@troy_s@mastodon.art cover

Digital colour gadfly. Antihumanist. Antipositivist. Acolyte of moving / static pixel hermeneutics and thaumaturgy. Make creative things matter.

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@troy_s@mastodon.art avatar troy_s , to random
@troy_s@mastodon.art avatar troy_s , to random

Does Helmholtz / Benham's disc support or falsify the idea that phasic signatures in the energy to coenergy projection of "colour" exist?

By varying the "black" at a specific phasic intervals. Under an energy to coenergy frame, this would hint that our vision can identify phasic signatures of "colour".

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More Phasic Signatures from James Butterfield.

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An historical moment otherwise lost if it were not for the Internet Archive.

Note that following the Energy Phase thinking, the “green” is likely being greatly diminished as it is in a decrement orientation, relative to the carrier signal. I suspect that if it were in an increment in terms of luminance, it would be a more strident effect.

That’s just speculation of course!

https://archive.org/details/twitter-1251080459762593792

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@troy_s@mastodon.art avatar troy_s , to random

This is wild. Only works on Desktop Safari for me though. Haven't tested iPad OS yet.

https://physicallybased.info/tools/explorer/

I think this is @apq 's work.

Kind of... mind blowing.

But take note how our cognition of material appearance is directly related to energy integration in the planar picture-as-surface sense.

Super cool stuff.

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@apq It is absolutely bonkers!

The performance catches me off guard a bit? Is this the threejs system at work from @donmccurdy , @herbst , and company?

@troy_s@mastodon.art avatar troy_s , to random

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116080940123156050

This is likely not an accident.

@troy_s@mastodon.art avatar troy_s , to random

RE: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/116074255217072629

I hate to say this, but as someone who watched code march from the Apple ][ era, and the way the cultural power swung, there is arguably always a hubris laden Goose Stepping Nazi seduction in this era of computing.

The little boys with their toys always came from privileged families; an Apple ][ was a rather massive expense back then, doubly so given how fundamentally useless these machines were. They emerged as little boys as that is what the culture marketed to.

So we end up with privileged,

troy_s OP ,
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and by privileged we can guess the skin colour, boys who hacked on those machines in the early years.

And what comes out of this? Hubris. Why?

These kids were treated as special. As wizards and geniuses, because they could figure out how to make the magic monkey do tricks. With that treatment, the idea that these kids were special emerged.

Sound familiar?

Once the myth of genius is substituted in for labour and craft, it’s only a shallow mind away from believing that they are special.

@troy_s@mastodon.art avatar troy_s , to random

“[2016] The CIA, NSA and Pokémon Go

Before heading out to capture Pokémon, you might want to consider the data the game has access to and the history of the company that created the game”
https://www.networkworld.com/article/953621/the-cia-nsa-and-pokmon-go.html

@troy_s@mastodon.art avatar troy_s , to random

I've said it before, but it came up again today...

I stress...

There is no "colour" at all in "colourimetry".

Colourimetry would be better off labelled stimulimetry or something akin to that, as it strictly pertains to radiometric, and the parallel weighted photometric, quantities of stimuli required to dissolve a boundary condition in a split bipartite field.

Note that there's absolutely nothing to do with "colour" in that definition. It is nothing more than boundary base relationships.

@troy_s@mastodon.art avatar troy_s , to random

RE: https://mastodon.art/@troy_s/115849179724641754

I still struggle to wrap my head around just how busted up these pictures are.

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Remember when it was impossible to purchase a TV without 3D? Me neither.

Every time I hear “HDR is Here To Stay” I am reminded of the various enthusiasts who tried to tell us this in the past…

“Box office boost shows 3D is here to stay”

https://phys.org/news/2009-11-office-boost-3d.amp

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“James Cameron Says It’s “Absolutely Inevitable” That All Entertainment Will Be In 3D”

https://theplaylist.net/james-cameron-says-its-absolutely-inevitable-that-all-entertainment-will-be-in-3d-20130822/

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“Get Used To "3D" TVs – They're Here To Stay”

https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/get-used-to-3d-tvs-theyre-here-to-stay/

troy_s OP ,
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If folks can’t see just how broken HDR pictures are, maybe it is time to go back to working as a barista at the local coffee shop, or some other trade that doesn’t require judgement along craft.

