Green Ghost 2019

Nostalgia for childhood experiences has a profound effect on how we see the world. And our memories of television, movies, and video games play an especially powerful role in shaping our personalities in our formative years and onward. But as we age, the accuracy of our nostalgia is subject to blurring of perception and reality. Can we trust our memories? Can we ever be certain that we can recall an idea accurately? To be certain, you must distill something down to its essence.

This series of images is the output of an exercise examining how we remember color. Using a Sherwin Williams paint swatch book, we each selected a set number of swatches that reflected how we best remembered the core colors of iconic pop culture IP. We restricted any visual aids or reference material to ensure that the color selections were based only on memories. From there, the mean, median and mode selections across the color spectrum were then identified and paints were ordered. During the color selection process we found that we had created false memories of the colors, and in the instance of Pac Man, both selected a green paint swatch representing the Green Ghost in the game. This is curious as there is no green ghost in Pac Man. We repeated the exercise with a friend who also remembered the green ghost