HILARY HANSON BRUEL

Binary Palettes

This series grew out of thinking about how computers represent colors. As both a graphic designer and artist, I spend a lot of time seeing my real-world colors translated by a computer for onscreen viewing — sometimes not very accurately. This series of paintings reverses that process.

4,096 unique colors can be represented using 12 binary digits, from black (000000000000) to white (111111111111). Each piece starts with a pattern of zeros and ones that determines the color palette, resulting in interesting and unexpected color relationships. While each string of digits defines a single, unchanging color to a computer, as an artist I can represent and interpret that color in infinite ways. In essence, my binary palettes are very poor translations of computer-generated colors.