Making Sense of Color is a collaborative project co-created by Ivy Ross, Google’s Vice President of Hardware Design, and Chromasonic, an LA-based Arts + Research lab, exhibited during Milan Design Week 2024.
Within the sensorial installation, visitors experienced an immersive multi-layered environment comprising repeating semi-transparent scrims. As visitors move through the 600-square-meter space in an industrial building near Porta Venezia, they are enveloped by a kaleidoscope of colored light projected onto the scrims alongside sound frequencies aligned with the corresponding color wavelengths.
Visitors experienced a simulation of synesthesia wherein light wavelengths are translated into sound frequencies; yellow, blue, and green generate higher-pitched sounds as they have shorter wavelengths, while red generates the lowest sound, having the longest wavelength.
According to Ross, “We're asking a series of questions in each of the rooms. How does colour sound? How does colour taste, feel, smell, look, hear, etc? With our work with the artistic group, Chromasonic, the installation invites you to walk through a series of rectangular boxes where the colour and the sound change. The idea of wanting a physical presence of colour was that we wanted people to experience what colour feels like when you can touch or smell it. So this is all about how our senses take colour in. Machines have sensors, but they don't have sensory systems. So, to have a sensorial experience of colour, to answer the questions that we're asking, people have to experience it physically.”
Following the immersive installation, the exhibition shifts, and visitors enter a series of spaces inspired by a particular correlation between color and sensation corresponding to Google’s most recent hardware design.
Making Sense of Color presents a unique introspective experience for visitors in an exploration of color, sound, perception, and sensation while further demonstrating the potential of collaborations bridging commercial and creative research.
