Color Reception

When you visit my website, the colors of the page and the text you see are determined by the weather in my home town. If it’s nice outside my window, the page will have a green or yellow tint. If I’m shoveling snow off my driveway, you’ll see teals or blues. If I’m swimming in a lake, hopefully you’re seeing oranges or (heaven forfend) reds. And if it’s cloudy out, everything is subtly faded (and you’re probably wondering where is this “color” I speak of).

Color is most often thought of as a form of expression. A person with strong feelings or personality will often express these things with bold color choices. But before people expressed themselves with color, they were receiving color from their environment. And once received, colors become a palette of available emotions. In other words, before inner life → color → decor and clothing there was (is) environment → color cues → available feelings.

In my way, I’m making use of both these paradigms, expressive and receptive, in what I’ve done with these pages.

Hue

Hues map to emotions, as well as to seasonal conditions.

My own relationship to emotion is mostly downstream of my thought process. When faced with change, I begin by figuring out what I know (and don’t know) about it, which gives me some idea of which feelings are warranted and productive. Then I feel those feelings; the more certainty, the more I feel. But since I am rarely certain enough about anything to know that I have got the feelings right, my emotional life is pretty subdued.

The natural environment is a good source of feelings I don’t have to think about; I can simply receive. There’s a “way it feels” to be outside when it is snowing, a feeling that goes with sweltering on the front porch in the summer. I can inhabit these qualia without making judgment calls.

So it seems fitting to outsource my site’s color palette to a deterministic function that references the weather — that is, to place color downstream of a thought process — and to let it dynamically reflect my environment.

Chroma

In her prompt for this month’s ‘Colors’ theme, Marisabel Munoz touches on all these ideas:

When I arrived in the Netherlands, a cold and grey winter day, what struck me the most, was the lack of color. Black umbrellas everywhere. Black coats. Brown shoes. Brown buildings of bricks. It was a monochrome life in winter. I did not make much of it then. Until the rise of Spring, on my very first Queen's day, when the whole country dressed in orange. I look at the pictures I took that day in awe, so much color! Everything suddenly came to life. The dark grey city of Amsterdam was ready for the sun. In contrast to my island, where the sun always shined, this country went through cycles of life much like life itself. An unspoken agreement to flow along with the seasons.

How wonderfully this captures the cultural difference in climates! Clearly the climate and culture are linked. If I were raised closer to the equator, the environment (social and natural) would likely have stoked livelier emotional metabolism in me as well.

This far north, people do tend to cooperate with long periods of cloudy monochromism, but also to punctuate them. Then the experience of color is far more heightened when it does finally arrive — exactly the dynamic Marisabel describes above. In a Minnesota winter, Christmas lights are a blazing beacon; in Florida or Hawaii, they appear mostly superfluous.

Contrasting color is intervention, a choice to exert influence; the lack of it also a choice, to yield or to reserve one’s thoughts for oneself. I, like Marisabel, have a favorite commercial, and mine also has color as its theme: color as emotional intervention on a grand scale.

Lightness

I vary the hue of these pages with the temperature, and the chroma with cloud cover. But the lightness does not vary; for any given element, it is constant. Like everything else here, this decision wasn’t originally informed by any deep philosophy, I just thought it looked better. But on reflection it does turn out to have its own analogue to my emotional life.

When the iPhone first introduced its mood tracking feature, I turned it on right away. Twice a day your phone asks you how you're feeling on a 1D spectrum of unpleasant/pleasant, and after a month or a year you can look at a graph of your mood over time.

I’d always had a weakness for Felton-style personal data reporting, and this seemed like a low-friction way to do some of that. I reported my mood to my phone faithfully twice a day, for about a year and a half, during which time it happened that I made some big changes in my work, my perspective, and my life’s direction.

You would have thought the graph of my mood over this time would have been interesting to review, but it wasn’t: with few exceptions, my reported mood hovered a bit above the “neutral” line nearly all the time. The graph wasn’t telling the story of the changes I’d made in my life, as I expected: it was telling the story of how I unconsciously kept myself at a baseline constant level of barely-positive attitude no matter what my circumstances were: the Hedonic treadmill.

Whether my extraordinarily deep emotional keel is a natural strength of mine, or a defect, I am still not sure, but I’m open to both. For now I guess I’m — well, slightly positive about it, naturally.