Color Codes
Color codes are the subject of a lecture Vilém
Flusser gave in São Paulo in 1988 at a conference
which was part of a series on the A Casa
da Cor [The House of Color] project to study
color from the perspective of a variety of scientific disciplines and to build a “house of color.”
In his epistemological approach to this theme,
Flusser first advanced the hypothesis that in
the future different color codes will be the vehicle
of technical, scientific, and artistic thinking
and could even replace today’s linguistic or
algorithmic communication. If we assume that
access to most of the information codes of old
civilizations has been lost forever, we must conclude
that we, too, have no access to the true
content of the coded information that has been
handed down (for example, in colors or forms).
“We have lost the keys to the coded codes.” (A
Casa da Cor, lecture, August 10, 1988; translated
from the Portuguese)
From the first gestures of communication and
the first attempts to preserve information –
for example, cave paintings – up to the age of
computers, Flusser distinguishes between five
different strategies: First, images and language
were the means that prehistoric humans developed
to create a new world of information. This
also entailed a movement toward abstraction.
The second process consists of transforming
the images into reality and making the world a
pretext: “People orient themselves within the
world not by means of the images but in the images.”
(ibid.; translated from the Portuguese)
That was the step toward idolatry. The countermovement
was characterized by a trend toward
iconoclasm, which emerged from a close relationship
between thoughts and words. In this
process, not only the images but also the colors
were sacrified to purism. In the context of this
fourth strategy, color was banned from the discourse
and the word mystified.
Flusser’s lecture targeted this imperialism of the word by defending the denotative power of colors. A renaissance of colors – the fifth and final strategy – has been made possible by the invention of the computer, since it can perform the transcoding or recoding of thought both from letters into numbers and from numbers (equations, logical thinking) into forms and colors. Colors were formerly used to capture and articulate the symbolic world. In today’s computer age, colors are employed to complete the transcoding of ideas and create new worlds. As Flusser noted at the end of his lecture, unfortunately we do not know very much about color codes. Thus the need to work on a new transversal theory of colors is all the more urgent.
Original article by Claudia Giannetti in Flusseriana