Category Archives: synesthesia

art, synesthesia, travel

Was Lorenzato a synaesthete?

At the Palácio das Artes in Belo Horizonte, we saw an exhibit of the paintings of Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, a self-taught Brazilian modern artist. Most of the paintings were figurative, or semi-abstract. But tucked in among them was this unique piece: an arrangement of colored rectangles, each labeled with a letter, spelling out the phrase “adoro apreciar a alvorada e o poente” (“I love to enjoy the sunrise and sunset”).

If you know me (or anyone with synaesthesia) a familiar pattern will jump out at you right away: each letter is always represented by the same color. Every O is red, every E royal blue, etc.

Could it be that Lorenzato was a synaesthete, and these are his personal colors?

Digging deeper into the pattern here: each color is specific, not generic: for example, the letter P (which appears twice) is also blue, but it’s a deep navy blue, distinct from the royal blue of E. And the colors are unevenly distributed around the color wheel: there are four distinct shades of green (C, I, V, and T), two blues (E and P), only one each of red (O), yellow (N), brown (L), black (A), gray (R) and white (D), and no examples of orange or purple. This arbitrariness and specificity is typical of the grapheme-color mappings of most synaesthetes.

It’s remotely possible he may have been a pseudo-synesthete (someone wrongly believed to have synaesthesia because they used it in their art), but Lorenzato does not seem to have been the kind of artist to follow fashionable trends (see the note on the back of one of his paintings, below.) And a cursory sweep of the grapheme-color mappings of his contemporaries shows no match even slightly better than chance.

So, thus far, all evidence suggests this is a case of true synaesthesia. But since the man himself passed away thirty years ago, we may never know for sure. (If only he’d chosen a more pangrammatical verse for his painting…)

“Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato, self-taught painter and sniper. No schooling. Doesn’t follow trends. Doesn’t belong to little churches. Joins as he pleases.”
alphabet, interactive, synesthesia, visualization

The return of Flash?

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December 31, 2020 marked the official demise of Adobe (nee MacroMedia) Flash. On that day, a number of web-native interactive artworks (Graffiti Archaeology among them) disappeared from public view, seemingly forever. This felt like a classic case of “why we can’t have nice things”, and it made me sad, but of course we all have had much bigger things to worry about the past couple of years, so I tried to just let it go and move on.

Imagine my delight, then, when I learned about Ruffle, a Flash Player emulator written in Rust. I’ve been tinkering with it the past couple of days, and while it isn’t perfect, it’s really quite impressive! Super easy to install, and when it works, it works everywhere, no fuss.

The grafarc UI reveals a number of ways in which Ruffle seems to differ from the original Flash Player, which makes the user experience a lot jankier than we originally intended. (You can install the Ruffle browser extension if you want to see for yourself.) So, I won’t be switching that on by default just yet– I’ll see if I can work with the developers to fix those glitches first.

But I also tried it on my old synaesthesia visualization applet, and there it works perfectly! (On desktop, at least– because the applet requires you to type words on a keyboard, it won’t work on mobile devices just yet.) So I’m happy to report that with one line of code, an old interactive artwork that I believed long gone has returned, unscathed, from the abyss.

Long live Flash! And three cheers to the devs of Ruffle!

alphabet, books, graffiti, personal, self-reference, synesthesia

Interview in LAB 04

LAB magazine issue 4After a long hiatus, Joseph Robertson’s excellent LAB magazine is back, and it features an interesting three-way interview he conducted with me and graphic designer Ian Lynam (author/editor of Parallel Strokes) over five years ago. It’s a fun meander through many of my favorite alphabet-related topics. The rest of the magazine is gorgeous and stimulating, as always. You can download the whole thing as a PDF for free, or buy a hard copy via print-on-demand. (I already have two earlier issues, and they’re handsomely bound and printed, well worth the cover price.) Or, just go straight to our interview. Enjoy!

(Previously: Folk Typography essay in LAB 01)

 

synesthesia

A clue from the distant past!

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colored number sticks by otherthings
colored number sticks, a photo by otherthings on Flickr.

