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Digital Color and Aesthetics: A Numerical Performance That Speaks to Presentness
Valeria Federici
Abstract
This article is concerned with digital color’s presentness and ubiquity and the implications of these aspects as reflected in contemporary artistic practices and aesthetics. Taking into consideration the history of color theory, the article explores premises and findings relevant to digital color and its differences with natural color as derived by optical vision. Further, it investigates the relationship between computer and artists, between appearance and experience in the digital realm, and highlights how digital color lies in the very nature of the medium: a numerical language hiding behind a mimetic two-dimensional surface or interface. These aspects are discussed through the analysis of the work of contemporary Italian artists Tommaso Tozzi, the duo Eva and Franco Mattes (01.ORG), and Elisa Giardina Papa. The works examined embed crucial aspects of computer-mediated art: from early experiments with information technology largely limited by narrow technical possibilities; to the process of unveiling and recognizing the numerical simulation made possible by the structure of the internet browser; to highlighting the dialogue between the physical world and its digital representation in a circular and self-referential manner.
Key Words
digital art; digital color; informational aesthetics
1. Introduction
When observing color’s lack of brilliance from exposure to sun, water, or other natural agents, we may find ourselves thinking about the process of decay that strips from color its original condition. If we sit long enough in place, colors around us will change according to the time of the day and, of course, to light conditions. A change in color saturation, brightness, or intensity reveals a change in light and simultaneously the passing of time and mutation of our visual surroundings. By observing light, and therefore color, we are able to recognize day from night, a pink dawn from an orange dusk. However, on the screen of our digital devices color is always sharp, bright, and luminous, as if time has no effect on it. Color shines. It will always shine with the same intensity, tonality, and saturation, as if time never passes in a digital realm that seems unpreoccupied with time as we know it.
Within the large spectrum of examples that illustrate digital color’s presentness, ubiquity, and meaning in digital technology, the works under investigation embed some crucial aspects of computer-mediated art, from early experiments with information technology that were largely limited by narrow technical possibilities (Tommaso Tozzi); to the process of unveiling and recognizing the numerical simulation made possible by the very nature of the browser (01.ORG); to highlighting the dialogue between the physical world and its digital representation in a circular and self-referential manner (Elisa Giardina Papa). Tozzi (b. 1960) has a pioneering approach to the use of the computer as a medium that is typical of an early generation of net artists and general users who between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s needed programming knowledge and ability to interact with the machine or make the machine do anything at all. Working mostly after the advent of the internet as we know it today, the duo 01.ORG (Eva and Franco Mattes, b. 1976) embodies a critical stand against the potential control of digital devices over users. Both Tozzi and 01.ORG knew the phase of the internet that largely consisted of text-based interfaces. Their initial work reflects the sentiment of early Net.Art pieces, which were driven by a sense of community and a spirit of spontaneous interventions.[1] At the same time, along with Elisa Giardina Papa (b. 1979), the duo 01.ORG can be associated with the generation of the so-called digital natives, who can no longer relate to a world without the internet and practically have not known a world without computers. In particular, Giardina Papa’s work mirrors the completion of the process of extension of consciousness started with the advent of informational media.[2]
Through an analysis of their work, this article delves into how digital color identity imposes its own aesthetics over users and penetrates the relationship between artists and medium. This argument is in conversation with a lineage of media scholarship, from Marshall McLuhan to Lev Manovich to Christiane Paul, and is indebted to the study on digital color conducted by Carolyn L. Kane.[3] This article is further informed by but not aligned with Friedrich Kittler’s approach to media according to which “meaning is not intrinsic or prior to technology but rather made possible and directed by technology itself.”[4] Even though, as highlighted by Jacob Gaboury, it is not possible to analyze digital images and the screen outputs without considering “the computational process that enables such expression,” and therefore it is crucial to consider the structure behind what we see, my approach remains distinct from Kittler’s deterministic considerations on the meaning of media.[5] I frame the latter as derivative not only of the structure of devices—while color in the natural world is a property of light, color in the digital sphere is a numerical performance—but also of the industrial, social, and cultural circumstances and biases that drive technological developments. Some have already argued that there is no longer a distinction between art that uses computer and art that does not, especially when interpreting art made by digital natives.[6] Although I maintain that a separation between analog and digital may no longer be significant, I also consider the structural development that changed digital color over time and over devices. By detailing the properties of digital color through the artworks considered, I argue that, along with qualities such as sharpness and flatness, the aesthetics of color embed a discourse of timelessness that characterizes the development and deployment of digital devices. This investigation aligns with the assumption that color in the physical world lies somewhere between a physical phenomenon (scientific realism) and a perceptual one (relative to a perceiver).[7] Since color, as it pertains to this article, is not a physical phenomenon, but rather an algorithmic one, the perceptual dimension is given greater emphasis. It is highlighted here as being related to the symbolic instance of color in the digital realm—its representation, as it were—through the ways artists engage with it and how they dialogue with the viewer’s experience of digital color. In general, I am referring to the use of computer as made possible after the commercialization of domestic devices and not to the more notorious experiments with computers and computer graphics of the 1960s and 1970s.
