Time‐traveling colors: Artisanal dreams and digital fabrication

Abstract

AbstractIn the 15th century, the miniaturists of the Timurid court in Herat conceive colors that seem to be made of pure light, without weight and volume. Their luminous colors synthesize a unique worldview from the anti‐materialistic teachings of Mani, the Sufi “world of imagination” and the alchemists' principles of transmutation. Five centuries later, our digital technologies seem to offer us such disembodied colors, which used to be the artistic dream of an artisanal culture. Pixels replace pigments, light‐colors replace matter‐colors. With the booming animation and game cultures, Tokyo becomes one of the first places that pixels invade in the 80s. A group of Japanese architects and artists seeks to express in their creations the ethereal dimension of the pixels' electronic light. Through a spatio‐temporal leap, the miniatures, as a historical reference point, reveals the emerging chromatic trends in contemporary architecture and visual culture. Could the invention of pixels be after all, stemming from an ancestral aspiration of mankind based on the sensorial and intelligible duality of his nature?