Meet the artist whose genetic mutation means she can see 100 times more colors than you

A Tetrachromat.

I for one… oh, forget it. You know the rest: Overlords and all that.

4 Likes

This album was on heavy rotation in my house ~10 years ago, I wonder if I could get the 18-year-old version of my son to belt out “4 of 2” with the same gusto that 6-year-old him did :wink:

4 Likes

Could be… those albums were great.

3 Likes

Good idea! Have her choose some colours that she says she can distinguish that others can’t, and then make up some cards with numbers or letters painted (CMYK isn’t good enough…) on them. If she can score way better than 50% in identifying the correct symbols at the same time that another large sample of people can’t score significantly better than 50%, then there’s proof of her ability.

2 Likes

can-you-ever-forgive-me-kidding-me

Or how about maybe believe her when she says that she experiences the world in this way. No one fucking owes anyone else proof of something like this.

14 Likes

No I don’t believe it. She can’t possibly do something I can’t do. It has to be fake. Prove it better. Prove it just for me. :grin:

16 Likes

Specifically, it’d prove whether she can see colors we never will (how awesome is that?!) or if her perception is somehow limited to the same RGB space as the rest of us and her fourth cone helps in some other way. I wonder how adaptive the human visual cortex is to a fourth cone.

I have no doubt as to the scientific validity of her abilities to see color, but it doesn’t really seem to have helped her to make better, or even good art, imho. Meanwhile there are plenty of artists with diminished physical capabilities, some with visual impairments, making excellent art. So while the scientific curiosity of being able to see extra colors is pretty neat, this ends up feeling like a weirdly ableist sales pitch – “I can see better than you therefore I am inherently an amazing artist” – and I’m not buying it, especially when looking at her work.

1 Like

Phew! I was waiting for this to progress into the “what is (good) art” phase of the discussion!

10 Likes

Psychedelic rainbows don’t speak to me (personally) on the topic of tetrachromacy. Now, if she’s picked physical paint pigments that represent colors we cannot perceive, and it comes out looking to us poor normies as rainbow, that’s one thing. (Although, a photo would lose that information if she shared it with another person with tetra.) But if she’s just painting rainbows with colors we both see the same, I’m kinda meh about that.

Idea: What if I painted something for a dog friend using only the colors they can perceive. A big chunk of my red/green/yellows were just replaced with the yellows a dog can see. And then, what if I used one texture to represent yellows that are really red, and I used another different texture to represent yellows that are really green. Now the dog would have some comprehension of the missing information. They’d be able to perceive something at least synesthetically similar to us humans. There would be the idea of the missing information we can perceive that they cannot. If I just used their limited color palette to paint something psychedelic it doesn’t really convey the missing information.

it could be that instead of talking about seeing things in the infrared or ultraviolet we may be talking about a level of color acuity far beyond the norm. i’ve gotten some friends of mine to do the farnsworth-munsell. two or three of them have spent as much as an hour on it and ended up with scores in the 20s and 30s. one of them told me that other than the first couple of colors on each end, the five or six tiles in the middle all seemed to be the same color to them. when i look at it, each tile is as easily distinguishable as purple is from blue. for the woman in the article each tile may be as plainly different as orange is from purple to someone with normal vision.

7 Likes

Could I suggest that you drop the dog analogy? It’s quite literally dehumanizing.

What you describe is exactly what’s done to convey information in such a way that anomalous trichromats can perceive differences between items or spaces. Instead of relying on color alone to differentiate data or interfaces, other “channels” of information should be used - size, shape, texture, etc.

9 Likes

And it can apply paint with 1,500 Newtons of force!

2 Likes
8 Likes

I don’t know what it is but I know it when I see it!

Or was that was the other inevitable art talk… I forget.

7 Likes

If folks don’t want to believe the artist, they could just learn from the research already done by the scientist involved…

According to Dr Kimberly Jameson, a University of California scientist who has studied Antico

I’m sure they’ll believe Dr. Jameson, right?

11 Likes

A little perspective.

Her paintings appear to sell for 200 - 500 bucks based on the website:

And here is an image valued at 2.3 million dollars:

The audacity of her though, right!? Who does she think she is?

18 Likes

7 Likes

I don’t know… did women do the research… then some men who are not involved in the field will need to devise some test to prove their little theories… /s

13 Likes

A female scientist?! OMG! She must not know what she’s talking about, either! heavy /s

10 Likes