2. The blue screen and the pursuit of color presentness
Color in the digital realm remains fundamentally different from optical phenomenon because of the process of numeric-based simulation that makes it possible. As noted by Gaboury, “the computer is not a visual medium” and digital color is an effect of algorithmic calculation, running within an electro-mathematical medium rather than optics.[8] Carolyn Kane highlighted that in the world of cybernetics, once divested of all its disguising attributes color was ready to be transformed from a “qualitative phenomenon to code”:[9]
The logic of electronic computing and cybernetics merged with mainstream culture and with it an affirmation that, armed with the new electronic technology, humanity could transcend the limits of time, space, and culture.[10] (Emphases added)
The techno-rationalism of postwar era is characterized by countless efforts to make screen color, and later digital color, look as unified as possible, reflecting a modernist desire of smoothness and continuity.[11] However, and perhaps paradoxically, by inheriting much of their color functionalities from the experiments conducted by analog video industry, digital screen technology is primarily “about perceiving events with the nervous system, not visualizing in a pictorial way.”[12] Therefore, notwithstanding the semblance of exactness and precision of all things related to information technology, the way our eyes see the screen is inextricably linked to subjectivity and lies somewhere far from the scientific “objectivity” that drives modernity.[13] Gaboury has also illustrated how difficult it has been, and I would add, far from objective, to construct a three-dimensional image on the screen. In other words, the passage from analog to digital color bears similarity as well as significant differences with visual devices that are based on optical vision.
Digital color—a computational phenomenon—is driven by algorithms and appears on the screen of any digital device following the additive system, through which colors combine to create white (Newton). As defined by Manovich, the “computer is a simulation machine”; therefore color within an electro-mathematical digital medium—a computer or another screen-based device—is also simulation.[14]< In technical terms, a screen is luminescent, which means that the light needed to make the screen visible is produced with an almost insignificant amount of heat. In addition, due to industry needs, a screen is predominantly characterized by a blue light, since producing blue light is faster and it consumes less energy than producing warm light. Before the digital turn—when television used a cathode-ray tube to generate color (CRT)—color was fuzzy and contour lines blurry.[15]< Borrowing from Kane’s analysis, it is significant to consider that the blue hue was adopted since “the eye is less able to detect minor difference in line or detail in bluish images, and thus, lower bandwidth bluish images could be broadcast with less people noticing the difference.”[16] The predominance of blue has given the screen the glow that characterizes our tele-visions. The blue light was then adopted by the maker of computer screens, and with its coolness it speaks perfectly to an appearance of presentness and timelessness. Metaphorically, the blue screen can be linked to that sunless time of the day, either dawn or twilight, during which light is cooler, and it can interchangeably be the beginning or the end of a day. In other words, a no-time zone.
The characteristic blue screen “is very much grounded in existential—cultural, technical, and historical—facts”[17] and is the result of deliberate choices made by screen industry, based on engineering and economic factors. For instance, LCD screen technologies have a narrower color gamut, and they employ even lower energy due to mercury-vapor fluorescent backlight. This phenomenon contributes even more to the coolness of color appearance and to the flatness of the screen.[18] In return, I argue that the semblance of coolness and flatness not only sits well with the ideas of efficiency, capability, and uniformity that drive information technology in terms of operability, but it also feeds into an aesthetic of reduction that has changed our physical objects and their design. It has been noticed how this aspect is a reflection of the engendered masculinity of high-tech values,[19] and Manovich further observed how a “new modernism of data visualizations, vector nets, pixel-thin grids and arrows” speaks to a rational approach to software that stems from Bauhaus design.[20] Color’s flatness and sharpness is the outcome of how color is fabricated and managed by algorithm-driven simulation, which are determined by both technical and cultural reasons. How is this reflected in digital artwork and their representation?
In 1994, Florence-based artist and activist Tommaso Tozzi started to experiment with Virtual Town TV (VTTV), a sort of Second Life platform ante litteram, made available on a BBS or Bulletin Board System, a text-based messaging tool though which it was possible to visualize a text on a screen and send it worldwide via a telephone line. Tozzi’s BBS was implemented via FirstClass, a GUI BBS software that allowed image-based interfaces. Tozzi’s original intention was to create a virtual space where users could freely interact, hang out, use the library (that contained newspapers scanned by users and uploaded), watch TV (that offered videos also uploaded by users), and make art online in the Hacker Art building.[21] Here, Virtual Town TV is considered for the process of image improvement Tozzi employed to display the project on his online archive, which includes two similar images of VTTV’s homepage, one from 1994 and one uploaded in 2008.[22] What is relevant to notice is how the appearance of work changes over time, since the 2008 file is rendered as more crisp, brighter, and clearer, yet in both cases, color is highly inconsistent.[23]
When Tozzi first created this networking platform, the artist chose to borrow graphic elements from Sim City (a popular video game), which proves how a certain look had been absorbed early on into his process of computer-generated art. Sim City offered the opportunity to create a simulated urban environment. Digital architectural objects are borrowed by the video game—which uses references to real cities—as if digital objects cannot depart from precursors in the nondigital domain, even when created entirely in and for a digital environment. Even though Tozzi envisions a rather alternative way at the time to interact with the urban landscape represented—users can virtually squat a space and create their own self-managed site of experimentation within VTTV—it seems as if the nondigital domain is still the main point of departure.
