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Arnau.
Indigo 99 is a study for the synthesis of natural pigment through multiples of 11 numbers, historical / sociological facts, geopolitics, contemporary events and different perception of reality.
I’m just a soul who’s bluer than blue can be
When I get that mood indigo
—Duke Ellington
Blue is the colour between violet and green on the optical spectrum of visible light. Human eyes perceive blue when observing light with a wavelength between 450 and 495 nanometres, which is between 4500 and 4950 ångströms. Blues with a higher frequency and thus a shorter wavelength gradually look more violet, while those with a lower frequency and a longer wavelength gradually appear more green. Pure blue, in the middle, has a wavelength of 470 nanometers (4700 ångströms). In painting and traditional colour theory, blue is one of the three primary colours of pigments, along with red and yellow, which can be mixed to form a wide gamut of colours. Red and blue mixed together form violet, blue and yellow together form green. Blue is also a primary colour in the RGB colour model, used to create all the colours on the screen of a television or computer monitor.
Hues of blue include indigo and ultramarine, closer to violet; pure blue, without any mixture of other colours; Cyan, which is midway on the spectrum between blue and green, and the other blue-greens turquoise, teal, and aquamarine.
Blues also vary in shade or tint; darker shades of blue contain black or grey, while lighter tints contain white. Darker shades of blue include ultramarine, cobalt blue, navy blue, and Prussian blue; while lighter tints include sky blue, azure, and Egyptian blue. (For a more complete list see the List of colours).
Blue pigments were originally made from minerals such as lapis lazuli, cobalt and azurite, and blue dyes were made from plants; usually woad in Europe, and Indigofera tinctoria, or true indigo, in Asia and Africa. Today most blue pigments and dyes are made by a chemical process.
IndigoDeep and bright shade of blue
Also called color indigo, colour indigo, and indigo color
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Indigo is a deep and rich color close to the color wheel blue, as well as to some variants of ultramarine.
—Wikipedia …More
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Indigo is a deep and rich color close to the color wheel blue (a primary color in the RGB color space), as well as to some variants of ultramarine. It is traditionally regarded as a color in the visible spectrum, as well as one of the seven colors of the rainbow: the color between blue and violet; however, sources differ as to its actual position in the electromagnetic spectrum.
According to psychologists, the popularity of the hue may take root in our evolutionary development. In the hunting-and-gathering days, those drawn to positive things—like, say, clear skies and clean water—were more likely to survive, and, over time, this preference for the color blue may have become hard-wired.
ref — https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-a-brief-history-of-blue
Indigo was actually a plant that got its name because it came from the Indus Valley, discovered some 5,000 years ago, where it was called nila, meaning dark blue.
A man of the Tuareg people of North Africa wears a tagelmust or turban dyed with indigo. The indigo stains their skin blue; they were known by early visitors as “the blue men” of the desert.
Natural pigment. Originally extracted from plants —Indigofera tinctoria -I. sumatrana- (tropics)
For centuries, the cost of lapis rivaled the price of gold.
The color indigo, often associated with political power or religious ritual, has held a significant place in many world civilisations for thousands of years. In the excavation of Thebes an indigo garment dating from c. 2500 B.C. was found, for example furthermore, the Hindu god Krishna is most often depicted in blue,human sacrifices were often painted blue in ancient Mayan culture,and the Virgin Mary is regularly imagined draped in blue clothes in Christian art.
https://www.lib.umn.edu/bell/tradeproducts/indigo
The Romans and Greeks likely discovered this brilliant blue in the bazaars of cities like Assur and Babylon as early as the 2nd and 3rd Centuries. The Greeks dubbed the blue cakes of indigo “indikon”, meaning from India, which eventually became “indigo” in English. For another thousand years or so, indigo only found its way to Europe via overland trade routes and was so rare and coveted that it was often called blue gold. It would be a long time before indigo was as common as a pair of blue jeans.
ref — http://www.projectbly.com/blog/on-the-hunt-for-indigo
India was the oldest center of indigo dyeing in the Old World. It was a primary supplier of indigo to Europe as early as the Greco-Roman era.
it wasn’t until after a young Portuguese explorer, Vasco de Gama, set sail from Lisbon in 1497 with directions from King John II of Portugal to find out what lay beyond the Cape of Good Hope, that Europeans would begin to get their hands on this blue dye.
Trade — The Silk Road
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The polyglot civilizations of traders who lived along its routes are the subject of legends, and more recently the Silk Road lent its name to an infamous darknet market. Historians usually date the Silk Road from roughly the 200s to the 1400s. But a new study in Nature suggests the trade routes may be 2,500 years older than previously believed and its origins much humbler than the rich cities it spawned.
