C is yellow and tastes like kiwi

How do human beings actually perceive colors, sounds, letters and periods of time? As you might expect, it’s not that easy to answer this question. Synesthetes at least have one thing in common in this regard: Their world is very colorful.

Anyone who is “affected” by synesthesia – which is not an illness or a disorder but rather, according to neuropsychology, a “normal variant of perception” – will see colors and patterns, for example, in their mind’s eye when they hear music; they will taste or smell names, assign a quality or a color to letters, and connect weekdays with a geometric form.

Artists, meanwhile, have never stopped working in interdisciplinary and multisensory ways and referring to synesthesia in doing so. Some of the most famous examples are undoubtedly the pictorial compositions by Bauhaus artist Wassily Kandinsky, who was probably gifted with the ability to “hear colors” himself. His abstract forms and patterns are similar to the experiences of many synesthetes when they come into contact with music. Joan Mitchell too, who exhibited several variations of synesthesia, took inspiration from music for her abstract expressionist paintings. While Kandinsky and Mitchell brought the images from their minds to the canvas, Giselher Klebe did the opposite: In 1949-50 the composer created an orchestral work as a response to the watercolor „Zwitscher-Maschine“ (Twittering Machine) by Paul Klee (1922).

What color is hell?

As technology developed, the possibilities for making synesthetic experiences perceptible to non-synesthetes increased. In an exhibition in Wuppertal in 1963, Nam June Paik, a member of the Fluxus movement and a pioneer of video art, presented “Kuba TV,” a work made up of two televisions that brought together image and sound in a new correlation: On one of them, sounds were translated via a microphone into rapidly changing patterns on the screen, while a tape recorder was attached to the other – the sounds generated were visible but not audible to the observer.

In a voiceover she reads out descriptions of terms from people who exhibit grapheme-color synesthesia, for whom letters and numbers are inextricably linked with a color. The complexity of the perception of letter sequences – multilayered color gradients, framing and resulting associations – is on the whole often hard to put into words. Something similar emerges in the work “A Study of a Name,” in which the artist asked synesthetes to verbalize their perceptions as reactions to their first name.

Since, in principle, more senses are at work in synesthetes, it is suspected that they are better able to develop creative approaches than other people – and to orient themselves, for example, differently within their surroundings. With her work “That Can’t be September – It Smells Like the August of 1985!,” artist Barbara Ryan gives expression to this.