SMPTE color bars are screen test patterns established by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers to quantify luminance (grayscale contrast) and chrominance (hue saturation) in IRE units (Institute of Radio Engineers). These bars function as Engineering Standards for screen calibration, empowering viewers to detect video signal alterations and guide the adjustments needed to restore anomalous signals to their original specifications.  Yet, in an era of infinite scrolling, where reality itself is mediated through full-color screens, one must ask:

Is your screen in sync with the colors of reality?

Color Theory IV (2020)

Acrylic vectorscope paintings. Centrifugal forces were used as paintbrush.  18x18 Inches

Though Panoptic prisons were constructed in the 1920’s, Bentham’s architecture ultimately failed under the weight of overcrowding. However, the advent of broadcasting technology equipped telecommunication towers with invisible wavelengths, effectively dematerializing the physical walls of the Panopticon. The “blinding” light now streams into willfully purchased screens seamlessly integrated into public and private spaces.  

“Whoever controls the media controls the people”, Marshall McLuhan's first law of communication predicted. As the dominant force shaping public opinion, screens track our every move, influence our behavior, modulate our perception of reality, and serve as the modern architecture of mind control at a global scale.

Color Theory initially sought to negate my physical presence as the creator, transfecting the act of painting to electromechanical systems similar to those in early TV screens. In Color Theory I (2011), remotely wired devices harnessed explosives to embed SMPTE pigments onto the canvas in live performances during Art Basel Miami Beach Weekend. With Color Theory II (2013), I reversed this dynamic, employing implosive forces to subvert the act of creation.

Through two years of research at Harvard University and MIT Media Lab, I expanded the project, designing, coding, and digitally fabricating painting devices equipped with 65 color chambers. These chambers were loaded with SMPTE pigments that were hand-mixed and graded from 100 to 7.5 IRE.

Color Theory III (2019) captured on film the controlled flow of free-falling paint under the effect of gravity, allowing chrominance pigments to impregnate the canvas without the intervention of my body. Color Theory IV (2020) introduced a canvas bed driven by a DC motor, spinning at 100 miles per hour to visualize the vectorscope effect of centrifugal forces on luminance pigments —an experiment in transforming SMPTE guidelines into physical Engineering Guidelines of reality.

With Color Theory V (2024), my latest iteration, I reinserted my body into the creative process while eliminating SMPTE pigments altogether. Materiality became the focal point, as I fragmented the canvas into a series of colorless bars, individually overlapping them in a 360-degree, three-dimensional stretching motion. This shift departs from rigid digital calibration, opening a space for entropy — echoing the accelerated fragmentation of on-screen personalized algorythmic realities.

Much like Bentham’s panopticon, Color Theory operates as a provocation — a mirror to a society where social control is privatized, seamless, silent, and omnipresent. Bentham envisioned the Panopticon as a tool to reform morals, preserve health, invigorate industry, diffuse knowledge, and lighten public burdens. Yet, in dissolving its walls, we find ourselves in a more insidious system — where full-color screens manipulate truth, and LED light-emitting diodes become the architecture of control.

Conceptual Drawings (2017)