The document discusses the biology and neuroscience of human color perception. It begins by explaining that color is the optical effect of specific wavelengths of light between 400-800 nanometers interacting with photoreceptor cells in the retina. It describes the three types of cone cells in the retina that are sensitive to different wavelengths and correspond to our perception of colors like red, green, and blue. The signal from these photoreceptors passes through intervening neural layers and the optic nerve to areas of the brain's cortex where color perception occurs through complex neural processing and connections between brain cells.

1. sean cubitt • donau-krems
A genealogy of colour

2. olour is the optical effect in the human perceptual
apparatus of specific electro-magnetic wavelengths
between roughly 400 and 800 nanometres. The cells
that form the retinal wall are neurons, part of the
brain. Light passes through the yellow-filtering cornea, the
lens and the aqueous humour between them, through the
vitreous humour filling the eyeball, and finally through a
layer of transparent cells to reach the rhodopsin-laden light-
sensitive rods and cones. The rods are sensitive to dim light
with maximum sensitivity to wavelengths of 510 nanometres,
corresponding to blue-green perceived colour. The cones are
only active in brighter light. There are three types of cone,
in the ratio of roughly 12:6:1, sensitive to long, medium and
short wavelengths, though there is considerable overlap in
sensitivities between the medium and long wavelength cones,
corresponding to our perception of yellow, which appears
the brightest colour. There are 120 million rods and 7 million
cones in each retina, in concentrations as dense as 150,000
photoreceptors per square millimetre (Fairchild 2005: 11).
Surprisingly, the activity of nearly 130 million rods and
cones is passed through only a million ganglia to the optic
nerve. This appears to be explained by the interconnection
of rods and cones in intervening layers of horizontal, bipolar
and amacrine cells which process the differences between
neighbouring photoreceptors as well as their direct signal,
giving us an acute visual sense of things moving before our
eyes. The optic nerve, formed of axons from the ganglion
cells, passes the signal to an area of the thalamus, which then
sends them on to at least thirty areas of the cortex, each of
which bounces its data to and fro among the other visual
processing areas. At this juncture, the current state of brain
science allows very little further definite knowledge. Colour
perception occurs in a fantastically complex interchange of
electrochemical messaging between brain cells, processing
which involves memory (for example of the presumed colour
of objects, even when seen under different light conditions)
and other specialised forms of recognition
C

5. Ochre pigments
clays with naturally occur-
ring mineral coloration

6. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Jan_van_Eyck_001.jpg
JanvanEyck,“TheArnolfiniDoubleProtrait”(akaTheArnolfiniWeddding)
oilonpanel,1434,NationalGalleryLondon

8. Ultramarine
prepared from crushed lapis
lazuli

9. Isaac Newton, sketch of experiment with prism, 1672

10. ColourWheelfromGoethe’sColourTheory(ZurFarbenlehre),1810

11. newton:
colour as
object
Goethe:
colour as
perceptionPhilipp Otto Runge. Farben-Kugel (Color sphere). 1810

12. CIE LAB colour space 1931

13. 18-year-old
William Perkin synthesises
first aniline mauve dye in his
bedroom in Shadwell in 1856
synthetic
colour

14. ArthurHughes“AprilLove”1856

16. When you look at colors, the intuitions of fantasy, in
contrast to the creative imagination, manifest them-
selves as a primal phenomenon . . . the color seems
to hover suspended above the objects. Their magic
lies not in the colored object or in the mere dead
color, but in the colored glow, the colored brilliance,
the ray of colored light
Walter Benjamin, ‘A Glimpse Into the World of Children’s Books’, Selected
Writings, vol 1, 1913-1926, 442-3.
Schutzeinrichtungen (Butterlies, Moths, caterpillars),
Chromolithograph, published by Joseph Meyer,
Meyers Konversations 1894

17. Ali Baba, Pathé Frères, 1905

20. Blue sensitive layer
Yellow Filter
Green sensitive layer
Red sensitive layer
Yellow dye in colourless layer
Bleached colourless layer
Magenta dye in pale yellow layer
Cyan dye in pale pink layer
Blue sensitive layer
Yellow Filter
Green sensitive layer
Red sensitive layer
White bacing paper
Blue dye in colourless layer
Bleached colourless layer
Green dye in colourless layer
Red dye in colourless layer
White backing paper
Colour film
Colour print
Colour
negative
Printing
paper
Light from scene White light from enlarger
Coloured light from negative
Processing
Developing
Photographic film contains three light-sensitive layers, each sensitized by dyes to one of the three additive primary colors [BGR
in order of their proximity to the light source]. A yellow filter protects the green- and red-sensitized layers from stray blue light.
To form the negative, coloured dyes in yellow, magenta and cyan are subsituted for the silver particles formed by the action of
light. To make a print, a three-layer film is exposed through the negative, and blue, green and red dyes are asdded to the exposed
areas.
(Source: Ball, Philip (2001), Bright Earth:Art and the Invention of Color, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York: 290)
How Colour Film Works

21. ccd chip and bayer mask

22. LCD sub-pixel

23. Typical colour gamuts mapped to the CIE LAB diagram

28. It is, however, just this ultimate money-form of the world of commodities that actually
conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social
relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a
relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the
absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats
and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or
silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private
labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.
Karl Marx, Capital Volume One, chapter 1
COMMODITY FETISHISM

29. biopolitics
I would say that discipline tries to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that their
multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under
surveillance, trained, used, and if need be, punished. And that the new technology
that is being established is addressed to a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that
they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form,
on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of
birth, death, production, illness, and so on. So after a first seizure of power in an
individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing
but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-
species. After the anatamo-politics of the human body established in the course of the
eighteenth century, we have, at the end of that century, the emergence of something
that is no longer an anatamo-politics of the human body, but what I would call a
“biopolitics” of the human race.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 242-3

30. Simon Payne, Colour Bars (2004, 8mins, colour, silent)
http://www.simonrpayne.co.uk/pages/videos/colour-bars.php

31. The great masculine renunciation