While looking at a possible kindergarten for our 4-year-old, I stumbled on a bin full of these colored wooden blocks in one of the classrooms. I remember these blocks from my classroom in 2nd grade. The shortest stick is a cube, and the longest is ten cubes. You can use them to teach arithmetic, by putting them together end to end and seeing how they line up, arranging them into rectangles, and so on.

But what caught my eye was something very different: according to my synesthesia, the first three blocks are all exactly the right colors. In particular, the unit block, being unpainted wood, perfectly captures the tendency of the number 1 to hover between white and yellow in my mind. I have vivid memories of playing with these blocks, assembling them into shapes, in that 2nd grade classroom. Could this be the origin of my synesthetic map? It feels too right to be a total coincidence. And yet, none of the colors from 4 through 10 match my mappings at all.

Apparently the blocks are called Cuisenaire Rods (or rechenstäbchen) and their colors have not changed substantially since the 1950’s. This means that thousands of synesthetic children may be exposed to these blocks during their formative years. I wonder if anyone else had their colors influenced in this way?

alphabet, links, synesthesia

The Limits of Color Coding

“Ivan is the colour of the letter G but four people saw it as Adam.”

I’m a big fan of color coding. I use it to help me wrap my head around complex tasks, like computer animation. I’m also a pretty harsh judge of color coding schemes, especially for transit systems. Growing up in New York spoiled me for good in that regard: the subway there has its flaws, but color is not one of them. Having synaesthesia also makes me tend to organize names by color in my head (but usually only in my head, since nobody else shares my personal alphabet of colors.)

One of the problems with any color coding scheme is that the more things you need to code, the harder it gets to choose distinct colors. But where exactly is the limit? That’s the subject of this interesting paper, A Colour Alphabet and the Limits of Colour Coding (PDF) by Paul Green-Armytage. The lengths these folks went to to understand the problem are impressive. The paper also has great sentences like “Ivan is the colour of the letter G but four people saw it as Adam.” (Thanks to Mike K. for the link!)

math art, synesthesia

Prime factorization sweater

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20120430-072656.jpg
Certified math nut Sondra Eklund has made an awesome sweater. Before you read her explanation, take a look at it and see if you can figure out how it works.

Of course, the synesthete in me says her color choices are all wrong. But she’s coloring a different animal here (primes, not numerals) so there’s no real way to be “right”. Regardless, I want this as a T-shirt!

(via MetaFilter)

interactive, self-reference, synesthesia

A Happy Accident.

I was home sick from work today, too sick to talk or really get out of bed and do anything– but fortunately not too sick to tap on a keyboard for a while. So I cracked open my long-neglected laptop and downloaded the latest version of Processing, which for those of you who don’t know it, is a really cool programming environment designed for artists. It’s a great big toybox full of fun gadgets, with plenty of examples to crib from, so you can just start with something interactive right away, and tinker with it until it does what you want–or does something completely unexpected.

It’s funny, because I was just talking with a friend the other day about watercolor, and how the happy accidents are what make that medium so much fun. We were comparing it to our day jobs in computer animation, where everything that happens is deliberate (not to mention expensive.) So it’s nice to see that happy accidents can happen in the computer once in a while too.

synesthesia

Can you teach yourself synaesthesia?

Neuroscientist Olympia Colizoli has done an interesting experiment where she tried inducing synaesthesia in non-synaesthetes:

To test the idea, they gave seven volunteers a novel to read in which certain letters were always written in red, green, blue or orange (see picture). Before and after reading the book, the volunteers took a “synaesthetic crowding” test, in which they identified the middle letter of a grid of black letters which were quickly flashed onto a screen. Synaesthetes perform better on the test when a letter they experience in colour is the target letter.

The volunteers performed significantly better on this test after training compared with people who read the novel in black and white.

I’m curious as to how significant the effect turned out to be for non-synaesthetes. (I also wonder: what was the novel? Something by Nabokov maybe? ;-) Unfortunately I can’t find Colizoli’s data on line anywhere, as her research appears to have been presented as a conference poster session rather than a full publication. But hopefully we’ll be hearing more about this in the near future…

Update: You can read a more detailed abstract of Colizoli’s experiment over at synesthesia.info.