The Colour Out of Space

by Marine de Dardel 

‘The Colour out of Space’ reflects the transmutation of the image through the combined use of computational tools and poetic fiction, superimposing abstract visuals with evocative text. Scripted with the p5.js web editor,1 shaded forms slowly emerge, morph, and fade as each point value is mapped across the HSB spectrum. The formless figures move between scientific realism and artistic abstraction, the macrocosmic and the microscopic, the vivid and the livid. Somewhat ironically, it is a machinic syntax that simulates an organic process of (de)generation of meaning. The resulting visual play, the sensuality of protean shapes resembling morbid conditions, refer to the incendiary aura surrounding the history of cinema: the unmistakeable image of the burning film.

art is like fire. It comes out of what it burns. And films must be burned. With the fire within.2 

In the primary meaning of the term, a film is a fine membrane that covers and protects certain parts of a plant or animal organism; by extension, the word refers to an equally fine layer of solid matter on the surface of a liquid or the outer face of another solid. In its secondary meaning, film is a thin strip supporting a sensitive layer which will receive impressions. It registers mental images which are for the most part visual, occasionally with added sound or subtitles, sometimes more like photographic stills, but most often animated like cinematic sequences.3

Initially accidental in origin, the sudden combustion of the film reveals the machinery  sustaining it. The unwritten contract of disbelief may be disrupted, yet the film does not  necessarily stop unspooling in the projector; often deployed in experimental practices, the  burning film reel becomes a meta-springboard, an aesthetic opportunity to visually and critically unveil the materiality of fiction. By simultaneously raising the spectre of destruction  and the silent contemplation of the picture being consumed, it questions the nature of  (super)sensuous perception and the aesthetic appeal of violence, silence, and desolation.  

[…] he was alone with these few lifeless objects, like the debris of a vanished continuum, […].4 

Referencing authors such as Lovecraft, Mallarmé, Ballard, or Joyce, the superimposed  narrative explores themes of cosmic awe, the quest for meaning, and the struggle for survival  in the face of unfathomable forces beyond comprehension. Blending the ordinary and the  eerie to probe the sensory experience of perception, it evokes at once mythopoeia and  disintegration: a future perfect, the beginning and the end of an illusionary world.

The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor’s strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all.5 

Meaning hue or tint, that quality of a thing or appearance which is perceived by the eye  alone,6 it is suggested that colour, rather than an inherent property of matter (a world qualia), is a matter of perception alone – a psychophysical agent mediating the relationship between the object and the subject, between the truth and art. The figurative sense of the word colour further fuels this complex philosophical dispute. Derived from the old Latin colos – ‘a covering’ (akin to celare, ‘to hide, conceal’) – it also translates as stylistic device,  embellishment, specious reason or argument, that which hides the real character of  something. If the world as we perceive is essentially a lie, how could its representations claim to approach the truth?  

According to linguistics, an image is an evocation in the discourse of an often abstract reality different from the reality referred to by the literal meaning of the text, but bound to it by a relation of similitude, of analogy. Words evoke ineffable tropes which are promised a  seemingly sensible artifact through the image. But if it fleshes out the lore, it also masks the  sincerity of the verb. Which of both systems of representation is closer to the truth? Their  singular objects ceaselessly struggle towards the freedom to mean something else and yet, the most ingenious rhetorical contours, the most vertiginous poetic arabesques cannot depict the unrepresentable. How could the turmoil of passions be contained in a single sentence or  image? 

If according to Plato and the principles of Christian morality there must lie a ‘truer’ world  beyond the vile sensuous one, Nietzsche takes an opposite stance; this will to the super sensuous is instead the negation of the only actual reality, the sensible one:

But the element of art is the sensual: the illusion of the senses.7 

A paradigmatic reversal reminiscent of Baudrillard’s criticism of the image: 

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.8 

Assuming this regime of idle simulation, acknowledging the equivalence between reality and representation – is the immemorial debate still pertinent?

The cinematographic image appeals at once to all the senses; it is elevated to the status of a sign. Semioticians study such signifying processes and describe the different stages symbolic  forms may undergo: the poietic or ‘creative’, the aesthetic or ‘sensory’, and the neutral level,  the ‘remains’. ‘The Colour out of Space’ playfully simulates an autopoietic machine probing the productive and perceptive levels of meaning, the aesthetic relation to truth – namely  according to the mental perception of the existence of any part of the body: the ‘ineluctable  modality’9 of the sensorial. Of this nebula of disparate things, it is up to the viewer, then, to  make and unmake the meaning. That is the sovereign subjectivity of the cinematographic  image: an impressionable film realising all contradicting desires of the self, like a dream. 

If we are to believe Godard’s assertion, there can no longer be any question of illusion: ‘IT’S ALL TRUE’.10 No reality, nor betrayal; only traces, after-images, and hauntings. The spectral resurgence of images betrays the wake of a re-presentation, ultimately the resurrection, of something that might have never been there. 

How does meaning come to the image? Where does meaning end? And if it does, what lies beyond?11 

Author

Marine de Dardel is an architect, visual artist, and media scholar. She studied architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) and creative coding at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). She is currently a doctoral researcher member in the research project ‘The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies’ funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in collaboration with Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) and Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). She continuously engages in publications and artistic projects with a specific focus on radical fringes, experimenting with architectural language and computational narratives. 

References  

Anzieu, D. The skin ego. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989: 210. 

Ballard, J. Vermillion sands, prima belladonna. London-Melbourne: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1985: 31-46. 

_____. The drowned world. New York: Liveright Pub. Corp., 2012: 191. 

Barthes, R. ‘The rhetoric of the image’ in Visual culture: The reader, edited by J. Evans and S. Hall. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 1999: 33-40. 

Baudrillard, J. Simulation. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1983: 1. 

Godard, J. Histoire(s) du cinéma, 1988-98.

Heidegger, M. Nietzsche I: The will to power as art. New York: Harper & Row, 1979: 70. 

Joyce, J. Portrait of the artist as a young man. London: Egoist, 1916: 104.

_____ . Ulysses, the 1922 text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008: 37-50. 

Lovecraft, H. The colour out of space and others. New York: Lancer Books Inc., 1963: 12. 

Mallarmé, S. Divagations, Le Phénomène Futur. Paris: Eugène Fasquelle Éditeur, 1897: 5. 

1 https://editor.p5js.org (accessed on 18 January 2025). 

2 Godard 1994. 

3 Anzieu 1989, p. 210. 

4 Ballard 2012, p. 191. 

5 Lovecraft 1963, p. 12. 

6 https://www.etymonline.com/word/color (accessed on 14 January 2025). 

7 Heidegger 1936-39, p. 70. 

8 Ecclesiastes, in Baudrillard 1983, p. 1. 

9 Joyce 2008, p. 37. 

10 Godard 1988-1998. 

11 Barthes 1999, p. 33.