13.31, Friday 28 Oct 2005

Blue is the colour from an active but unfed projector, before the presentation starts, and of dead or absent tv channels. It's a common colour, but I never look at it. When it's not invisible, it's rich, almost purple; the blue of dusk, or of a hot, deep, dusty, early morning. It's not like water, the ocean, and somehow, given the Battle for Blue [thanks Phil!; text], not corporate. Another oddity: It's bright and highly saturated, yet we never notice it. It fills. Like the blue of the hyperlink (which is appropriate despite being arbitrary [1, 2]), it speaks to me:

This blue is the colour of the virtual. This blue is the colour of possibility, becoming, and potential. This blue is the sky that rocket-ships the weight of cities will lift into, and of the abyss. When the cable is unplugged, this is the colour when the universe floods in. This blue is Cerenkov radiation, the energy that high-velocity sub-atomic particles shed as light, when they brake through dense material.

As the virtual becomes actual, the whiplash it experiences as it attains mass and physicality shoots blue light ahead of it, into its future destination, onto our screens, onto us.

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