This relates to how graphic user interfaces of early home computers replicated forms and shapes borrowed from the real world. The phenomenon has been observed and discussed fairly extensively.[24] For instance, when initial experiments for making art with digital technology were conducted at the Bell Laboratories in 1960s, artist Lillian Schwartz (1927-2024) asked lab engineers for “graphic programs that would give her fluidity and flexibility, and color instead of only grey levels.”[25] Basically, she demanded that the computer simulate what artists can do in their studio with colored pigments and paper or canvas, anticipating a trend of graphic design applications and interactive images—the so-called icons—that copied artists’ studio tools. This representation, albeit prominent, became only one of many possible mediated realities. At the same time, even though computer color representation aims to mimic the world outside of the computer, digital color imposes its own aesthetics aside from simulation, determined by its numerical structure and how it translates into appearance, in addition to industry-driven developments of hardware.
Two processes about Tozzi’s digital objects can be then outlined: first, by readjusting VTTV digital appearance, Tozzi strives to find a fresher look given by sharper colors and higher image resolution. The artist has been subjected to computer aesthetics from the very beginning, drawing from extant forms, and reapplied those aesthetics in a “feedback loop.”[26] Second, Tozzi not only created VTTV by pulling from existing graphic elements but also assimilated “virtuality” as a possibility to make a space beyond appearance, and re-used that virtuality to upgrade its digital reality. By so doing, he achieved the “real virtuality” Castells speaks of in The Rise of the Network Society (1996). The extension of human consciousness through the machine thus is manifested through the making of an online space where to connect with others, expanding on practices happening outside of the virtual sphere. Artist and theorist Roy Ascott called this process “technology of consciousness” and affirms:
We artists are trying to seduce the machine: we wish to embrace it with our ways of thinking and feeling. We want computers that emote, networks that are sentient, robots that care. We stroke their screens, play with their mice, run our fingers over their keyboards, to entice them into our field of consciousness.[27]
In this close relationship with the device lies the extension of consciousness from the human analog existence into the digital, and vice-versa. In accordance to this interaction between artist and medium, art is augmented. In 1981, Francesca Alinovi, a forward-looking art critic and curator, who collaborated extensively with the Neon Gallery in Bologna, Italy that exhibited Tozzi, noticed:
Our mind is in the electronic micro-processors, our memory is in the computers, our imagination in the images transmitted by the mass-media. Then everything enters mysteriously into our bodies, and here it gets filtrated, molded, modeled.[28]
Alinovi’s lucid analysis of newly available technologies reached many young artists at the time. She summarizes the relationship with information technology as “the art of creativity of a single person who connects to other individuals in order to extend and to potentiate themselves, indefinitely.”[29] The extension of consciousness that was initiated with analog information devices, as famously recorded by Marshall McLuhan, continued with digital devices that can no longer be distinguished from their predecessors since they all now share a common numerical computing language.[30]
The appearance of media devices and of color within them is not a separate element of this process, but it is often overlooked. Examples are too many to list, but one can think of Nam June Paik’s video sculptures (Ommah, 2005), and of the impact of the juxtaposition of monitors with organic forms (TV Garden, 1974-2000), or of the integration of electronic wires, screens, and human body happening with Charlotte Moorman’s performance for Paik as TV Cello, in 1972—or even of Paik’s color lithographs on wove paper that clearly recall still images from videos (Untitled (Allen Ginsberg), 1984).[31] As a result, media aesthetics—intended as the range of visual characteristics and their meanings embedded in the appearance of a device—influence, modify, and affect computer-based and computer-related art production. Again, color is a fundamental part of these aesthetics, especially in those works of computational art prominently dominated by the screen, by visual outputs, and by visual user interfaces.
Finally, Tozzi seems to be aware and concerned with the color quality of the images produced and reproduced. While color’s instability is often accepted, and the difference from a picture on the screen and its projection on the wall voluntarily ignored, Tozzi demonstrates a will to correct it. A way to adjust the image is to refine it by perfecting both color and the outline of objects represented. This is a procedure aiming to match a digital aesthetic that demands for a spotless simulation in order to attempt mimesis. Tozzi’s 2008 image of VTTV is a replica of its predecessor from 1994. What occurred in between these two images is attributable to a practice of perfecting, of making things better or, more precisely, of making things look better, presumably. This speaks to a fetishism of the image that drives the computer image-making process.
