Color Wheel is a series in which we identify a trending color in the art world and post a daily image that illustrates its popularity. This week’s color is brown.
Brown is not the color of the Internet. Steely gray, Day-Glo blue, and default black: those are the colors you’ll find far more often on the Internet than earth tones. What a hard task I set up for myself, then, by searching for brown art online. I searched far and wide, and eventually discovered an industrial brown—almost an aged bronze patina—in Rene Abythe’s “startup and shutdown sequence.” That video’s found in Sara Ludy’s Chambers pavilions, a series of “online sound rooms,” and her contribution to the Wrong digital art biennale.
The video itself takes a fairly common object—what looks like a household fan—and the camera slowly pans over its body as if it were a luxury vehicle. Over the span of several minutes, the fan in “startup and shutdown sequence” does just what the title says it will, speeding up and then shutting down. That’s a pretty simple concept to get, but there’s some nice touches added, too: as the fan speeds up, nearly roaring with passion, the blades seem to disintegrate into pixellated dust.
So, hooray. Brown on the Internet. Tomorrow we might look elsewhere.
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