Tauba Auerbach: The exploration of color

[Ann]

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Photo: Vegard Kleven.

At Malmö Konsthall, The Art Hall of Malmö, you can now see an exhibition of some of the works of Tauba Auerbach. One of her great interests is exploring the color vision of humans. One of her ideas is that there might be some humans who have four receptors for color instead of three, so that they would be "tetrachromatic".

Anyway, here you can see one of of the works of Tauba Auerbach that I myself found particularly fascinating. According to Auerbach, each of our three types of cones - the red-sensitive, the green-sensitive and the blue-sensitive ones - can distinguish between a hundred different hues. But together, our three types of cones can therefore see 100 x 100 x 100 different hues, that is, we can see a million different colors.

In this "color book", Tauba Auerbach has attempted to put on paper all the different colors that humans are able to perceive. The book, when closed, is perfectly cube-shaped. The coloring of each page is computer-generated, and she has programmed the computer to change the hue of each page gradually, moving slowly over the RGB palette and also taking into account brightness variations, from dark to light, and also including that other chromatic scale, magenta-yellow-cyan.

Well, wow. Imagine owning Tauba Auerbach's book. You could leaf through the pages and see every color that it is humanly possible to perceive.

Ann

[BMAONE23]

Call it
"The Visual Spectrum"
and sell it as a coffee table book

[Chris Peterson]

At Malmö Konsthall, The Art Hall of Malmö, you can now see an exhibition of some of the works of Tauba Auerbach. One of her great interests is exploring the color vision of humans. One of her ideas is that there might be some humans who have four receptors for color instead of three, so that they would be "tetrachromatic".

That is an established fact. It does alter their color perception, but not as much as you'd think, because the neural pathways are the same. That is, while there are four retinal cone pigments, the information is still conveyed to the brain along just three channels.

[Demeter]

I want one. Where can I buy one?