Neutrality is a state of mind

Our investigation in the colorful piece of cloth from IKEA, was meant to get practical with the material, to take it a part into pieces and see what happens. Our idea is that Neutrality, is a state of mind and an ongoing negotiation. A negotiation of who has power to claim something as neutral. In this experiment we have the power, we decide what is neutral, and that is as accurate as anything else. If you don’t give someone else a power over the words, they don’t have that power. We know what is neutral – not them.

An endless experiment:

The cloth was neutral from the beginning; it was not vivid, not calm, but a struggle between the different basic colors. The cloth evened out and balanced the cultural codes, the history, and its own content, making itself as neutral as vacuum. Why? Do we ask ourselves as scientists, is this piece of cloth so perfect in its neutrality. We have to take it apart. We began by separating the cloth by its colors, carefully extracting each one with steady scissor-hands. Within this process we found out that parts the parts in themselves were far from neutral. Some were easy to remove, some complicated and troublesome. Some were big and some were small. Some gave us, the researchers, blisters on our hands, some didn’t. The list could go on. But in this process, made us discover and prove one thing: A neutral object as a whole is not neutral in its parts, but consists of opposites.

In the next step we took the different parts, the colors, and did several measurements and calculations with them. We weighed them, counted the minor parts, calculated the area, and the different 2D-shapes. Then psychological experiments were conducted at a selected group of skilled neutrality experts. The experiments were aimed at naming the feeling the different colors and shapes provoked. Also here there were some interesting discoveries, partly contradicting the earlier ones. An overweight of the associations made by the selected group, leaned towards unease, chaos and wildness. This is interesting, so a neutral object need not to consist of just two opposites, but of a swarm and a larger system of chaotic and seemingly incoherent parts.

After this in-depth research of the different shapes and colors, we began disassembling the pieces even further, cutting them in pieces with an average square area of 11 mm2. This process turned out to be time-consuming, but nonetheless utterly important for the research. The pieces became like molecules or atoms, each the same, but still individual. They were Individual in the sense that each one had a slightly different shape and size, but the same because they all were replaceable by any other of the same color. After this process, we were left with six piles of the necessary components for the original pattern.

The final step was to mix them to be able to create a new entirety, a new whole. All of us were silent when this important moment finally came. Carefully the small components were mixed and spread out to create a smooth surface. And to our pleasure we could see that the surface created still were neutral, as neutral as it has been in the beginning. So we could conclude that: The piece of cloth from IKEA is neutral, and becomes neutral. During the process we found out that neutrality is both a state of mind and a negotiation, a struggle, between the different parts and components of the chosen object.