A Brief History of Fluorescent Color

Otherworldly hues pop at my eyes and glow with way too much power. These fluorescent monsters seem to contain millions of overly stimulated color particles, bouncing around, and growing ever more intense under the waning strength of a day’s sunlight. I have a total propensity to sucked in to the vibrational intensity of the spectrum of fluorescent colors, but cannot fully explain their significance beyond this. So in the spirit of the “cabinet of curiosity” that Cabinet Magazine founder and editor Sina Najafi so vigorously encouraged during his time with our class, I would like to begin a brief history of the fluorescent pigment based around a compilation of sources.

Several investigators reported luminescence phenomena during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it was British scientist Sir George G. Stokes who first described fluorescence in 1852 and was responsible for coining the term in honor of the blue-white fluorescent mineral fluorite (fluorspar). Stokes also discovered the wavelength shift to longer values in emission spectra that bears his name. Fluorescence was first encountered in optical microscopy during the early part of the twentieth century by several notable scientists, including August Köhler and Carl Reichert, who initially reported that fluorescence was a nuisance in ultraviolet microscopy. The first fluorescence microscopes were developed between 1911 and 1913 by German physicists Otto Heimstädt and Heinrich Lehmann as a spin-off from the ultraviolet instrument. These microscopes were employed to observe autofluorescence in bacteria, animal, and plant tissues. Shortly thereafter, Stanislav Von Provazek launched a new era when he used fluorescence microscopy to study dye binding in fixed tissues and living cells. However, it wasn’t until the early 1940s that Albert Coons developed a technique for labeling antibodies with fluorescent dyes, thus giving birth to the field of immunofluorescence. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the field of fluorescence microscopy was responsible for a revolution in cell biology, coupling the power of live cell imaging to highly specific multiple labeling of individual organelles and macromolecular complexes with synthetic and genetically encoded fluorescent probes. (from Basic Concepts in Fluorescence )

Fluorescence is a luminescence that is mostly found as an optical phenomenon in cold bodies, in which the molecular absorption of a photon triggers the emission of another photon with a longer wavelength. The energy difference between the absorbed and emitted photons ends up as molecular vibrations or heat. Usually the absorbed photon is in the ultraviolet range, and the emitted light is in the visible range, but this depends on the absorbance curve and Stokes shift of the particular fluorophore. Fluorescence is named after the mineral fluorite, composed of calcium fluoride, which often exhibits this phenomenon. (from Wikipedia )

There is a big difference however in what my mind lumps together as flourescent, and the above more strictly scientific rendering. High Visibility clothing, neons, Day Glo colors (Daylight fluorescent pigments), are all part of this power structure of color to me, eating up the more subtle palette in the face of certain doom for all. What I mean i guess, is that in this time of Bleeding Hearts, political lameouts (link + one million other occurrences), hyper hyper stimultation of all sense, these colors can be used to ramp up the message in a formal and emotional way (if those criteria even apply anymore…another day’s topic)

For instance, I am really interested in High Visibility Safety Clothing that the work force in security/prisoners, hazardous materials industry, public works, hunting, construction, it’s all really dangerous, and for the eye to be able to discern figure from ground. Psychologically it is strange that prisoners such as the ones that don’t exist at Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay don the safety orange jumpsuits of a prisoner. Are they not meant to disappear entirely? (BBC News Timeline )

Paperrad, a crew of three most of the time, uses the color to pierce all of this and move their big time installations and books in to more hands. Fashion in the 90’s co-opted these colors in order to be
…associated with cool, summer themes like surfing and the beach. The five fluorescent colours were blue, green, orange, pink, and yellow. Fluorescent clothing was especially popular with teenage and pre-teen girls, but fluorescent t-shirts and shorts were also popular with boys. Fluorescent clothing included t-shirts, sweatshirts, socks, shoelaces, hair scrunchies, and fanny packs. In 1991, fluorescent colours were replaced by colours such as coral, hot pink, and turquoise. The popularity of bright colours declined through 1995. (1990’s )

This desire to loosen up, and let your eyes drink in the color can definitely strike a harmony visually with a

membrane puncturing of our over-saturated eyes, and transgenic artist Eduardo Kac seems to have an intense passion for doing this serious work while maintaining an appeal:
“GFP Bunny” is a transgenic artwork and not a breeding project. The differences between the two include the principles that guide the work, the procedures employed, and the main objectives. Traditionally, animal breeding has been a multi-generational selection process that has sought to create pure breeds with standard form and structure, often to serve a specific performative function. As it moved from rural milieus to urban environments, breeding de-emphasized selection for behavioral attributes but continued to be driven by a notion of aesthetics anchored on visual traits and on morphological principles. Transgenic art, by contrast, offers a concept of aesthetics that emphasizes the social rather than the formal aspects of life and biodiversity, that challenges notions of genetic purity, that incorporates precise work at the genomic level, and that reveals the fluidity of the concept of species in an ever increasingly transgenic social context. (from Eduardo Kac’s homepage)

I say keep it loose, but bring the heat.

Other Notes of Interest from the lecture:
Aspen Art Magazine
Dean MacCannell
Jocko Weyland
Acid Dreams
Eyal Weizman
Nietzsche- On the Genealogy of Morals