Thinking Blue

This inquiry begins in thinking blue and seeks to find blue resonances across atmosphere, language, memory, and digital mediations. Blue appears in sky and water as gradients of light and depth—continuous phenomena produced through atmospheric scattering and relational perception. The inquiry thinks planetary blue together with digital and posthuman theory, tracing how blue becomes abstracted, permuted, and discretized as it moves and becomes digital. This project seeks to follow the continuous phenomena of blue and identify multimodal flight patterns across different registers: planetary blue; languaged blue; #0000ff; memory blue, blue stored in dreams and digital architectures, invisible blue, and sounded blue.

Thinking blue is both method and matter. Through fictopoiesis, a form of speculative theory writing, and arts-based digital inquiry, this project explores how the discreteness of blues moves across perception, language, and digital mediation shaping how skies and blue guitars might come to be.

Orbits of Blue explores named blues, historical and contemporary naming systems, relationships between colours, and their representation through computational arrangements.

Diagramming Blue explores writing, photographic traces, pixel sampling, visual diagrams, and computational mediation.

A word’s photographs, their traced contours, the shards they cut, gathering into the sheet.

Drawings from the sketchbook, and the same drawings layered and set on a line plate.

The working notebook holds every plate, the data behind them, and a dated log of each apparatus: 730 blue names from eleven naming systems, the first 300 names with their sources, and the xkcd colour survey.

Open the notebook →