Countering this approach to image high definition, artists have notoriously embraced computer glitches and created defective images. Hito Steyerl defended the “poor image,” writing that it is “a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances” and “it mocks the promise of digital technology,”[32] namely the promise of infallibility, clarity, sharpness, and newness. Creating or working with glitches or distortion through screen devices, first with analog video (or sound), then with digital media, has a long tradition that is beyond the scope of this article to trace. However, it is significant to consider that Glitch Art stands exactly as a counter effect to the modernist pursuit of perfection in digital images and to the “quest for realism.”[33] A potentially unified design is not only a misconception, denied by the technical characteristics of digital appearance, but also the result of constant negotiation, failure, and compromise with color, whose behavior is unstable, uncertain, and unpredictable.
3. Digital color: a numerical performance
Volatility of color behavior is, of course, no secret for artists who have always coped with the fact that color lies in an indistinct area between objective and subjective, between human perception and the physics of light.[34] The belief that color flaws in the digital realm can be overcome is a false presumption, since digital color is first and foremost a simulation that varies from device to device even after the adoption of stabilizing technology.[35] Color’s unsteady behavior manifests itself in the digital realm as in the realm of optic vision. Algorithmic color uniformity is a myth. As noted by Kane, “color is unruly and every new technology faces a unique set of challenges in the effort to standardize it.”[36] When television first appeared at the beginning of 1950s, color technology was already a reality, but the prohibitive prices of color television sets made it affordable to consumers only as a black-and-white apparatus. It was only in the mid-1960s in the United States that television broadcasting companies finally migrated to color content only. With that transition, “black-and-white by default became a medium of the past.”[37]
When industry started to invest in the computer in order to make it a home device, color had to be included. From the start, the computer was perceived and commercialized as a tool of the present, or even more so as an instrument to access the future. The role of color was to convey and confirm such a message, namely that digital was the future present. Further, computer first, and the internet later, made media content modifiable by everyone. Following the digital turn, media devices were no longer tools to access time in a linear yet imaginative narrative of the human condition in history; rather they became the tools of the present and of a constant, connected, presence. This aspect adds to the computational metaphor,[38] that is, the belief in a technological transcendence, even though computational systems and appearance are based on an epistemological cluster of cultural symbols that refer to the natural world and the human body—from computer memory to the invention of the cyberspace to desktop windows—rather than to the “facticity of the machine or their hyperrational processes.”[39]
In computational language, color is a number or a group of letters. Color is controlled by algorithms that can vary the saturation, brightness, contrast, transparency, and many other tonal values. In a system called hexadecimal, numbers are associated with a specific color expressed in HTML language for the browser to read or in another markup language for the software to render, following the RGB (red, green, and blue) additive color system.[40] Computer also offers the possibility to use the CMYK subtractive color model (cyan, magenta, yellow, keystone), which is used to describe the printing process itself. As mentioned, the alleged precision of the algorithms does not guarantee the exact replica of color in ubiquitous digital files. The process of perfecting color appearance on digital devices is ongoing. Some computer-specific technical characteristics, not necessarily derived from analog television, whose color technology has been considered as a precursor to digital color, have determined how color looks in the digital realm.[41] It is indeed possible to experience a difference in color from screen to screen or from screen to printing, even though both processes are computational. Further, it is sufficient to run an image search on any browser to see how the same image may be simulated differently from one screen to another. In other words, color continues to be unpredictable and unstable, even though industry and modern science tried to stabilize it through algorithms. Color somehow challenges the human-technology dichotomy by inserting itself within it while remaining incongruent and self-determining. Its numerical performance—whose outcomes are imprecise and unpredictable, even though the mathematical process is exact—renders color somewhat autonomous. What I refer to as numerical performance can be considered as color noise or the interference that occurs during the exchange of information within a machine or between machines. In other words, it is a process that exists within the informational realm independent of whether we perceive it or not. Nonetheless, as noted, artists have notoriously worked with machine noise, distortion, and clashing elements, at times as a way to resist the deterministic drive of machines.[42]
In 1998, Italian duo Eva and Franco Mattes, alias 01.ORG or 0100101110101101.ORG (or simply zero one) exploited the RGB color system to reveal the ambiguity of computer interface. Their early work largely is made of content found on the internet, and replicated following the principle according to which algorithms and data allow digital objects to be ubiquitous, therefore reproduced instantly and potentially ad infinitum. In an online project called Hybrids (1998), they remixed a series of works of Net.Art with random webpages, using content from both. Within the Hybrids series, there is an artwork titled function makeArray(n), the only piece that does not stem from someone’s else existing online material.[43] When entering function makeArray(n), the viewer is presented with a white webpage, where it is possible to enter a value between 0 and 255 into the correspondent box for red, green, and blue. Alternatively, users can enter the HTML color code. By so doing, the part of the page selected fills in accordingly and instantly with color.
