ChromaTweet is an ongoing nano-blogging project where each post consists of a single color tone. The daily moods, feelings, and experiences are compressed into one piece of information: color.
Rules:
One chromatweet per day, every day.
No white (FFFFFF) or black (000000).
The title of every post is the hexadecimal code of the color.
The first ChromaTweet post: 1 April 2009
23 September 2011
ChromaTweet Outdoor Print in Dumbo
Two years worth of ChromaTweets (1 April 2009 - 31 March 2011) have received a 100 meter printed outdoor treatment in Dumbo, Brooklyn, as a part of the Dumbo Arts Festival 2011.
Location of the artwork:
Water street, between Old Dock St and Main St.
Presented by ArtBridge
www.art-bridge.org
www.dumboartsfestival.com
READ MORE >
Emotional Footprint
How it started
There are three main impulses that inspired me to start the ChromaTweet project.
In the age of atomized online communication I was wondering whether we could go beyond the 140 characters in Twitter. Can we say something with even less? Spoken/written language has limits in respect to how much we can communicate with few words, even though Twitter really affected the way we communicate and even speak to each other. There are already plenty of acronyms in the English language, but word-shortening has become common practice. There are even written algorithms that shorten your message if it is longer than 140 characters. But that's about it. You cannot go much further than that, from micro to nano. So my mind has turned to the visual language. In 2006 I started a blog art project called Margins (www.macasev-margins.blogspot.com), which is basically an intimate visual online diary/blog. Each blog entry has one photo and probably more compressed text through interpretation than the space the picture occupies.
The next step would be to compress or shorten information even more, and it occurred to me that I could do it with a single color. On the other end, the audience would "unzip" such an entry in their own way.
My second impulse is to play with color as much freed from the conventions as possible. In my art and design practice I have used color pretty scarcely. My focus was always on the the line and form. Color seemed to me as redundant as an ornament. And I stick to that Adolf Loos' statement that ornament is a crime. Even when I used color it was very mathematical and based on pretty strict theories I was taught in school (Josef Albers and Johannes Itten's Bauhaus experience, complementary pairs, harmonies, color wheels...). I had a feeling that I was missing something very exciting. It was emotion. A very simple colored field or an abstract composition can affect you just like music. (Kandinsky springs to mind). It overrides your rational judgement and goes straight to your heart. So I started a journey where I could map my emotions through color.
The third impulse is to share my intimate life with the world. Basically that's how I began my art practice. I wanted to share something with the people around me. If you cannot say it or write it you can make art out of it. That impulse became even stronger with the expansion of the expression on the Internet in the 90s and online social networking in 00s. You can use Chuck Palahniuk's line from Haunted, "public is the new private," the other way around too -- "private is the new public". In that respect Margins is more explicit than ChromaTweet. With ChromaTweet I reached that fine balance of public/private. We live in the age of over-sharing after all.
How it works
At the end of the day I try to recap my daily experience by picking a particular tone. I open Photoshop and slide across the color map as I try to summarize my feelings and moods during that day. I keep adjusting hue, lightness and saturation until I'm done. It is a fairly quick process. A couple of minutes and it's already posted.
I decided to use hexadecimal color values, because I can use the same color for both screen and print and it's cross-platform friendly. There's 16 million color tones to choose from. (Which could be around 44.000 years worth of ChromaTweets without repeating the same color value twice).
Color meaning
Adding a meaning to a single color is like adding meaning to a single musical note. On the other hand color is supercharged with meaning, from culturally induced to the very personal. It's like a compressed file. A lot of things come out when you unzip it.
I try to be as personal as I can get, but I cannot totally amputate culturally inherited meaning. Lighter tones (lightness, happiness...), darker tones (heaviness, sadness...). Less saturated (low intensity, bleak), more saturated (intense). As for the hue areas: reds (positive, a bit neurotic), orange (very positive, creative), yellows (uplifting, calming), blues (melancholy, lightness, carelessness), green (sickness, being relaxed), purple (carnal, sexual)...
Despite choosing a precisely defined color each day, the experience is still relative, since everyone's eye receptors receive the same wave lengths in a slightly different way, and color reproduction varies , depending on the output and the context. And there lies the beauty of it. I pack my day into a color tone, people on the other end unpack it and feel maybe something totally different.
Outgrowths
ChromaTweet is an online experiment, but it has started to seep into other media as usually happens with my work. Monthly or annual sheets of daily strips of color produce those interesting patterns. Color combinations are totally accidental and I find this avoidance of the usual color harmonies quite refreshing, especially when tones interact with each other. I look at it as my own version of Color field art. Some friends even used some samples as color themes for their blogs. On several occasions I made ambient print works out of annual sheets. I even started experimenting with painting, mixing acrylic color that would match a particular hexadecimaly defined tone.
A. M.