When HDR dies the inevitable death it will, folks who were boosting for it ought to be reminded of their mindset for a good while.

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Always a good time to repeat McLuhan…

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

@troy_s@mastodon.art avatar troy_s , to random

If we think about "Luminance" to "Chrominance" as being orthogonal dimensions of energy conservation, we can lean into a more established model of this relationship by way of sine and cosine waves.

This might be useful given that we are discussing amplitudes "away" from some mean energy central carrier.

I believe there's a very useful visualization here.

To appreciate this, sine and cosine are "orthogonal" projections, and the respective areas of each curve amplitude always sum to unity.

@troy_s@mastodon.art avatar troy_s , to random

RE: https://mastodon.art/@troy_s/115939790940886580

Somewhat “happy” to report that the spherical projection is apparently incorrect.

It appears that the appropriate projection is a hyperbolic space.

Who knew?

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As best as I can tell however, neither Yilmaz nor Resnikoff prior, were aware of the retinal ganglion cells, which arguably provide us the deepest insight into this projection.

Specifically, we can think of a Poincaré open unit disc as being the totality of the sum of all energy at a given relative position. The perimeter of the Poincaré disc forms the infinite horizon of ever diminishing energy.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should, as it's technically buried in that wretched stimuli

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specification known as the CIE Chromaticity diagram. Don't believe me?

Every time someone gazes upon this Medusa-like plot, they are turned to stone pondering what exists out in the regions not demarcated by the familiar horseshoe.

Eventually, with some painful understanding, they come to understand that there is nothing outside of this projection shape.

How come?

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If we think about this peculiar almost-triangular shape, we can see the wavelengths of energy plotted around the perimeter.

That is because there's an implicit assumption of a given fixed energy level in the experiments, and in fact within the plot. Let's call this fixed energy level E.

As we "move" toward this peculiar shape boundary, we are in fact increasing excitation purity. Think of it as an ever "thinning" region of energy. As we thin, the energy drops.

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As we grow ever "thinner" we approach the event horizon of zero energy.

Hence, there's literally nothing outside of that shape. That entire mythical construct that naturally emerges from our cognition of maps to territories, is purely a nonsense inference from a crap projection.

Sort of like thinking about time as zero to whatever, and then some curious mind will ask, quite rightly and logically, "What comes before time zero?"

Of course, under a different projection, "Before Time Zero"

@troy_s@mastodon.art avatar troy_s , to random

To revisit the Luminance vs Chrominance functions in relation to Ostwald, we can quickly realize that the Chrominance of any given mixture is the Luminance of the complement.

Plotting these together, yields this sort of diagram. Notice how we can read these following Ostwaldian lines of reasoning, as in Luminance forms a unit area up from some base energy per unit area, and Chrominance forms a unit area down from some base energy per unit area.

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The understanding that a single sensory impulse of a given unit energy input reveals something about the complement is perhaps the most intriguing part of the dynamics of the system.

Remember, a complement is not an opponent. A complement is the other portion of the set.

So when we realize, by way of MacAdam, that the Chrominance vector is complementary to the Luminance vector, the notion of complement when combined with the other portion, reveals the whole set.

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Given that this relationship appears to hold for any visible combination of energy, MacAdam’s Moment calculation could be thought of as revealing the complementary energy component of the signal. Again, the complement is not “in opposition to”, but rather, the “other portion”.

An awareness of the Chrominous force of A as being equivalent to the Luminous force of the complementary energy is perhaps more profound than it first appears.

Imagine partitioning incoming energy five times.

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The Luminous force of a given direction along increments or decrements is given by the Luminous Efficiency function weighting of the incoming energy signal.

That would be the integral of the incoming energy signal as indicated under the curve that reaches maximum at 555nm.

