Machine Dreams: Dean Blacc’s Subliminal Explanation of Color Theory

Dean Blacc’s attraction to abstraction and color is rooted in his organic and hands-on upbringing in the arts. A native Londoner, he spent much of his childhood perusing London’s art institutions and later in life he applied his learnings to design. He was both a practitioner and enabler of others, building tools that distilled his insights into applicable frameworks. It is unsurprising then that Blacc has emerged in the generative realm as one of the most effective explorers of symbolist color theory. Machine Dreams is an explicit articulation of how colors impact us, expressed with a delicacy that keeps the directness of the message just below the level of our conscious understanding. Symbolist color theory posits that different colors evoke specific human reactions. These reactions can be idiosyncratic, but within large groups of people, certain colors are believed to evoke similar emotional responses. Color theory is an evolving construct that is widely used as part of design toolkits, and it is applied to us daily via an unending stream of print and digital media. The media succeed or fail to have the intended effect, those efforts are measured and analyzed, and — unbeknownst to us — we become part of the feedback loop that evolves what colors mean to us as a society. Machine Dreams is an elegant, minimalist work that literally explains to us the colors’ intended reaction. But it uses forms, media, and devices that are gentle and ephemeral, keeping our conscious grasp of the explanation just barely out of our reach. <a href="https://medium.com/@tonic_team/dean-blacc-machine-dreams-color-trials-from-my-computers-journal-d99048309f8f">Learn More</a>