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| Part of .doc series (2013) |
After last weeks exploration of color with icon Dale Chihuly, this week we want to introduce you to an up and coming individual using color to explore the language of visual media online: Jack Laurilla. Laurilla is an artist on Tumblr working with images found online. He remakes them into pure color portraits or creates woven blanket or rug like color-scapes with incongruous software like Microsoft Word.
Word, a common place software, is meant for word processing. If you use a computer in everyday life, you likely know how to use Word or a similar program to whip out a document full of words. We use processing programs for everything from invoices and business contracts to novels and daily diaries.
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| Part of .doc series (2013) |
Laurilla on the other hand uses that same program to construct documents of color. Using a simple combination of text and highlight color in Word he paints intricate repeating patterns that ask the reader/viewer to see both the whole field of color, the story with all its characters and plot lines, as well as the minute pieces, individual letters and punctuation marks. The images challenge our linguistic separation between document, the visual storage of words, and image, the visual storage of shape and color. Why not read color left to right line by line the way we might read a book or email?
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| Part of .doc series (2013) |
As he states on his site, in his work "representation and realism is abandoned in favour of the newly created vocabulary of colour." But what does "vocabulary of colour" mean? Lets look at this red and blue piece from Laurilla's .doc series. One way to think about a new color vocabulary would be to look at this document as though asked what if "vocal" and "eight" (just as two examples of five letter words with no repeating characters) were spelled with five shades of red and five shades of blue instead of letters at all. If we read in color this page could read:
vocaleightvocaleightvocaleightvocaleightvocaleight
eightvocaleightvocaleightvocaleightvocaleightvocal
vocaleightvocaleightvocaleightvocaleightvocaleight
eightvocaleightvocaleightvocaleightvocaleightvocal
How differently we would see our world if our languages were made up of colors instead of characters!
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