Hüseyin Mert Erverdi
Rumi who was a 13th-century poet, scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic, in his famous Masnavi (Book I) asked a profound question: “Since all the colors emerged from the void of colorlessness, how could color fight with colorlessness?” This question is in essence states the same problems of entropy, the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of human striving; to deploy energy and information to fight back the tides of ever increasing entropy. In one sense, entropy is an expression of the disorder and randomness tendency of the universe.
“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light, and God saw the light, and it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.” is a well-known verse from the opening of the Book of Genesis. In modern terms, light is electromagnetic radiation within a certain portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. As Einstein showed us, light and matter are just aspects of the same thing. Matter is frozen light and light is matter on the move. The usage of word ‘light’ itself usually refers to the narrow visible spectrum that is visible to the human eye and is responsible for the sense of sight having wavelengths in the range of 400–700 nanometers. The human vision has 3 types of cones that, roughly speaking, are excited by red, green, and blue. RGB color model is an additive model. When 100% of each color is mixed together, it creates white light. When 0% of each color is combined, no light is generated, creating black.
On Color (2019) is the story of light, after being birthed by the pitch black void preceding the universe, it disperses into red, green and blue and then from there to all the various colors of visible spectrum emerges and flows into each other, creating all the possible forms of hues. After the life of light spent it flows back into the primordial state of pitch black void of ‘Khaos’.
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"How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word." - Stan Brakhage