Future of Sculpture Final Maquette: Color Changing Room
The installation, called “Color Changing Room,” is a publicly accessible, miniature-sized room filled with multi-colored objects. A light in the room changes colors through the visible spectrum to bright white, along the way illuminating objects of the same color (i.e. a red light wavelength makes all red objects glow, and so on), while other colors in the room that do not match the color of light appear to be black or white. There are books in the room various subjects related to nature and science, and a magnifying glass. The project is a commentary on color perception. The participant, in theory, if they were tiny, would be invited to sit in the room and look at the objects in nature through a magnifying glass, and see that they are highlighted or muted drastically based on which color is highlighting the room, as well as on the furniture around them.
If installed in public, hypothetically in New York City on a place like the The High Line, it would be open during the day and closed at night. At night, a live video feed of the room would be projected onto a nearby billboard (somewhere in enough darkness to show up), showing the colors changing in the room, the colors again altered through digital imaging. This step would be a commentary also on color perception, but through digital technologies. Often, the colors we think we see are not “real.” Even in full spectrum daylight, how do we know what color is “real”? It is all just an illusion of how our brain perceives light on objects around us.
I often think of this when attempting to work in the program Unity; in Unity there is no light pollution. There is no sun. All is black, until you add a light. Essentially, lighting is everything; it is how we see our world, and how we see our world is further manipulated through digital technology.