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Via MacAdam, and a realization that the Luminance to Chrominance force are equivalent vectors, we can suggest a shorthand. That is, we can think in terms of the complement of the set, where in this case, the complement of A is some notion of a B. Here, B would be quite literally a complementary energy field, perfectly partitioned as the intersection of two sets.

This shorthand cheat allows us to first estimate the complement, and then take the complementary energy signal’s Luminance.

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This is all well and good, but is there something even more useful in this framing?

Across the past centuries, there’s been a reoccurring thematic of some minds drawing some parallels between “colour signals” and “notes” in music.

Newton was one of the earlier minds, although the history goes back all the way to Ptolemy.

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The intriguing framing of a “colour” as locally bound to a given carrier frequency might be a useful framing.

I would point out the paradox of “orange” vs “brown” and “yellow” vs “drab olive” as being striking examples whereby identical stimuli leads to viscerally unique qualitative descriptors being a reason.

Yet in both swatch contexts, it is not enough to consider a global increment or decrement. For example, both upper and lower rows are decrement luminance of the discs.

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The “colour duality paradox” forces us to reconcile that even within a given cognized configuration, our sense of colour seems to hinge upon some poorly understood threshold. A luminance decrement of A is orange, while crossing some threshold it becomes brown.

This becomes rather untenable when we are stuck thinking in a polemic model of up to down, where our global maxima and minima frame the discussion model limits.

We can further make the case through other examples, that said global

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notions of model limits are clearly an incorrect framing.

Here, we can clearly an eerily similar multistability of stimuli regions, laid more clear by way of how we adjust the carrier signal. Here, consider the carrier signal as the spatial horizontal and vertical sampling, and the carrier signal range as “within the rectangles in question”.

Notice how the stimuli in the base presentation is “blackish”, and yet in identical form becomes “greyish”?

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If we accept the complementary nature of Luminous force to Chrominous, it comes with an acceptance of a broader complementary structure.

When we think about Chrominance here, we can think of it as an ever "thinner" slice of the incoming energy. Working ever more closely to something akin to a Dirac-like pulse as we increase Chrominance.

Again, thinking along the band example, the total luminance is the integral of all "slices".

We can imagine only a single band here being high chrominance.

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As we shrink our band of energy, something unique happens. This unique thing leads many a new person to look at the CIE xy colourimetric projection and make logical, albeit utterly erroneous, conclusions.

The boundary of the CIE xy projection, following the idea of ever decreasing integrals of energy "slices", is an infinite event horizon toward "zero energy".

An infinitely thin slice of a Reimann sum, approaching zero energy.

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Given we already have established that Luminance is complement to Chrominance, and that we can use the shorthand of taking the Luminance of the literal complement to derive the vector, where does this lead us?

Well folks... it forces us to reconcile with another idea that wise minds of yore already suggested.

None other than Hering!

Sadly however, the framing is one of the opponents. Note the subtle difference here again, between opponent versus what we are exploring as complement.

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I'd suggest that since Hering's time, there have also been folks who have suggested this orthogonality. One of which you can find over on Mathstodon, being Dr. Vlaudusich.

I cannot stress the difference between opponent and complement here enough, however.

If one follows along the postulate based on MacAdam's work, and the series of logical steps outlined above, it leaves us with one somewhat perplexing realization...

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The perplexing part?

As we forever decrease the Reimann-like width integral of incoming radiation, we approach zero total local energy.

In terms of visual cognition, we have a colloquial name for this experience. That's "black"!

Note that this holds up for any local framing. Put a blue filter in front of us? Local "lowest" energy is "black". A green filter looking at newsprint "black"? Somehow it too is "black".

A hazy diffusion filter? Even within the increased energy field... black!

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The key insight here is that we can draw a straight line between Chrominance, and the ever decreasing Reimann width or Dirac like pulse sample and ever increasing toward minimal energy. And that minima of local energy? That's the weird thing we call "black".

This folks somewhat forces us into the inconvenient realization...

"Blackness" must not be opposite to "Whiteness"... but rather if one follows the logical trail, it forces us to accept...

Blackness as complementary to Whiteness!

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If this sounds all too abstract at first, and that there's little to be gleaned from this framing, I'd encourage one to think again.

