COLOR CODEX (INTRO)
By:
August 1, 2024
One in a series of posts investigating what specific colors signify — via specific material contexts — to 25 semiotics practitioners from around the world. Cross-posted from our sister website SEMIOVOX.
This month we’ll begin publishing COLOR CODEX — a 25-part series, cross-posted from HILOBROW’s sister site SEMIOVOX, exploring the unexpected associations evoked for our contributors by specific colors found in the material world.
The idea for the series first occurred to me during the COVID lockdown. Trapped at home for weeks and months, and inspired by Rob Walker’s ART OF NOTICING project, I began to see the everyday objects in my life through new eyes. One day, having idly plucked a 1960s-era Ballantine paperback edition of Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring off my shelf, I realized that I was drawn to a little yellowish green square on the back cover; that particular color, manifested on that particular book, was meaningful to me… It made me feel a certain way, it unlocked something. I wanted to share that insight and read other, similar insights too.
Eventually (in May 2022), I issued a call, to HILOBROW contributors and the general public — via Rob Walker’s THE ART OF NOTICING newsletter, for submissions to a color series. Here’s what I wrote:
If we make ourselves receptive, the colors of specific phenomena in our lives can evoke all sorts of ideas, values, memories, and emotions. So show us a color — materialized in object form — and tell us what it means to you!
The goal of this exercise, I went on to explain, is to pay attention to various specific material manifestations of color in everyday life — a splash of red from the label of an old tomato sauce can that you use to store loose change, say, or the blue handles on a trusty pair of scissors that you use every day — and to share out what that color-manifestation means to you, i.e., what’s evoked whenever you encounter that color?
Alas, we only received two submissions: Marc Weidenbaum on TEAL, and Jason Sandberg on ZINC CHROMATE. It was a promising start — but the series fizzled out. This (admittedly rather nebulous) concept didn’t find much traction with HILOBROW’s usual contributors.
Several months later, I tried again — this time with SEMIOVOX’s contributors. Which is to say: a community of commercial and applied semioticians from around the world. Perhaps teasing out the meaning of a color-manifestation would prove a more straightforward assignment for this specific set of contributors? This time around, everything worked perfectly. Here’s the COLOR CODEX series lineup, originally published at SEMIOVOX between March–November 2023:
Martha Arango (Sweden) on FALUKORV RED | Audrey Bartis (France) on KYOTO MOSS | Maciej Biedziński (Poland) on SKIN-DEEP ORANGE | Natasha Delliston (England) on MARRAKECH MINT | Whitney Dunlap-Fowler (USA) on RESURRECTION CANARY BLUE | Josh Glenn (USA) on TOLKIEN GREEN | Aiyana Gunjan (India) on LETTERBOX RED | Sarah Johnson (Canada) on ARMY GREEN | Lucia Laurent-Neva (England) on TEAL BLUE VOYAGER | Rachel Lawes (England) on DEVIL GREEN | Charles Leech (Canada) on STORMTROOPER WHITE | William Liu (China) on PINING GREEN | Ramona Lyons (USA) on GOTH PURPLE | Sónia Marques (Portugal) on RUNAWAY BURRO | Max Matus (Mexico) on CALIFORNIAN BLUE | Chirag Mediratta (Canada / India) on AUROVILLE ORANGE | Clio Meurer (France) on PARIS LUMINOUS GREY | Serdar Patkin (Turkey / England) on AMBIENT AMBER | Maria Papanthymou (Russia / Greece) on AGALMATOLITE WHITE | Vijay Parthasarathy (USA) on ALPHONSO YELLOW | Greg Rowland (England) on LAUNDROMAT FUTURA | Tim Spencer (England) on ELECTRO-EROTIC COBALT | Ximena Tobi (Argentina) on VILLA MISERIA BRICK | Alfredo Troncoso (Mexico) on BORGES GLAUQUE.
I’m very grateful to this series’ contributors. Other SEMIOVOX series featuring these and other semio colleagues include: COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | MAKING SENSE WITH… | DECODER.
COLOR CODEX kicks off tomorrow, here at HILOBROW. Enjoy!
COLOR CODEX is one of several cross-over series published by both HILOBROW and its sister site, SEMIOVOX. Also see, for example: SEMIO OBJECTS | COVID CODES | CODE-X | TAKING THE MICKEY.