The series Hybrids questions authorship and origin of the samples used to generate the work and confronts an ongoing discussion about sharing, copyrights, and openness of the web. At the same time, in a self-referential way function makeArray(n) reveals representational simulation at the base of a page as visualized in a browser, and invites the viewer to know the computing numeral colors in order to dispute the transparency of the medium and the assumption that digital representation is a reproduction of reality. Unlike VTTV by Tozzi, function makeArray(n) does not try to resemble any forms or meanings directly connected to a physical object or a three-dimensional one. By utilizing the sharp flatness of the screen and operating exclusively on the two-dimensional surface, 01.ORG pose the attention on the screen itself and also on the layers of computational mechanisms behind it. By referring to the simple language behind the color appearance on screen, 01.ORG contribute to highlight some significant elements of digital color, such as its attempted precision and accuracy.
Therefore, even though computing language simulates color in a refined and complex way, digital color remains unsteady. The computing language that is made to simulate color in imitation to reality (mimesis) is failed by the performance of color that varies from device to device.[44] I propose to call this fallibility “color numerical performance,” in order to reinforce the argument that digital color’s performance and aesthetics retain a certain specificity that constitutes digital color identity. The performance may also be related to the limitations of object-space algorithms, the power of the hardware at hand, and the complexity of the object rendered.[45] Nonetheless, the goal remains to define color as sharp, bright, and brilliant as possible, and as always new, divested of one of its more typical traits in the natural world that may indicate the passing of time and the aging of objects, such as fading and whitening. Indeed, one of the main characteristics pertaining to digital color and its aesthetics is that on a screen light and color come from within via electricity and are designed not to mutate over time.
Further, pixilation plays an important role in a computer-simulated representation of color. As described by Manovich, a single digital image can consist of millions of pixels, and it is possible to encode more than one billion different colors—more than the human eye can see.[46] A pixel contains only one color, no shadow or reflection, which is why digital color can look so sharp, but also so flat. In other words, color does not decrease in angular scale across the surface, and therefore the surface appears to never recede from the viewer.[47] In addition, digital devices struggle with simulation of shadow and reflection. Image resolution is thus another crucial factor, insofar as it quantifies the number of pixels an image is made of and determines the degree of fidelity of image simulation, since when information is absent, the “‘list-priority’ algorithm picks a value from an adjacent subregion,” technically guessing the missing information.[48] Although current technology allows a user to control and modify how light behaves on a surface to mimic light-based color, light and shadow are still broken down into a gradual number of flat-colored points; somehow deploying a computational color constancy.[49] These kinds of effects are extremely demanding as they relate to image information. When transferring files, the process may lead to a loss of detail; as a result, digital objects are likely to lose snips of information and experience a decrease in reproduction fidelity.[50]
In other words, a computer-based representation of color is programmed to attempt mimesis, but can only achieve simulation through numerical performance. Color representation or “color numerical performance” varies from device to device due to the quality of the screen and the transferring mode of image information. Digital color’s specificity and performance are subjected to the device in which the simulation occurs and the type of algorithms employed. As a result—notwithstanding the exactness of digital color mixing—based on a numerical system, it is unlikely two users using two different devices will look at the same color. In addition, despite color calibration, whether those two same users decide to print from a digital device, they may end up with a different color product than the one expected.[51] Paradoxically, it seems as if the impossibility to achieve an exact mixture of any primary in the real world—a phenomenon that Josef Albers knew very well when he asked his students to study colors by using colored paper rather than pigments—transferred into the impossibility of achieving color consistency in the virtual world.[52]
However, differences in digital color performance are largely ignored and barely mentioned. When facing this instability in color performance—although we may acknowledge, and not without frustration, to be looking at two different reproductions of the same color scheme—we disregard this detail because color is not what we look for in object recognition. On the one hand, we are prone to believe to the promises of digital technology and its infallibility. On the other hand, color may not be what we need in terms of recognizing what we see.[53] Perhaps, this is also due to the limitations in color perception of the human eye.[54]
Overall, the mechanism of machine and file behavior undermines the assumption about the infallibility of computer visual simulation and reproduction. It also confirms that computing language devices have their own virtual reality that includes specific visual characteristics. Artists who work with the computer as their medium can manipulate their images through complex software while the machine retains control over representation as well as certain instability over the final result. Media aesthetics or informational aesthetics—given the information-based circulation system at the core of digital devices—retain a certain degree of control over representation. At an image level, color plays a fundamental part in this process of attempted mimetic representation. In addition, as a cultural product, computer-mediated representation affects largely the cultural setting, in particular its visual instances, specifically since the logic of all new media is not creation, but selection.[55] Selection implies exclusion. Therefore, a range of possibilities are excluded a priori, whilst a limited cultural and visual system is built.
