At the same time, blue is a commodity: an expensive pigment, a modern-day market symbol. Sapphire, cobalt. Silicon Valley logos. How do legacies of empire and conquering classification systems linger linguistically, and what histories can we understand through them?

Kathy Wu (she/they) is a cross-disciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in Providence, RI (Narragansett land). She moves between and across textiles, code, book arts, and language. Her work is interested in scientific epistemology, nomenclatures, fossils, and land markers. She is currently a Literary Arts MFA candidate at Brown University.

The poem’s left-hand panel loops procedurally through a dataset of color names, emphasizing only names of blues.

Artist Reflection

Is blue the most virtual color? Blue brings to mind computers that fail, projectors that are starting or ending. A glitch or rupture, blue screen of death.

Blue is deeply abstract, and lossy. For instance, the sky and sea are the largest blue “things,” yet they contain no pigment. In many languages, blue is a late or non-occurrence. Is blue an import? From where is it created or extracted?

At the same time, blue is a commodity: an expensive pigment, a modern-day market symbol. Sapphire, cobalt. Silicon Valley logos. How do legacies of empire and conquering classification systems linger linguistically, and what histories can we understand through them? What is the etymology of lapis lazuli; is there a relationship between Turquoise and Turks? 

This work was curious to see what emerged through a study of color names. The names are taken from a Wikipedia list of all colors, from which I extracted via word search only shades of blue. I wasn’t sure exactly what would result. The resulting names offered hints at nations and trade (“French,” “Honolulu”, “United Nations”) as well as institutional brands (“Cambridge,” “Eton,” “Duke”). I used Python to scrape images off Google of cobalt mines, blue porcelains, painted cloaks for Mother Mary in shades of ultramarine.

Blue often derives from precious minerals; it shares that material basis with computers. Cobalt is a type of blueness and a crucial hardware element. In terms of hybridity, I wanted the poem to be formed primarily of light—the material of LEDs, and the screen, which the poem alludes to. I’m interested in what the material contributes to the work, as not just a container for language but something fundamental in shaping, exciting, and permitting certain types of language. To write on the computer extends writing into realms of data-parsing, copy-pasting, string-matching, and new scales. New media offers shifts from old canons by offering new conceptual and formal values.