Basic Black

Abstract

Abstract This brief essay addresses the quest for “the blackest black,” a totally absorptive, nonreflective surface—in science and engineering as much as in art and entertainment—as an occasion for conceiving difference differently. Here black is both a color and a color space in which other colors become themselves, in their specificity, through a disavowed dependency or derivation, processes whereby we can question the material and symbolic consequences of the meanings ascribed not only to the various colors of the spectrum but also to the very idea of a color spectrum itself.

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