4. A self-referential performance
How virtual imagery has started its journey into materiality can be analyzed through the work of Elisa Giardina Papa, in particular through Brush Stroke (2012—), a sculpture that in order to be deleted from the physical space of the gallery is removed from the digital representation that captures it. Brush Stroke is “a sculpture that cannot be digitally documented.”[56] As suggested by its name, Brush Stroke is a brushstroke-shaped flat sculpture patterned with a grid of grey and white squares. The grid resembles the background or neutral surface that appears behind an image when the “transparency” or “delete” option is selected in the editing software. The grid represents the virtual absence of color. If photographed frontally, Brush Stroke disappears from the picture thus replicating the transparency effect as seen in an image editor. Interviewed about Brush Stroke, Giardina Papa stated:
With this sculpture I am trying to play with the relationships between the world of things and the world of perception…it is not clear if this object would live in a physical three-dimensional world or in a virtual two-dimensional one.[57]
Brush Stroke confirms that there is no distinction between real and virtual. The digital realm has transcended time and space or so we tend to believe. The sculpture lives in the physical world, but it is conceived to live in the virtual one too and can be understood only if considered in both.
At the same time, Brush Stroke reveals the fiction of digital representation. Giardina Papa explains:
When the visitor walks around the sculpture, its appearance changes, but if instead, the visitor stops in front of it, and takes a picture of it, the photograph will appear as if it were digitally manipulated.[58]
Brush Stroke offers the viewer several possibilities of experience and interaction, both analog and digital. In addition, and similarly to function makeArray(n), it speaks to another aspect in the process of computer-mediated art: digital self-reference. In its digital replica, the viewer sees the sculpture by not seeing it. The piece mimics itself digitally through the apparent absence of color—even though there is no true absence since the work features a grid of gray and white squares—and through the flatness of the sculpture, which resembles the two-dimensional flatness of digital objects on the screen. Thus, color becomes what the digital version of it represents. This is not different from other fictional representations, such as paintings. However, in this case, the work implies the possibility of being experienced through a digitally trained eye and acquiring significance from its reference of a digital existence. It is indeed the viewer who activates the sculpture by taking a picture of it and by looking at the picture on a screen rather than looking at the sculpture in the room. The sculpture somehow needs the flatness of its on-screen representation to be validated and for the color to disappear. This adds a layer in between the beholder and the sculpture. A device sits in this in-betweenness, while speaking to a ubiquitous image whose significance exists within the virtual references it epitomizes. On the one hand, Brush Stroke reiterates somehow the necessity of experiencing the sculpture in real life, hic et nunc, in order to activate it and to expose its deception. On the other hand, since the two realms, digital and analog, are intertwined, the experience has become hic et nunc and elsewhere. The work eludes the physical space. It happens here and now, and somewhere else.
The artwork addresses the question of whether color is something real insofar as it is the idea of how the absence of color is represented in the digital realm that conveys, here, its existence—or lack thereof. The viewer must recognize the visual reference to an image editing software. Brush Stroke not only reflects the “feedback loop,” but it also represents a step forward insomuch as it speaks to the extent to which the digital and analog worlds are no longer distinguishable, or if they are distinguishable, they clearly refer to and feed on one another. These two worlds merge in the “technology of consciousness.” It is not simulation or mimesis, but simply reality. The time and space of digital and analog coincide, while the sculpture will occupy another space, virtual space, where time does not matter.
5. Conclusions
The relationship between artist and medium is characterized by compromise, fetishism, and control. This is not novelty in art. Nonetheless, the relationship between computer and artist, as evidenced by the works discussed, is different than with other mediums. As noted by Christiane Paul, “the computational, variable, networked and interactive ‘character’ of new media art certainly makes it different from painting or drawing.”[59] In addition, computer-mediated, or computer-related art, lies in the very nature of the medium: a numerical language hiding behind a mimetic two-dimensional surface that can potentially replicate reality or create many other realities. The medium is a complex combination of elements that includes not only the computational device but also the code through which the device functions. The device allows for a reshaping of our reality in a reversible and potentially endless process, which changes users’ fruition and consumption of information. This system acts upon our perception of time and space in such a way, and with such an impact, incomparable to other analog artistic mediums. More simply, the medium is a device used not only to make art but also to handle daily chores. There is no line of separation between the functionality of the medium in and outside of the artist’s studio, as there is no line of separation between a timeless day characterized by a glowing blue continuum.
While color in the natural world is a property of light, color in the digital sphere is a numerical performance. This is perhaps the most evident point of fracture between natural and digital color. Echoing Goethe, by describing our attempts to capture color by means of physics, Heidegger describes color’s fleeing quality, since color’s perception is affected, among other things, by how light changes over time and space:
Colour shines and only wants to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone. It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained.[60]
When analyzed in computational and rational terms, however, digital color does not disappear. Rather, it performs differently and becomes part of another reality in which color maintains a margin of instability that affects its performance from device to device. Color in computer-mediated art is a simulation through numbers and algorithms that transcends time and space, since no light nor space affect how it is performed. Nonetheless, as shown, color remains unstable.
