‘The Color Project’ explores narratives through colour. The project, created by MPC New York in collaboration with artist Thompson Harrell, explores narratives through colour, line, and form found in geographic satellite imagery. The piece utilizes Google Earth, and custom software programmatically records the geographical features of each location, which are presented on an impressive wall of 27 HD screens.

The main technical hurdle was scale: the sheer amount of content needed to create the installation was prohibitive without a scalable custom software solution.  We first needed to analyze well over 1,000 square miles of satellite imagery from 12 different locations, and identify hundreds of "meaningful" colors at pixel-level in each location.

The formal motifs of each film location are explored in the form of a grid of 162 globes.  In beautifully synchronicity, each view first plunges from space, coming to a stop on a single color in the landscape, creating a place-specific mosaic. Hopping from one location to the next, the piece reveals the character of Bogotá, Colombia (Maria Full of Grace), Cleveland, New York City, Florida (Stranger than Paradise), Vietnam and Virginia (The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers), among others, while also drawing attention to the contrast between the locations.

Using openFrameworks and Awesomium (an off-screen browser renderer), they built an automated sampling and recording interface to the Google Earth API and created a library of over 1,620 sequences, each spanning 1 minute and 30 seconds. Finally, Python and Nuke were utilised to composite the final five sequences, each containing 324 individual videos to make up the mosaic.

Creative Director.- David Estis.
In collaboration with Artist.- Thompson Harrell.
Executive Producer.- Tim Dillon.

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Published on: January 24, 2014
Cite: "The Color Project at IFP Media Center." METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/color-project-ifp-media-center> ISSN 1139-6415
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