Colour Out of Space

(2025, collecting earlier works starting in 1998)

Colour Out of Space is a systems-reading of H. P. Lovecraft’s mythos, as exemplified in the story from which the project takes its name. Drawing from Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and thinkers like Bruno Latour, the project proposes that the “colour” in Lovecraft’s tale is not merely a metaphor for alien otherness, but a stand-in for the invisible systems that structure life on Earth — electromagnetic radiation, industrial light, petrochemical supply chains, nitrogen cycles. OOO reminds us that objects have agency independent of human perception; that the world is not centred on us. In this light, Colour Out of Space becomes a framework to read the spectral glow of sodium lamps on farmland, the ghostly flicker of failing LEDs, or the unnatural sheen of pesticide-slicked topsoil — all as forms of the “colour” that came from beyond, now fully embedded in the everyday. Using video, aerial imagery, long-exposure stills, and sound, the work maps these spectral systems as they manifest in rural and peri-urban zones: fields, sheds, drainage ditches, abandoned distribution centres. Here, the horror is not in cosmic arrival, but in saturation — the realisation that we already inhabit a planet teeming with nonhuman actors, indifferent systems, and colours that came out of space long ago and never left.