If we can sample a given swatch of "colour" and, by the nature of the neurophysiological signals infer something about the complementary energy, this must hold true for blackness.

That is to say that given we are dealing with orthogonal notions, not opponent signed, "black" must be informing us something about the complementary "white".

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For starters, we already can show how Luminous force to Chrominous force are equal, and the complementary nature of their structure.

Accepting this postulate forces us to logically deduce that this must be the case for Black force to White. After all, an infinitely thin Reimann sum, while being high Chrominous force, would simultaneously be indicative of extreme locally low energy... aka "Black"!

So where does this all go?

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This is what looped me back to Newton's musical note idea. It is at least possible that we can, as Newton observed, locate our colours within a "colour octave". What Newton did not appear to consider was to push the idea further along the musical analogy perhaps... as musical octaves have carrier frequencies.

Given the complementary orthogonal nature of what we've explored, what emerges if we push a bit further?

Well we can first draw our "colour notes".

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Notice how there's an emergent symmetry here along the carrier frequency. If we push to higher luminance for a "yellow" by attenuating it, the corresponding complementary "blue" drops to lower luminance.

By continuity, we can uniformly decrease the "yellow" excitation purity to maximal luminance, and it follows that "blues" complement drops to zero.

Which indicates that at "white" as a local maxima energy, "black" must be the complement.

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Now this "dual" diagram is confusing as hell, quite frankly.

The increments and decrements are somewhat reinforcing the very same problem that got us here in the first place by forcing everything along a polemical model.

We've already illustrated that the model is not polemical, aka a magnitude with a sign, but rather orthogonal.

So what model facilitates this orthogonality more elegantly?

Orthogonal would be akin to our original diagram, with x and y.

Hello Sine and Cosine!

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If we freeze our sine and cosine at a given moment, and overlap them, the integrals sum to unity. That's a confusing math way of saying "Derp if our units are zero to one, they both sum to one."

For the visual geometry folks, this is quite literally how a triangle's edges would sum to a unit circle radius using good old Pythagoras.

In energy terms? This is known as Parseval's Identity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parseval%27s_identity

And this is the intriguing glue toward the end of all of this...

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If one has followed along this far, and one would be forgiven for having given up on this ChatGPT looking mess, the conclusion in the achromatic domain is rather striking, or perhaps even shocking.

If we accept that white must be orthogonal to black, and the basics of this orthogonal symmetry, it follows that white to black are complements of the carrier signal. That signal?

Visual energy.

Adding white and black, not as opponent magnitudes, but orthogonal magnitudes, splits the signal

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into two parts of a cohesive whole.

And that whole?

Well it seems to force us to accept that is must be the weighted portion of radiometric energy that us primates are sensitive to.

Energy to coenergy. Kinetic to potential energy. Or any of the other framings out there...

What if we could extract more utility out of the framing of a "carrier energy"?

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Of course I think we can.

Remember when I asked if we could have a "black" that was "too black"? That the "blackness" almost feels like a note that has shifted to a different octave?

We can arguably say that this is, given a momentarily agreed upon cognized configuration, validated.

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I would like to loop this idea all the way back to the ridiculous Wikipedia example for the Helmholtz-Kohlraush effect.

troy_s OP ,
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Remember... excitation purity and Chrominous force are correlated. Further, we've established that as we approach maximal Chrominous force, our integral of the carrier signal drops to zero, and we arrive at a maximal Chrominance of "black". This value is effectively "zero", but within a carrier signal case, nonzero in the same way an octave resides at a given frequency centroid energy.

So this means that we can suggest, to borrow Ostwaldian terms, our swatches here are too high "black" energy.

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Now at this point I'm going to suggest that using the terms "white" and "black" are way too laden with our baggage of understanding. So much so that saying "blackness" and "whiteness" obfuscates the broader ideas.

What are those broader ideas? I'm going to use the terms Energy and Coenergy here to relate to local energy maxima and minima respectively.

Reframing, our swatches are carrying too high Coenergy, and not enough Energy. Remember... these are orthogonal constructs, not opponent!