Study: Additive White

Overly complicated setup to create a white projection: The most neutral color – white is projected on a white wall using three projectors connected to three computers, each displaying not-so-neutral red, green, and blue.

The work was shown at Platform in Kimusa (2009), Seoul Korea.

Study: Additive White is part of the self-initiated project that investigates the common misbelief of the technological advancement. It is typically assumed that technology’s mission is to direct us toward a more efficient state, and that this will result in a more efficient environment. However, the more I looked into the promises of systems, the more I saw their failures and flaws: some were funny, others ridiculous, and all of them a function of a kind of unavoidable inefficiency. I found irony, stupidity, excessive effort when none was required, unnecessary complexity, pointless acceleration, speed at the cost of solvency. This overly complicated setup to project nothing on a wall tries to demonstrate this futile aspect of a system, while using three different computers and projectors each displaying red, green and blue in synchrony to recreate white. Naïve assumption was made that this setup will project a complete white – as advertised by its manufacturers and as written in the first chapter of color theory books.

3 computers with 3 Projectors,
1280 x 1024 pixels

Yale School of Art, Fall 2008

Photo from Samuso