The author discusses James Turrell's artworks in relation to contemporary disputes about the nature of color. The idea of Turrell's pieces as “pure chromatic sensations” is implausible to per-ceptual psychologists who have adopted the ecological approach of J.J. Gibson. Such psychologists view visual sensations as mere symptoms of the stimulation of the photoreceptors in our retinae. Their idea goes against the tradi-tional theory of color. The ten-dency of philosophers throughout history has been to take colors to be the exemplary instances of simple, unanalyzable qualities.

The author presents a hier-archical model of rhythm in lan-guage, music and action and ap-plies it to the integration of these semiotic modes in multimodal texts. The model distinguishes be-tween rhythm and meter; meter is shown to synchronize the rhyth-mic hierarchies of musical instru-ments, as well as of voice, music and action. The author identifies the meanings conveyed by variet-ies of multimodal synchronization.

The discovery of a technique for the particle separation and preparation of the blue mineral pigment azurite for use in an oil painting medium aids the compari-son of colors used in the Renais-sance with modern synthetic pig-ments. Chroma or chromatic intensity is presented as the key to understanding the language of color theory. This is supported by the first images ever of azurite cut by a focused ion beam (FIB) in or-der to compare unprepared and prepared particles of the mineral and thus demonstrate the impor-tance of the preparation process.

Since the advent of the film art form, the author finds, cinema and dance have engaged in an al-most unbroken courtship, each appropriating techniques and styles from the object of affec-tion. A hybrid form, video dance, has resulted; its recording me-dium may be thought of as its site. The architecture of this site provides a distinctive context for the critique of dances created for it. The collaborative process nec-essary to realize the potential of video dance is found to require a reconstruction of the dancing body as unencumbered by the re-straints of time and space.

In the binary economy of art and science, art's subjectivity is widely perceived as undermining its contribution to knowledge. Even when invoked by those with a vested interest in art, the potential ascribed to art within this economy does not do justice to the range and critical power of art. Trans-gressing this art-science binary, the author explores how objectivity is practiced within art and argues that the relationship between art and science is not a matter of boundaries but of intertwined in-flections of understanding.