29 Nov Digital Colour in Art & Design | London, UK
Date: Wednesday 3rd December
Time: 14:00 – 17:00
Location: R101, City University St Georges, Franklin Building [R] 124 Goswell Road, EC1V 7DP
Registration Information
This event is free to attend, but registration is required via Eventbrite:
Digital colour surrounds us, on our screens, in our cameras, and increasingly, within the tools that shape our creative and industrial worlds. It is both precise and ephemeral: infinitely reproducible in theory, yet constantly shifting depending on the screen, illumination, and context in which it’s viewed. This shift from the physical to the digital has opened new possibilities for artists and designers, who are harnessing colour as both medium and data to create, simulate, and communicate in innovative ways.
This event brings together practitioners exploring digital colour through virtual and extended realities, trend forecasting and AI, and the translation of colour measurement and illumination values into meaningful tools for designers and brands.
Speakers
Sally Angharad
Lecturer, Trend Forecaster and PhD Candidate, University of Leeds
Presentation: Color, Code, and Cognition: A Study of Machine Learning vs. Human Perception
Sally is a lecturer in Fashion Marketing at Leeds Arts University and final year PhD student. She has a design consultancy exploring colour, material, trend forecasting with a focus on its use in fashion, textiles, interiors and architecture. Sally has an MA in Textiles and a BA Hons in Textile Design as well as over 7 years teaching experience at undergraduate level, delivering trend, design, and colour related modules to design students. Sally worked for a London based international trend consultancy as a colour trend consultant and features editor prior to establishing her freelance business in 2014. Sally continues to write editorial content, focusing on colour and materials. She works with clients to establish new collections, create trend tools, as well as providing research and curation for trade events. Her research interests include how trend information is used, consumer-driven colour forecasting, and the role of machine learning in colour forecasting.
Dr. Tom Milnes
Research Fellow, Centre for Blended Realities, Falmouth University
Presentation: Chromatic Failures: Glitch, Transparency and the Materiality of XR Capture
This presentation explores how colour operates within the unstable processes of volumetric capture and extended reality media. Rather than treating colour as a stable property, my practice approaches it as a material phenomenon shaped by light, error, and mediation. Through projects such as Ashnihilation (2022) and ongoing research into photogrammetry and XR headsets, I examine how translucency, iridescence, and digital glitches generate unexpected chromatic artefacts. These spectral residues expose the materiality of capture technologies, foregrounding colour as both an index of failure and a generative aesthetic force. By tracing the ways chroma keying, texture-mapping errors, and headset optics distort and reconfigure colour information, the talk considers how immersive media reshapes our perceptual and cultural relationship to colour.
Tom Milnes is an artist, curator and researcher based in the UK. He is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Blended Realities, Falmouth University. Milnes’ research practice explores the materiality of imagery and technology, engaging with the cultural impact of media through glitches, errors or hidden subcultures. His practice explores the aesthetics of digital imagery incorporating emergent technologies such as photogrammetry, augmented reality and NetArt methods, often through sculptural or immersive experiences, as ways to challenge our relationship to digital technology and the physical world.
Milnes has published research papers with Journal of Artistic Research (JAR) and Visual Resources. He has exhibited internationally including at: W139 – Amsterdam, AND/OR – London, CEAC – Xiamen, The Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia – Gdansk, and Gyeonggi International Biennale – Korea. Milnes has recently curated the exhibition Rolodex Propaganda at KARST, Plymouth (April 2024). He is the curator of the online platform Polygon Palm.
Myriam Cherif and Freddie O’Reilly
Fashion Textiles and Technology Institute, University of the Arts London
Presentation: Colour workflows and reproduction in computer-generated fabrics with Virtual Production technologies
Myriam Cherif is the Virtual Production/XR Lab Manager at the Fashion, Textiles and Technology Institute, University of the Arts London. Myriam’s practice includes computer graphics, VFX and immersive technologies to support the institute’s research in the digital rendition of textiles and dress.
Freddie O’Reilly is a Senior R&D Fellow in XR Textiles and Dress at the Fashion, Textiles and Technology Institute, University of the Arts London. Freddie’s research explores how lighting, colour, texture and material behaviour shape our perception of textiles in virtual space.
Dr. Chelsea Sullivan
Colour Solutions Technical Engineer at VeriVide, Ltd.
Presentation: Innovation in Industry
There are many reasons why innovation occurs industry from business goals (i.e. time, money, sustainability, digitalisation) to finding a solution to government legislation (i.e. fluorescent technology ban, tariffs). The presentation will highlight industry case studies on how companies are using DigiEye in their businesses to make changes to their current working methods as well as what innovation looks like internally at VeriVide.