Polarized Color

From late-2009 to the beginning of 2010, my daily routine saw me rise at 5:30 every morning. First, I would check for hints of light dawning above the eastern horizon. If the day promised fair weather, next I would sight the "morning star" shining to the upper right of the nascent dawn. Depending on how bright Venus appeared, I could judge the clarity of the air that day. Tokyo is clear almost every day in winter thanks to the prevailing seasonal west-high east-low pressure patterns. Only then did I ready my old Polaroid camera and start warming up a film pack from the long winter night chill.

10 years of time was needed for me to complete the artwork titled Colours of Shadow. While the entire project constituted a kind of observational apparatus, the observations only began once the apparatus was completed. And were I to include my observational finding in the work, then it would have been an endless project - especially since observations could very well continue after I am gone. In actual fact, however, these present obeservations of mine were begun 350 years ago by Sir Isaac Newton. My apparatus represents an improvement upon Newton's devices I dare not call it my own. Both science and art expand ever-newer horizons by building upon groundwork laid by great forebears, though most people have long since lost track of who first conceived the ideas behind today's hyper-advanced technologies.

Newton published his book Opticks in 1704. While I do not wish to diminish the achievements of the nineteenth century photographic pioneers Talbot and Daguerre, their inventions were made possible because of earlier research into the nature of light itself, which all traces back to Newton. Not long after Newton graduated from Cambridge, the university closed as a precaution against the spread of the Great Plague of London, whereupon he returned home to Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth in eastern England and there continued to conduct research on his own. During his one and half years there he gained important insights into his lifelong pursuits: universal gravitation, infinitesimal calculus and optical theory. At Woolsthorpe Manor he bored a pinhole through a closed window shutter in an upstairs room to let in a tiny beam of sunlight. He began experimenting with a prism, splitting the apparently white light into the primary colors — red, yellow, blue — each with a different refractive index. This discovery along with that of universal gravitation, both major influences on the course of intellectual inquiry thereafter, largely delineated the outlines of Newtonian mechanics. Newton became the first person to explain an apple falling from a tree and the forces between celestial bodies by means of a singular principle without invoking a divine cause. Even today, we estimate the distance to stars by the wavelengh of polarized light they emit.

The establishment of empirically verifiable natural science brought the world closer to the modern age, a world that could be analyzed and quantified. However, a century after the publication of Opticks, criticism of Newton’s mathematical approach was heard from an unexpected quarters. In 1810, the poet, novelist and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe compiled a twenty-year study on the effects of color on the human eye, and in his Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) he found Newton’s impersonal scientific exposition wanting on artistic grounds. Granted Newton’s spectrum of seven defractively differentiated colors was perceived by the human eye via the central cortex, but what did that prove? Colors, Goeth argued, appeal directly to our senses; red and blue have effects upon the human psyche that will not submit to mechanistic quantification. Furthermore, while we perceive light precisely because of darkness, light travelling through the blackness of outer space was imperceptible to the eye; only when light hits the atmosphere and is reflected off airborne dust can we see a blue sky. Seeing the darkest shade ultramarine each dawn as I sighted the morning star, I finally understood what Goethe wrote in his preface: “Die Farben sind Taten des Lichts, Taten und Leiden.” (Colors are acts of light, acts and sufferings). I interpret this to mean color occurs when light strikes some obstruction, and suffers the impact.

Interestingly enough, East Asian Buddhist doctrines use the word “color” (shiki in Japanese) to refer to the material world, as in the well-known phrase from the Han’nya Shingyo sutra. Shiki soku ze ku, ku soku ze shiki (Form is emptiness, emptiness is form). While the original Sanskrit word rupa (form) does not refer to color per se, translating sunyata (void) into the character ku meaning both “emptiness” and “sky,” perhaps suggested color as an apt counterpart. Thus, if the visible world of colour is essentially empty, then this world is as immaterial as the color of the sky. Gazing at bright prismatic light each day, I too, had my doubts about Newton’s seven-color spectrum: yes, I could see his red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet schema, but I could just as easily discern many more different colors in between, nameless hues of red-to-orange and yellow-to-green. Why must science always cut up the whole into little pieces when it identifies specific attributes? The world is filled with countless colors, so why did natural science insist on just seven? I seem to get a truer sense of the world from those disregarded intracolors. Does not art serve to retrieve what falls through the cracks, now that scientific knowledge no longer needs a God? I decided to use virtually obsolete Polaroid film to photograph the spans between colors.

Sunlight travels through black empty space, strikes and suffers my prism, and refracts into an infinite continuum of color. In order to view each hue more clearly, I devised a mirror with a special micro-adjusting tilting mechanism. Projecting the colored beam from a prism onto my mirror, I reflected it into a dim observation chambre where I reduced it to Polaroid colors. Of course, I could further split those prismatic colors by adjusting the angle of that long tall mirror so as to reflect only the hue I want. I could split red into an infinity of reds. Especially when juxtaposed against the dark, each red appears wondrous unto itself. Moreover, colors change constantly. As the sun climbs on its arc, the colors from the prism vary moment by moment. It only takes a few minutes for red turn orange then yellow. Cranking the worm gear by hand to adjust the mirror angle to compensate for the rising sun, I managed to keep the color band within my field of vision.

One morning, I noticed something curious: staring at the band of blue hues with a quiet sense of elation, I shifted my gaze to the white wall and saw yellow. Goethe also studied this phenomena and found that after gazing prolongedly at a single color, the human eye will see an afterimage of the opposite color for a few seconds when looking away. This strange ability to perceive non-existent colors contributes greatly to our aesthetic sense of complementary color harmonies, though look too long at this world and we see an inverted world. It makes me think all the more that "form is emptiness” and vice-versa.

I thought I had finished this project over a year ago, but I availed myself of the opportunity to buy up the last existing stocks of expired Polaroid film from the final ebb of production. Consistently clear Tokyo winter mornings found me swimming in a sea of colors. With neither Newton’s cool, impassionate arithmetic gaze on nature, nor Goethe’s warm poetic reflexivity, I employed my own photographic devices toward a middle way.

- Hiroshi Sugimoto

prev/next