colors, not dance

Filed under:Uncategorized — posted by Amanda Abrams on December 6, 2007 @ 2:40 pm

 

today i was looking out the window and saw a lime green taxi go by.
and i thought how great it would be if everything in the world was brightly colored like that.

then i wondered if all the colors of the world have been discovered, or if one day people will find one, or some, that’s never been seen before.
it sounds crazy, but think about it…
there are a lot of colors to combine. take the regular ROYGBIV spectrum. if you mix red with yellow, or with green, or with blue, you get different colors. or you can mix red with yellow-green, or blue-green, and those would produce other colors. what if you mixed red-orange-green then with blue-purple? another color.
it’s actually infinite, all the colors you can combine with each other to create new colors.

so i was figuring that there really is a good chance that we haven’t seen all the colors of the world yet.

but my colleague at work put it in much more concrete terms.
he said that the first tvs, in the 1930’s or so, showed 256 colors, all stemming from 3 basic colors.
but today, high definition tvs have 16 million colors.
that’s only in the past 3 years or so.
16 million!
that’s not infinity, but for all practical purposes, it’s close.



image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace