colour – Rethinking Time

the Scintillating Year

a riff on the 256-day calendar

There’s a new page regarding the Scintillating Year.

Unlike the fixed 256-day calendar, which does not apply to the Leap Day, the Scintillating 256-day calendar does. This means that every 4 years, the colours of the days of the year shift by 1, which also effects the glyphs of the 260-day calendar.

13 Months of the Prismatic Year

Adding a little colour to our days.

After the colours for the Cardinal Directions were assigned, it was a short matter of finding the gradation of colour between each to come up with the Prismatic Days of the Year (although, there are 360 distinct colours, as five of the 365 are repeated).

concentric rings - at centre, a circle divided into four quarters that swirl clockwise. From bottom of the circle the colours are blue, green, yellow, red. The first ring around this is made of 16 bigrams - one line on top of the other in each of the combination of the four colours. The circle around this are the 64 trigrams of three lines. At the outside are the 256 quadrigrams. The outermost ring are thirteen rectangles, each of which is made of 4 by 7 circles. Each circle is shaded a particular hue. From bottom right progressing clockwise, the circles range from blue to turquoise, the next from turquoise to gree-blue, then to green, then lighter green, then green-yellow, then yellow-green, then at centre, a rectangle of mostly yellow circles, then orange, red-oragne, red, deep red, plum-purple, indigo-blue. — 13 months of the Prismatic Year
256 quadrigrams
64 trigrams
16 bigrams

While the 4 colours represent the year for the plants.

Blue – North – Winter – the blue of the sky while the plants are sleeping.

Green – East – Spring – the budding of new growth as the days warm up and grow longer.

Yellow – South – Summer – the yellow of flowers, pollen, bees, and later peppers, beans, maize.

Red – West – Autumn – the ripened red of pumpkins, apples, and leaves falling from the trees.

Assigning colours to the days is in part a step in working more colour into my artwork, but more importantly, it is to gradually note the change from day to day as the Seasons change.

Transforming Trigrams

Three means of changing lines around theAbysmal Wheel of the Year.

a circle divided into four by an X. At bottom and moving clockwise, the colour of each quarter is Blue, Green, Yellow, and Red. — North – blue
East – green
South – yellow
West – red

Using the above colours and the structure of the I Ching, I’ve come up with a series of images made up of stacked lines.

concentric circles - at centre, a circle divided into four quarters that swirld clockwise. From bottom the colours are blue, green, yellow, red. The first circle around this is made of 16 bigrams - one line on top of the other in each of the combination of the four colours. The circle around this are the 64 trigrams of three lines. At the outside are the 256 quadrigrams. — Circles of two-, three-, and four-line images

In the I Ching’s function as a divinatory system, a starting image is determined, and lines are changed to create a second image. The idea is to contemplate the change between the first and the second. Because the I Ching is binary, any line that changes simply switches to its opposite: dark becomes light, and light becomes dark.

the Colour out of Time

Did you know that time can be represented as a wave simply by adding colours to your calendar?

Me neither.

The colours in question are colours associated with the four cardinal directions. There are any number of cultural traditions with respect to which colour is associated with which direction, and so I decided to create something anew, rather than appropriate an existing set of colours.

I applied the four colours to the time-schematic illustration below: