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An Abridged History Of Color
Installation of color through time

An Abridged History Of Color Through Time is an as-yet-uninstalled installation I created in 2012.

I wrote a script to analyze the colors used in painting from the year 1000 through 1999, using data it collected from ARTstor.

This image is a visualization of this data as a timeline divided into ten columns by century, each showing the most common paint colors of that century sorted by hue.

For the installation, I wrote a program in Processing to create live video from this data, shrinking the thousand years of painting into the installations duration. This video is projected onto a pool of water.

By integrating with Max/MSP, gamelan sounds are played when the video passes each century, decade, year, month, and week. This creates a rhythmic texture that denotes and responds to the passage of time.