Color as stakeholder and memory. Critical historical analysis of the materiality and cultural coding of color
An increasingly colorful world provides the epistemological environment in which color in its totality as a natural, technical and cultural-semantic phenomenon emerges for the first time as a sui generis object of research. The present shows us a completely new functional charge of color, which has found its way into numerous areas of life as a sensitive actor, reacts just as intelligently to individual communication and entertainment needs as it does to dangerous situations, e.g. weather conditions, and presents itself as an artistic, creative and personality-staging, even therapeutic medium.
Ausstellung color continuo 2010
The research project "Color as stakeholder and memory. Historically critical analysis of the materiality and cultural coding of color" (FARBAKS) is an interdisciplinary project in which the TU Dresden, the HfBK Dresden, the FSU Jena and the FH Cologne are participating as joint partners. With reference to the history of colour over the past 200 years, the fundamental changes to which color, a truly omnipresent medium, has been subjected since the beginning of industrialization through new technological forms of production and application, through theoretical and scientific evaluation and through new attributions of meaning, will be examined. A central concern of the project is to gain scientifically usable and verifiable statements about how the understanding of the materiality of color on the one hand and its diverse semantics on the other has changed since the Goethe era. The interdisciplinary composition of this innovative joint project, which brings together disciplines from the natural sciences, humanities, arts, social sciences and history of technology, aims to address eight complex questions on the subject of color in a close exchange between the different research methods, which are oriented almost chronologically to the history of color since 1800. With the aim of gaining results and statements for the current colour discourse, the enormous developments and upheavals that the medium of color has experienced in the course of industrialization up to the current digitalization, virtualization and dematerialization will be examined.
The close interweaving of scientific and technological achievements in the field of color research and production with the as yet unexplored social and artistic application of intelligent dyes forms the background for the novel interdisciplinary profile of this highly topical research project:
Even if the individual sub-projects of the network follow subject-specific approaches and methods, what they all have in common through the material turn is the investigation of the language of color in its material and immaterial manifestations as a cross-disciplinary issue. Color is thus being examined in the context of the funding guideline "The Language of Objects. Material Culture in the Context of Social Developments" as a separate actor in the sense of Bruno Latour's actor-network theory. Natural science, art and technology history, social science, artistic and conservation expertise are coming together here for the first time. A Europe-wide circle of high-ranking collections, institutes, companies, scientists and artists support the research project as cooperation partners and multipliers.
In addition to the usual forms of continuous communication of results (colloquia, conferences, publications, internet platforms), the joint project will be concluded with a final publication and an exhibition translating the research results into the public domain.
The results of the research project "Color as stakeholder and memory. Historical-critical analysis of the materiality and cultural coding of color - FARBAKS" have been published in a comprehensive publication: GESPRÄCHSSTOFF
COLOR. Contributions from science, art and society, ed.
by Konrad Scheurmann and André Karliczek, Böhlau Verlag, Cologne
Weimar and Vienna 2017.