MARC DA COSTA
Negative_Color is a durational light installation: a cube that glows with colors that have no names.
The work is built around a database of over 60,000 named colors—compiled from paint manufacturers, industrial standards, digital specifications, cosmetics catalogues, historical pigment records, and proprietary color systems including Pantone, RAL, and others.
The installation displays none of these colors.
Instead, it cycles through the RGB spectrum's negative space: the millions of values that appear in no color dictionary, belong to no trademark, answer to no word.
Poets have always named colors no colorimeter can verify—"wine-dark sea," "the blue hour"—colors born from feeling rather than specification.
The unnamed colors shown here ask a different question: not what we might call them, but what it means that we haven't. What exists in the spaces our systems leave empty.
The cube form evokes the geometric figure of a hypercube—the three-dimensional "shadow" of a four-dimensional tesseract. Just as a hypercube suggests spatial dimensions beyond our perceptual capacity, the work renders visible chromatic dimensions that exceed our linguistic and commercial frameworks.
Aluminum extrusion, opal acrylic diffuser, LED light, custom software, color database
500mm x 500mm x 500mm
The assembly of the 60,000+ named color database is itself a work of compilation and boundary-drawing. By precisely defining what has been named, the database simultaneously defines—by exclusion—the vast territory of unnamed color.
Systematic color naming began in earnest during the 18th century, with projects like Werner's Nomenclature of Colours (1814) attempting to standardize hue descriptions for scientific communication.
This Enlightenment impulse toward rationalization has culminated in today's proprietary color systems, where corporations charge licensing fees for color definitions and artists face legal action for using trademarked pigments.
The piece runs durationally, shifting through unnamed colors at a pace that invites sustained attention. Viewers encounter not a catalog of hues but an ongoing revelation of what color systematization has left behind.
The gaps in every proprietary palette. The vast territory of visible light that remains outside language and law.
Marc Da Costa (b. 1984, USA) is a multimedia artist and anthropologist whose work explores how archives and technical infrastructures shape attention and experience. Working across installation, performance, and film, he creates public encounters with emerging technologies.
Recent works include "AlphaGo_Lee: Theory of Sacrifice" (2025), a theatrical examination of the 2016 match between Lee Sedol and DeepMind's AI; "The Golden Key" (2024), an immersive myth-making machine; and "Tulpamancer" (2023), a VR work exploring memory and intimacy through an alternative history of AI in 1980s East Germany.
Da Costa's work has been exhibited at the Venice International Film Festival, Centre Phi Montreal, Lincoln Center, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He has received the Lumen Prize and SXSW Jury Prize.