The code is not coloured: blackboxing colour, light, graphic arts and modernity

Do we need a philosophy of colour technology? Automation of reproduction technology will relegate graphic design to the ranking of visual art, a fate that crafts such as weaving, ceramics and glass have suffered. The twentieth century saw the demise of specialist fields such as drafting, woodcut, engraving, etching, letterpress, gravure, lithography, photography and web. Software will democratise graphic design processes, allowing everyone to be a graphic artist. The automation and democratisation of colour reproduction have come to fruition as digital workflow changes the graphic designer’s role. This change makes apparent the history and effect of colour reproduction; it is an unexplored discipline, the printed word thus far dominating graphic art theory and history. Real world practice involves antagonisms between art directors, graphic designers, prepress men, printers and clients. If your average human is to be a graphic artist, our accumulated colour cognisance requires sharing. Technological change indicates that colour reproduction had traditions, methodologies and expertise not widely known. It is the aim of this paper to lay bare this colour history. Colour and light in science, philosophy, optics, printing, visual arts, photography and graphics have culturally fixed and reductive histories, requiring recovery, examination and collation. When a technology becomes successful, it becomes invisible; its processes are blackboxed and visible to specialists alone; only inputs and outputs are generally apparent. A colour technology history requires these blackboxed processes to be unpacked. Primary sources in this history such as research papers, biographies, and trade journal accounts of methods are classified as events, instead of historical dates and fact markers, to demonstrate an unbroken continuum of human thought and invention that is traceable to thought’s earliest recording. Corporatised promotional guides and handbooks supplement the history, despite their bias for appearing scientific and successful, with knowledge presented as a body of unquestionable facts. Art histories mark the end of the pursuit of verisimilitude as coinciding with the invention of photography; however, graphic art imaging continued the inheritance of this pursuit. Automated exactly repeatable colour verisimilitude was its nirvana, achievable through mathematicophysical descriptions of colour science and measurement. This thesis explores the creation of this code by theories and practices of scientists, philosophers, graphic artists and twentieth-century corporations and international authorities. Subsumed into our machines it has led to our technorealist faith in technology and to the demise of scepticism regarding colour realism.

Grantor dc:publisher

UNSW, Sydney

Year dc:date

2012

Author dc:creator

• Martin, John Henry

• Printing
• Design
• Colour
• Photography
• Technology
• Colorimetry
• Trichromatic theory
• Colour management
• Technoscience
• Science
• Light
• Optics

Statement dc:rights

• open access
• CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
• free_to_read

Licence

• https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/

Language dc:language

EN

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/15914

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:unsworks.library.unsw.edu.au:1959.4/52364