means to pursue a particular form of it. Training changes the reach of the question; it can also reveal a difficulty that the original formulation concealed. The relevant development lies in that interaction, rather than in a list of newly acquired media.

Perception as something to investigate

The prism seems an obvious place to restore an original: surely here is color before cultural use, separated from daylight and available to anyone who looks. Sugimoto’s Opticks complicates that intuition. His artist statement describes winter sunlight passing through a prism, projected onto a plaster wall and recorded with a Polaroid camera. The resulting work emerges from a chosen arrangement of season, light, surface and recording medium.²⁰ It is not an untouched spectrum transported into a gallery.

An earlier architectural experiment, described in Colors of Shadow, involved differently angled walls, plaster, daylight and changing weather. Sugimoto also recounts making or adjusting photographic equipment.²¹ Here an apparently modest subject, the variation of a wall, becomes substantial because the conditions for attending to it have been constructed. There is something to return to, watch, record and compare. Technical work helps constitute the occasion for discovery.

The relation to Yeh is now more precise. Sugimoto’s work could suggest a possible practice because it demonstrated that photography need not be confined to recording an already recognizable subject. It could investigate the conditions under which an image appears. Yeh’s later account of Lightning Fields describes its effect on his understanding of photography, while his darkroom experience remained relevant to digital retouching.²² The influence concerns what someone came to believe a medium could be used to attempt.

That possibility did not become an uninterrupted photographic career. Looking back in the same interview, Yeh describes Taiwan’s photography world around 2012 as more receptive to documentary work than to his experiments. He chose to establish himself professionally as a graphic designer. Teaching subsequently exposed a shortage of Chinese-language typography books, prompting translation and publishing work.²³ Photographic competence continued inside the design practice, including the 2018 prints. The opening survived, but in a changed professional form.

An acquired way of seeing can outlast the professional path first imagined for it. Its transfer changes the task and audience, preserving a commitment through a different working life.

How should such an encounter enter an account of knowledge? It is tempting to reserve that word for what can be stated independently of the experience, then call everything else inspiration. But the construction of a repeatable situation, the detection of a difference and the ability to alter a result are already forms of learned competence. Their relation to a scientific description remains a serious question, not a reason to dismiss them.

Chirimuuta’s Outside Color makes one ambitious proposal. In her published précis, she develops color adverbialism as an account of perceptual activity involving the perceiver and environment. Color is not simply an inner picture laid over a finished external world. Her project asks what ontology can accommodate the findings and functions of perceptual science.²⁴ In her own shorter explanation, she emphasizes that the relevant activity includes what is perceived, distinguishing the proposal from a purely internal event in a subject.²⁵

This helps articulate why a maker’s conditions matter. A wall, a source of light, a body, a recording process and a task do not have to be treated as unfortunate complications introduced after “the color” has already been fully specified. They can be part of the phenomenon under investigation. For a practitioner, changing a condition may open a new way of attending rather than merely introduce noise into an otherwise stable observation.

But it would be a mistake to make the artworks prove the philosophy. Jonathan Cohen’s review argues, among other things, that the integration of color with other perceptual processes does not by itself defeat realism, and that usefulness for action can coexist with correspondence to the world.²⁶ A successful practice does not automatically decide among ontologies. An instrument may be informative because it stabilizes a relation, even if that relation is not an exhaustive account of an experience.

Koenderink is equally ill suited to the role of a scientist who has never noticed context. In the 2021 paper “RGB Colors and Ecological Optics,” he, van Doorn and Karl Gegenfurtner distinguish physical, colorimetric and phenomenological uses of color, then investigate their relations under a specified ecological model. Their account includes constraints on illumination and surface reflectance; its proposed reflectance representation is not simply the sRGB numbers in an image file.²⁷ The scientific work itself contains arguments about what a useful object of inquiry should include.

These disagreements are worth preserving because they change what a learner can ask. Is the object to be explained a beam, a match, an appearance, an action, or a stable feature of an environment? What does a successful explanation of one allow us to infer about another? The questions are neither a contest in which art defeats science nor a polite assurance that everyone has a different perspective. They concern the scope of claims and the possibilities of practice. Learning to recognize the scope can make a person more adventurous: an unexplained effect becomes a question to pursue, rather than an embarrassment to conceal or a mystery to romanticize.

Reading, teaching, and making differences available

An individual can learn to see something that others do not yet notice. That does not settle how the distinction becomes available to them. The problem is especially clear when color helps organize a reading rather than simply supplies the appearance of an object.

Johanna Drucker’s History of the/my Wor(l)d juxtaposes large black historical text with smaller red personal memory, captions and images. Her project statement connects the arrangement to feminist historical inquiry and to the intimate experience of learning language through her mother.²⁸

Scale, placement and chromatic distinction let different accounts occupy a page together. A continuous verbal summary would change that reading relation. So might a reproduction that lost the necessary distinction. Meaning does not supersede material precision: it helps determine which differences the reproduction must sustain.

