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Abstract
Do we need a philosophy of colour technology? Automation of reproduction technology
will relegate graphic design to the ranking of visual art, a fate that crafts such as weaving,
ceramics and glass have suffered. The twentieth century saw the demise of specialist
fields such as drafting, woodcut, engraving, etching, letterpress, gravure, lithography,
photography and web. Software will democratise graphic design processes, allowing
everyone to be a graphic artist. The automation and democratisation of colour
reproduction have come to fruition as digital workflow changes the graphic designer’s
role. This change makes apparent the history and effect of colour reproduction; it is an
unexplored discipline, the printed word thus far dominating graphic art theory and
history. Real world practice involves antagonisms between art directors, graphic
designers, prepress men, printers and clients. If your average human is to be a graphic
artist, our accumulated colour cognisance requires sharing. Technological change
indicates that colour reproduction had traditions, methodologies and expertise not widely
known. It is the aim of this paper to lay bare this colour history.
Colour and light in science, philosophy, optics, printing, visual arts, photography and
graphics have culturally fixed and reductive histories, requiring recovery, examination and
collation. When a technology becomes successful, it becomes invisible; its processes are
blackboxed and visible to specialists alone; only inputs and outputs are generally apparent.
A colour technology history requires these blackboxed processes to be unpacked. Primary
sources in this history such as research papers, biographies, and trade journal accounts of
methods are classified as events, instead of historical dates and fact markers, to
demonstrate an unbroken continuum of human thought and invention that is traceable to
thought’s earliest recording. Corporatised promotional guides and handbooks supplement
the history, despite their bias for appearing scientific and successful, with knowledge
presented as a body of unquestionable facts. Art histories mark the end of the pursuit of
verisimilitude as coinciding with the invention of photography; however, graphic art
imaging continued the inheritance of this pursuit. Automated exactly repeatable colour
verisimilitude was its nirvana, achievable through mathematicophysical descriptions of
colour science and measurement. This thesis explores the creation of this code by theories
and practices of scientists, philosophers, graphic artists and twentieth-century corporations
and international authorities. Subsumed into our machines it has led to our technorealist
faith in technology and to the demise of scepticism regarding colour realism.