M HKA Ensembles

KILLING COLOURS

A question that confronts every generation anew is this: Is it really so that the Enlightenment has once and for all let its light shine over the true nature of colour?

For many among us it is an immutable fact that Newton’s prism-experiment elucidated the veritable nature of colours, and against the factual power of this sort of empirical experiment it seems, as well, that no other considerations might be deemed to carry any weight. Newton’s work appears to have preserved the world from entertaining mistakes and wrong interpretations and, further still, since Newton’s time the idea that everything surrounding us can be brought into an overarching harmony with the principle of the “truth” seems to be realizable, and this would then also be applicable with respect to colours.

In the history of science, this moment in time is often put forward as triumphal in terms of human knowledge and understanding, while from this standpoint Newton represents not much more than the starting point of a definitive rift that has divided us ever since. “Us” includes, on the one side, all those who sign up to the empiric tradition and attribute values to colours that are the equal of fact, that may be expressed in codes. Read more

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