A number-mediated cultural realm has delivered a new form of representation that acts upon artists (and upon us) and our consciousness. As a consequence, the artmaking process itself is mediated as appearance becomes experience.[61] Further, our perception of digital color contributes to this cultural transformation, even though it is often overlooked. Notwithstanding the mathematical precision of numbers that constitutes the structure of digital color, color continues to perform inconsistently from screen to screen. Perhaps because of this instability, or maybe due to what David Batchelor has called chromophobia,[62] color continues to be ignored as a source of information or as a proof of the fallacy of the machine. Color inconsistency is considered a variable with which to cope. Yet, artists are challenged with the unstable yet imposing aesthetics of digital color: its flatness, its sharpness, and its inconsistency. Indeed, as a consequence of the advent of computational media, a shift happened in the aesthetics of color. The flat, shadowless, crisp quality of digital color does not only emerge from the screen of a digital device; it is also made for the screen of a digital device in a self-referential loop and obliterates the perception of time and space given by color in the natural world.
Valeria Federici
valeria_federici@alumni.brown.edu
Dr. Valeria Federici is a Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies and an MA in History of Art and Architecture from Brown University in 2019. She recently served as Lecturer, Undergraduate Advisor, and Italian Language Program Coordinator at the University of Maryland. As a multidisciplinary scholar, her research interests revolve around themes of art, information technology, sovereignty, relational space, social movements, cultural identity, women’s studies, and the digital humanities. Dr. Federici’s past and current research has resulted in academic publications on several topics, including: digital humanities, digital art history, and teaching with technology; contemporary art theories and practices; and women’s history.
Published on September 27, 2025.
Cite this article: Valeria Federici, “Digital Color and Aesthetics: A Numerical Performance That Speaks to Presentness,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 13 (2025), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] Christiane Paul, Digital Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 113.
[2] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
[3] Carolyn L. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms. Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Carolyn L. Kane, “Digital Art and Experimental Color Systems at Bell Laboratories, 1965-1984: Restoring Interdisciplinary Innovation to Media History,” Leonardo, Volume 43 Issue 1, (2010): 53-58.
[4] Kittler, Friedrich, “Thinking Color and/or Machine,” Theory Culture Society, Vol. 23 Issue 7-8: 39-50, (2006): 39.
[5] Jacob Gaboury, “Hidden Surface Problems: On the Digital Image as Material Object,” Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 14 Issue 1: 40-60, (2015): 41.
[6] Lev Manovich (2002), The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); Domenico Quaranta, Beyond New Media Art (Brescia: LINK Editions, 2013), 212.
[7] For a much larger discussion about these two aspects of color and an in-depth analysis of color in philosophy, see Brown, Derek H. and Fiona Macpherson, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour (New York: Routledge, 2021). The author looks forward to future efforts in exploring the many aspects pertaining to color in art, even though in this particular article the discussion remains inevitably limited.
[8] Gaboury, 40.
[9] Kane, Chromatic Algorithms, 36.
[10] Kane, 63.
[11] Kane, 42.
[12] Quote by artist Paul Ryan in Kane, 191.
[13] Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations, no. 40: 81–128, (1992).
[14] Lev Manovich, Generation Flash, http://Manovich.net/content/04-projects/038-generation-flash/35_article_2002.pdf, 1-18, (2002), 14. Accessed 21 October 2024.
[15] Kane, 45.
[16] Kane, 65.
[17] Kane, 62.
[18] Kane, 69.
[19] Jonathan Sterne, and Dylan Mulvin (2014). “The Low Acuity for Blue: Perceptual Technics and American Color Television.” Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 13 Issue 2: 118-138 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412914529110
[20] Manovich, Generation Flash, 1.
[21] Images are available on VTTV dedicated page on Tommaso Tozzi’s website. “Virtual Town TV,” (2008)http://www.tommasotozzi.it/index.php?title=Virtual_Town_TV_(1994), Last modified on 30 March 2009 at 14:38 (UTC).
[22] Although the page of the website was last updated in 2008, image forensic analysis confirmed that the file named 1994_Scan10006.jpg was created in 1994.
[23] The file titled Virtual_Town_TV.GIF has been uploaded in 2008 and presents some differences regarding the items offered for interaction.
[24] Beverly Jones, “Computer Imagery: Imitation and Representation of Realities,” Leonardo, Supplemental Issue, Vol. 2, Computer Art in Context: SIGGRAPH ’89 ArtShow Catalog (1989).
[25] Carolyn L. Kane, “Digital Art and Experimental Color Systems at Bell Laboratories, 1965-1984: Restoring Interdisciplinary Innovation to Media History,” Leonardo, Volume 43 Issue 1, 53-58, (2010), 56.
[26] Kittler, 49.
