Adam Clare

Last year I posted a documentary on seeing colour which went into curious ways that colour impacts individuals and cultures. This year I came across an excellent three part series on colour by the CBC radio show Ideas which origanlly aired in 2011.

You can listen to the show on Ideas’ website. That’s right, you can listen to a show about visual colours. Each part is an hour long and worth a listen. In part two they bring up a theory that green may have killed Napoleon.

Relatedly, here’s some recent information on how the colour of light can impact your sleep. Essentially, stay away from blue light at night and get exposed to orange, or preferably, red lights.

Whenever I bring up wavelengths and colour I think it’s worth mentioning f.lux to make your computing life easier. Also, for searching purposes, I need to include color spelled in the non-British fashion: color.

This new video by Dizzee Rascal is rampant GIF material, or is it entirely inspired by GIFs. I don’t know.

Dizzee Rascal | I Don’t Need A Reason from DIVISION on Vimeo.

Regardless, it got me thinking of the new aesthetic, which is a newish sort of art movement thing (yes, it’s that vague). In that linked Wikipedia article there is now a better description of what the new aesthic is from Matthew Battles than the last time I saw the article.

New Aesthetic is a collaborative attempt to draw a circle around several species of aesthetic activity—including but not limited to drone photography, ubiquitous surveillance, glitch imagery, Streetview photography, 8-bit net nostalgia. Central to the New Aesthetic is a sense that we’re learning to “wave at machines”—and that perhaps in their glitchy, buzzy, algorithmic ways, they’re beginning to wave back in earnest.

And now there is a Tumblr on new aesthetics.