Colour

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,

Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

L'Art, Ezra Pound

Listen to the show here.

See the playlist here.

This week Dave and I spoke to David R. Simmons about how we perceive colour and why it is so important to us. David is a lecturer in Psychology at Glasgow University, and helps to organise a colour studies group. The group is an interdisciplinary forum which meets up roughly four times a year for different events and talks about colour.

You can listen to the interview below.

Here are a few extracurricular titbits:

An experiment to try -

Light, Mirrors and Lenses - F. E. Newing & Richard Bowood

Two octopuses displaying their incredible colour change abilities -

The Soft Intelligence - Jacques Yves Cousteau

And some videos:

A Len Lye GPO unit animation, made by painting directly onto the film.


Another great sesame street song.

And here is a video from a pioneer of colour, Norman McLaren, once a student at GSA, who went on to do his most significant work at the National Film Board of Canada. Like Len Lye, McLaren painted, drew and etched directly onto film stock to make his animations, and then often made the soundtracks to his films by drawing on the soundtrack strip on the film stock itself. In this film you can watch as the shapes and colours on screen respond to the pitch and rhythm of the notes.
Splendid. If you like this, check out his other work, especially the entrancing Lines Vertical and his landmark Begone Dull Care, which was scored by Oscar Peterson.

Also, here is an advertisement you may remember from a few years ago. It was, believe it or not, made at a Glasgow tower block which was earmarked for demolition.

And if you didn't believe this was actually staged and not just CGI, like me, here is a picture of the tower in Toryglen after the shoot.

Which leads us quite nicely onto our next show on the theme of Buildings.