[27] Roy (n.d.), A Turning on Technology,https://www.scribd.com/document/23611542/A-Turning-on-Technology-by-Roy-Ascott, Accessed 18 October 2024.
[28] Francesca Alinovi, “L’Arte MIA,” ITERARTE, n. 21, (1981), 46.
[29] Alinovi, 47.
[30] Manovich, The Language of Media, 48.
[31] These works can be found in the archives of the Everson Museum of Art, https://everson.org/from-the-archives/from-the-archives-charlotte-moorman-and-nam-june-paik/, accessed October 21, 2024; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/paik, accessed October 21, 2024; and the National Gallery of Art, https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.155538.html, accessed October 20, 2024, and can be seen online.
[32] Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux journal #10, 1-9 (2009), 1.
[33] Gaboury, 50.
[34] David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing, Sul Colore (Torino: Einaudi, 2018), 6.
[35] Wikipedia, “Web_colors,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors, Last modified on 19 October 2024 at 02:15 (UTC).
[36] Kane, 63.
[37] Kane, 58.
[38] The computational metaphor refers to the psychological metaphor according to which the relationship between the computer and the human should be seen as a symbiosis rather than as a prosthetic relationship. The psychological metaphor is attributed to two computer scientists: Vannevar Bush, who refers to it in his essay, “As we may think” (1945), and J.C.R. Licklider, who refers to it in his essay, “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960). See Paola Castellucci, Dall’ipertesto al web. Storia culturale dell’informatica (Laterza 2009), 89.
[39] Kane, 129.
[40] The code reads the color symbol “#” followed by six letters and/or numbers. The first two symbols in HTML color code represent the intensity of red in a scale which includes the following possibilities: #00; #33; #66; #99; #CC; #FF, where #00 is the least intense gradation, and #FF is the most intense one. The third and fourth numbers represent intensity of green, and the fifth and sixth represent the intensity of blue. The value assigned to each of these numbers determines the color, by adding red, green or blue to an otherwise white or black value, respectively #FFFFFF and #000000. See, Wikipedia, “CMYK_color_model,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMYK_color_model, last modified on August 29, 2024 at 23:06 (UTC); and “RGB_color_model,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RGB_color_model, last modified on August 29, 2024 at 23:06 (UTC).
[41] Gaboury, 45.
[42] Kane, 176.
[43] 01.ORG, function makeArray(n),http://0100101110101101.org/files/hybrids/00014/index.html, accessed October 21, 2024.
[44] Kane, “Digital Art and Experimental Color Systems at Bell Laboratories…” 73, 88.
[45] Gaboury, 54.
[46] Manovich, Cultural Analytics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020), 158.
[47] For a discussion on how color appears on a second surface to replicate a third surface, see John Kulvicki, “Colour and the Arts: Chromatic Perspectives,” and the discussion on experiencing “two distinct colors along a single line of sight” as discussed by Derek Brown, “Colour Constancy,” both in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour, ed. Brown and Macpherson (New York, 2021), 91-106:93, and 269-284:279.
[48] Gaboury, 54.
[49] Cited in Kane (2014: 194). The difference between points and pixels is well illustrated by Alvy Ray Smith, “Alpha and the History of Digital Compositing,” Microsoft Technical Memo 7 (1995), Microsoft Corporation, August. For color constancy as intended in the physical phenomenon of natural colour, e.g.“the stability of perceived colour across alterations in the character of the illuminants,” see Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, “The Science of Colour and Colour Vision,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour, ed. Brown and Macpherson (New York: Routledge, 2021), 123-139:132 and note 47.
[50] Manovich, The Language of Media, 40.
[51] In the printing process, additional variables can be the type of printer, paper, or other supports to print on, and the quality of image file.
[52] Josef Albers, Interaction of Color: Unabridged Text and Selected Plates (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.
[53] Alan L. Gilchrist, Seeing Black and White (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
[54] Sterne and Mulvin, 133.
[55] Lev Manovich, Aesthetic of Virtual Worlds (1996),http://Manovich.net/index.php/projects/the-aesthetics-of-virtual-worlds, accessed October 21, 2024 at 14:24 (UTC).
[56] Elisa Giardina Papa, interview with the author, May 2014. Brush Stroke,https://www.elisagiardinapapa.org/new/img/brush_stroke/EGP_Brush_Stroke_01.jpg, accessed October 21, 2024.
[57] Elisa Giardina Papa, interview with the author, May 2014.
[58] Elisa Giardina Papa, interview with the author, May 2014.
[59] Quote in Domenico Quaranta and Yves Bernard, “Just What is it That Makes New Media Art so Different,” in Holy Fire: Art of the Digital Age, ed., Yves Bernard, Domenico Quaranta, and IMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology (Brescia: LINK Editions, 2011), 94.
[60] Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” [1950] in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964), Edited by David Farrell Krell (San Francisco, California: Harper, 1993), 197.
[61] See Castells (1996).
[62] David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000).