Historical accounts of the Silk Road begin in China in the 100s, when the Han Dynasty used its many routes to trade with the peoples of Central and South Asia. Han soldiers protected the roads and maintained regular outposts on them, allowing wealth and knowledge to flow across the continent. Monks wandering the Silk Road brought Buddhism from India to China, while merchants brought spices, gems, textiles, books, horses, and other valuables from one part of the continent to the other.
ref — https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/new-research-reveals-origins-of-the-ancient-silk-road/
The Mughal Empire
(…) The loyalty to the government of the Mughals was based on their tolerance. Since subjects were encouraged to worship as they pleased, a far cry from the rest of the world, the emperor was loved. Before trade began foreign trade flourished in India, the Mughals relied on a system of taxing. Tax collectors, called zamindars, collected crops as tribute, but also took a percentage for themselves. As the system became more and more corrupt Akbar centralized the system of tax collecting to end thievery. The money saved was used to finance military advancements and art in Akbar’s palace.
The economy of the Mughal Empire was based on the expansion of trade throughout the Indian Ocean and central Asia. The Mughal Empire did not have a navy so traders either came to their ports along the ocean or the Mughals traded over land. Trade along the Silk Road allowed India to trade with Russia and Iran for pelts, armor, fruit, leather, nuts, metal, silk and carpets. The Mughal Empire traded with European countries, which valued Indian spices above all else. In 1578, the Mughals worked out an agreement with the Portuguese that gave the Portuguese a monopoly on trading with India. But by the 1590s the monopoly had ended and the Portuguese, Dutch, and British all had ports in India. The Mughal Empire exported spices, cotton, tobacco, saffron, betel leaf, sugar, and indigo. Trade ended the system of taxes, because of the wealth it brought to Akbar’s court.
ref —http://splendidculture.wikispaces.com/The+Mughal+Empire
Indian trade under the British Empire saw a constant process of exploitation led by British East India Company which led to a gradual collapse of the Indian economy, leaving in its wake an underdeveloped country struggling to acquire an economic stronghold. The terms of trade were based on the conditions of the British market and the detrimental effects of British trade in India were long felt even after the country acquired its Independence. The profound changes in the world order which resulted in the subjection of most of Asia to European colonial rule, economic domination, and varying degrees of political interference, began in India under the British rule.
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One of the most disastrous outcomes of the British economic policy in India was the increased number of famines in the latter half of the 19th century. One of the worst famines ever to have hit the country, the Bengal famine of 1943, was also experienced under British rule. Although famines were not new to the subcontinent, these were particularly severe, with tens of millions dying, and with many critics, both British and Indian, laying the blame at the doorsteps of the lumbering colonial administrations.
ref — http://www.indianetzone.com/47/indian_trade_under_british_empire.htm
The growing of Indigo was not a very profitable business in the 19th century in India. The European Indigo planters oppressed their workers, which led to several rebellions over the years.“ 1861 saw the ‘Blue Mutiny’ in Bengal, when farmers rose against the forcible cultivation of the un-remunerative indigo crop. This offered an unprecedented opportunity to the educated community in Calcutta to close its ranks and come out in protest against the tyranny of the European planter.” Mahatma Gandhi fought for the cause of the workers on Indigo plantations, his efforts were successful. “ In 1917 the pitiable conditions of the oppressed labourers in the indigo plantations at Champaran in Bihar attracted his attention. The result of his campaign was that the government itself appointed an official committee of investigation with which Gandhi was associated. The committee gave its report, leading to the Champaran Agrarian Act and the grievances of the indigo planters were largely ameliorated.” The Indigo revolt (or Nilbidroha) was a peasant movement and subsequent uprising of indigo farmers against the indigo planters that arose in Bengal in 1859.
(picture — An indigo factory in Bengal, a watercolor by William Simpson, 1863)
ref — https://www.writing.com/main/view_item.php/item_id/1243732-Indigo-Cultivation-In-India
Neel Darpan — The Indigo Planting Mirror (Novel)
Click Here (English from Bengal) — 8.8Mb
An indigenous variety of indigo began to be cultivated by Spanish overseers on the plantations of Honduras and the Pacific slopes of Central America in the 1560s. The indigo plant was known to early Guatemalan colonialists by the Nahuatl word xiquilite, and the dye was known to contemporaries as Guatemalan Indigo. M. De Beauvais Raseau, writing about indigo cultivation in the Eighteenth Century, stated that the Native Americans also knew about extracting dye from the plant. They called it Tlauhoylimihuitl and used it to darken their hair. It seems that indigo production continued to increase throughout the Seventeenth Century in the New World. The French colony of Saint Domingo eventually became the major producer of indigo, and this dye was also of the best quality. The English gained their first indigo-producing colony in this part of the world in 1655 when they captured Jamaica. However, it is unclear how important New World indigo was in the worldwide indigo market, as prices fluctuated and so did production numbers. By 1740 sugar had replaced indigo as the main crop of Jamaica, but, on the other hand, this was also the beginning of the indigo boom in South Carolina.
