COFA Colour Colloquium 2009

The official title is actually
"1st COFA Colour Colloquium: New Perspectives to Teaching Colour - An Interdisciplinary Approach"

It's an event I attended today, which was most stimulating and in a way mentally exhausting. But it made my head swirl with ideas and my belly fill with emotions. So I had this idea, while taking down notes, to capture the essence of the speeches by using just phrases. I mean, really, who takes detailed notes these days, and more importantly, who actually re-reads them? I noticed that many ideas can be captured with just a few words, so here is my version.

Word clouds generated by brilliant Jonathan Feinberg from Wordle




Text aggregation of phrases
colour is completely subjective
colour classification is complex
lightness and darkness seem to be more important than hue
Ginger Riley
Ewald Namatjira
colour teleports us to a particular space in our consciousness
colour takes us to dreaming space
anthropology of colour
language of colour
detox from overstimulation
stop and observe
nature is the best teacher
colour detox
icons are windows to other dimensions
expand the way we deliver knowledge in the future through holograms
reduce information input and seek focus
David Bachelor
colour understanding is in observation, especially observation of nature
seeing reproduction is a very different experience from seeing the original work
go to a museum!
artwork aura
experimenting and altering perception
effect is dependent on your level of awareness
ability to perceive
walking in silence awakens heightened perception
relationship between intuition and knowledge
student needs to find a way to serve her/his individual needs
pink is the colour of the future
all the knowledge you need is out there
buy paints with single pigment
mix your own!
desire to seek
colours don't exist in vacuum
year-long cruise is best for learning

Wisdom by Andrew Zuckerman

Have you ever planned to attended a lecture not expecting much, perhaps even thinking it will be boring... Well, Andrew Zuckerman's talk about his Wisdom series was just the opposite of that! Right from the beginning he established a connection with the audience, and shared his passion generously. To me, this was one of those fortunate opportunities, where I found myself at an event, which left me thinking for days to come.

On October 16, 2008 photographer Andrew Zuckerman gave a talk at the opening of his exhibition, titled Wisdom. Through his work Zuckerman hopes to revive the tradition of the elders being the wise members of the tribe, and to helps us realize that we are a collective group, which possesses an enormous amount of knowledge and experience. He interviewed and photographed 51 people over the age of 65, whom we consider to be wise. Those include Nelson Mandela, Clint Eastwood and Judi Dench.

The exhibition is currently still running until November 16th at the State Library of New South Wales. The exhibition space is set up beautifully and simply, utilizing only black and white colors with clean typography along the walls. If you have a chance, go see it!




In addition to the exhibition, Andrew Zuckerman also produced a book and a movie with the same title, Wisdom. Here is the movie trailer. May we find the wisdom within ourselves and share it with the world.



The full video of the talk and some additional "behind the scenes" videos are available on the State Library website here [long link].