This is a point at which Casey’s provocation returns with greater force. Color’s meanings cannot be supplied by a list of words and their associations, because the meaningful relation may be made in the arrangement of a page. Nor can the numerical account alone tell us why that relation matters. Someone has used material differences to create an intellectual operation for someone else. The knowledge lies partly in being able to make that operation available.

Chirimuuta’s replies to critics acknowledge a related limit in her initial account. An individual organism’s perceptual success does not yet explain human communication and reason-giving. Her discussion considers the relation between experienced colors and colors in ordinary language without simply declaring one more real than the other.²⁹ The admission is productive here. It leaves room for practices in which people learn not just to discriminate but to explain, compare and dispute what they have perceived.

Education has to arrange those encounters. Shannon Mattern’s 2002 Textual Form syllabus makes the responsibility unusually concrete. She placed Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways on physical reserve because electronic reproduction might fail to convey its color adequately, and Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information on reserve because its price might impede access. The course joined reading with encounters with printing and with students’ observation of text in their surroundings; Drucker’s work was among the assigned material.^{30, 31}

One reserve decision concerns access to a relevant perceptual and material difference; the other concerns the cost of sustained study. Both affect which inquiries are practically open to a student. A teacher can explain that color matters and still fail to make the relevant object available. Conversely, the provision of an object is not a guarantee of learning. It creates a condition in which the claim can be tested rather than merely accepted.

Return, then, to the paper-sample book. Its comparisons make a supplier’s materials inspectable through a common arrangement.³² The designer’s acquired competence becomes an object another designer can use. That is a vocational development different from winning recognition for a distinctive palette. It involves shaping the field in which other people’s decisions become possible.

It also suggests why a chromatic education cannot consist only of correct answers. An official Japanese color-examination erratum offers a tiny but telling example: a textbook’s use of “pink” required clarification because its descriptive use did not coincide with the relevant JIS naming region.³³ Knowing how the term operates includes knowing which practice is currently using it.

A learner who can move among those domains gains more than terminological caution. They can ask whether a disagreement concerns the sample, the viewing condition, the code, the category or the purpose. That ability changes how a collaboration proceeds. It may turn an apparently personal disagreement in taste into an experiment, or reveal that an experiment cannot answer the question being asked.

The scope of an opening

Other forms of participation begin with a much narrower task. In LuxuryLogico’s 2022 Fly! no matter what project in Echigo-Tsumari, an animation was printed as black-and-white frames for coloring, then scanned and assembled for public screening. The official record describes 4,000 drawings. Lin Kun-Ying participated as part of the collective; the count is of drawings, not a count of independently verified participants.³⁴

This is a deliberately organized form of participation. The makers supply frames and an eventual temporal arrangement. Within that structure, chromatic decisions enter a shared work. Paper and computation support different moments of the process. A particular contribution has been made possible and given a way to appear with others.

The example helps distinguish several senses of “opening.” Eater’s circuit opens an operation to inspection. Tadrous’s controls open a visible distinction to adjustment. Drucker’s page opens a relation among accounts to reading. A workshop opens a bounded part of a work to contribution. These are not interchangeable benefits. Each allows someone to take part in a different activity, and each depends on decisions about what remains fixed.

Those decisions also affect who can participate. A design that communicates only through color may fail a viewer who cannot distinguish the relevant colors. For web content, the W3C’s accessibility guidance requires another visual means of carrying information when color alone would do the work.³⁵ This asks the maker to distinguish a desired perceptual richness from an unnecessary condition of admission. The question is particularly sharp for an educational image: is the color helping someone understand, or has the ability to perceive that difference become an unexplained prerequisite?

There are material limits as well. A sample requires printing and distribution; an experimental image requires equipment and time; a teacher’s provision requires institutional resources. Piper’s acknowledgments and Mattern’s syllabus make those conditions visible without reducing the work to them. A newly conceivable practice does not become equally available to everyone who can imagine it. The duration and social organization of learning remain part of the account.

A consequential outcome of color knowledge is a changed relation to what one is capable of attempting. Yeh’s encounter with photographic experimentation led into study, then into design objects through which others could investigate material choices. Piper’s sustained philosophical inquiry acquired new forms through printing and digital skills. Tadrous’s movement between laboratory images and computation made a different kind of operation available within his scientific work. Their paths do not share a single destination, and none needs to stand for the whole subject.

What they make visible together is a recurrent expansion of the possible through very specific kinds of learning. An appearance becomes an experiment; a standard becomes a compositional resource; a printed distinction becomes a way of thinking; a working method becomes something another person can enter. The expansion is neither purely inside the person nor entirely supplied by the tool. It happens through the development of a practice, with its desires, materials, arguments and other participants.

Color’s ambivalences matter because they keep that development from reaching a single final form. The word can be familiar while the phenomenon remains difficult; a measure can be exact while its application remains open; an inherited association can be useful and still become an object of criticism. The rivalry among these accounts can itself become a vocational resource. A practitioner can draw on the stability of a match, the specificity of an appearance, or the force of a social meaning without pretending that any one exhausts the others. What develops over a life is partly the capacity to recognize when to hold a distinction steady and when another question requires reopening it. That is why learning color can change the direction of a practice, as well as the results it produces.