HTML Color Codes.

Reviewed by Susan Ballard.
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=383

Curated by Carolyn Kane for Rhizome.org September, 2009, the HTML Color Codes exhibition features a selection of internet based artwork that address the topic of digital color. The central question that the exhibition poses is whether or not artists working with the internet are in fact limited to a “ready-made” color palette, a premise that many artists working with film, photography, and mass produced, standardized paint sets have assumed. The rationale for this question stems from theories of perception that argue that color is a not ready-made object found in a paint set or machine, but rather it is an experience that results from a complex process of light interacting with the retina and human nervous system.

Dr. Susan Ballard is a writer, curator, musician and artist who spends her time writing, thinking and teaching about contemporary digital and time-based installation art, sound and noise. Her current research investigates the contribution of artists to contemporary notions of utopia and the political and cultural implications of a materialist reading of media cultures in antipodean environments. Su is the Principal Lecturer in Electronic Arts at the Dunedin School of Art, in New Zealand. Her book The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader was published in 2008. She is a founding trustee of ADA (http://www.aotearoadigitalarts.org) New Zealand’s digital artists network. She tends to blog here: http://housesparrow.blogspot.com