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Color Yourself Inspired™ by Andrew Demirjian and James Proctor
Color Yourself Inspired™ is a generative artwork that creates unpredictable poetic phrases from Benjamin Moore’s paint color database; it is an interdisciplinary exploration of sound, color and language. An online collection of over 1000 unique color names are poetically sequenced using phonetic analysis and parts of speech analysis in a computer program designed by the artists. Instead of labeling color with language as the marketing team has done in the original database, Color Yourself Inspired™ (a marketing slogan from the Benjamin Moore website) inverts this relationship and uses language to generate visual information.
Every three seconds a new phrase combination is chosen and the hue, saturation, and brightness of the selected colors determines the location and size of the on-screen graphics. The musical notes map a twelve-tone chromatic scale to the hues of a 360º color wheel. The brightness of the color shifts the pitch over five octaves, while the saturation controls the duration of the note. The piece humorously plays with the marketing language of late capitalism through exploring the nuances between ways of seeing, reading and hearing.
