RGB Colorspace Atlas

The premise is simple and almost vertiginous: take the entire RGB color space — every combination of red, green, and blue values, millions of colors — and print it as a three-dimensional gradient across three cube-shaped books. Open to any page, any point, and you are holding a precise coordinate in that space. The whole of digital color, made physical and navigable by hand.

Tauba Auerbach made three books, each 8 × 8 × 8 inches (20.3 × 20.3 × 20.3 cm), the cube format chosen because the RGB color space is itself cubic — three axes, three channels, a volume rather than a spectrum. The books are not a selection or a sample. They are a complete map. Every possible value is present somewhere in the sequence of pages.

The production is meticulous: digital offset print on paper, case bound, with airbrushed cloth covers and page edges — the gradient continuing across the outside of the object as well as the inside, so the book itself becomes a colored solid, a cross-section of the space it contains. The binding was co-designed by Auerbach and bookbinder Daniel E. Kelm, and bound by Kelm with Leah Hughes at the Wide Awake Garage.

What makes the object remarkable is not just the concept but the experience. The gradient is steady, unhurried — you can turn pages and watch color shift in small increments, or flip quickly and see the space compress. Each page is different from every other page that has ever been or will ever be printed, because each carries a unique coordinate. The book is a map of a territory that had never been mapped in this form before.

It sits in a different category from reference books about color. This is not about the history or the culture of color, or about combinations and their meanings. It is color as pure data made sensuous — the complete digital palette held in the hand.

Available to view at taubaauerbach.com.

Three books · 20.3 × 20.3 × 20.3 cm each · Digital offset print on paper · Airbrushed cloth cover and page edges · Binding co-designed by Daniel E. Kelm and Tauba Auerbach · 2011