Indigo plants were brought to the American colonies and was grown in the deep South for many years but never became the cash crop that settlers expected. It was replaced by rice and cotton.
Indigo is currently made of synthetic pigments
FD&C (Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act) Blue No. 2
ref — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Food,_Drug,_and_Cosmetic_Act
An organic compound is virtually any chemical compound that contains carbon, although a consensus definition remains elusive and likely arbitrary. Organic compounds are rare terrestrially, but of central importance because all known life is based on organic compounds. The most basic petrochemicals are considered the building blocks of organic chemistry.
For historical reasons, a few types of carbon-containing compounds, such as carbides, carbonates, simple oxides of carbon (for example, CO and CO2), and cyanides are considered inorganic. The distinction between organic and inorganic carbon compounds, while “useful in organizing the vast subject of chemistry… is somewhat arbitrary”.
Organic chemistry is the science concerned with all aspects of organic compounds. Organic synthesis is the methodology of their preparation.
The modern meaning of organic compound is any compound that contains a significant amount of carbon—even though many of the organic compounds known today have no connection to any substance found in living organisms.
Compounds that are prepared by reaction of other compounds are known as “synthetic”. They may be either compounds that already are found in plants or animals or those that do not occur naturally.
Most polymers (a category that includes all plastics and rubbers), are organic synthetic or semi-synthetic compounds.
M o l e c u l a r
s t r u c t u r e
o f
I n d i g o
Last year, Greenpeace released an overwhelming study titled “Toxic Threads: The Big Fashion Stitch-Up,” which outlined the true dangers of dye pollution and jeans from Levi’s and Tommy Hilfiger popped up as top offenders of toxic dye use. A few textile conglomerates, like DBL Group in Bangladesh, have upgraded their factories to use and waste less water, but most are still putting out nauseating amounts of dangerous dye waste water a year.
“In some areas of China, you can tell which colors are fashionable in New York and Paris by the color of the rivers”
ref — http://www.popsci.com/blog-network/techtiles/problem-indigo
Read the whole Greenpeace report and Technical Report
in 1494 spain and portugal signed the treaty of tordesillas, an imaginary line that ran 370 degrees west from the portuguese colonized cape verde islands, located off the west coast of africa. after the portuguese crown becoming dissatisfied with the inter caetera papal bull issued by pope alexander vi, it was re-negotiated with spain that the lands to the east of the line would belong to portugal and the lands to the west, to spain.
ref — https://global.britannica.com/event/Treaty-of-Tordesillas
Historical US Immigrant Admission Data — 1821 to 2006
The following data on immigration by decade and by geographic region is taken from the Statistical Yearbooks of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and updated since 2006 with INS Annual Reports:
“Today, we are protecting ourselves as we were in 1924, against being flooded by immigrants from Eastern Europe. This is fantastic…We do not need to be protected against immigrants from these countries on the contrary we want to stretch out a helping hand, to save those who have managed to flee into Western Europe, to succor those who are brave enough to escape from barbarism, to welcome and restore them against the day when their countries will, as we hope, be free again…these are only a few examples of the absurdity, the cruelty of carrying over into this year of 1952 the isolationist limitations of our 1924 law. In no other realm of our national life are we so hampered and stultified by the dead hand of the past, as we are in this field of immigration.”
-President Truman
“These refugees, escapees, and distressed peoples now constitute an economic and political threat of constantly growing magnitude. They look to traditional American humanitarian concern for the oppressed. International political considerations are also factors which are involved. We should take reasonable steps to help these people to the extent that we share the obligation of the free world.”
-President Eisenhower
“Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave…For the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process.”
(Barbara Jordan, February 24, 1995 Testimony to House Immigration Subcommittee)
History of US Immigration policies — http://www.fairus.org/facts/us_laws
A traveler has his passport scanned as he passes through U.S. Customs and Immigration after using the Cross Border Xpress pedestrian bridge between San Diego and the Tijuana airport on the facility's opening day in Otay Mesa, California December 9, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Blake
ref — http://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-usa-visa-idUSKBN1691Q9
“the artist as a cartographer, using craft to reveal the borders and hidden locales.”
(…)
The theory of trauma was a crypto-geological hybrid from the very start. Darwin and the geologists had already established that the entire surface of the earth and everything that crawls upon it is a living fossil record, a memory bank rigorously laid down over unimaginable aeons and sealed against introspection; churned and reprocessed through its own material, but a horrifying read when the encryption is broken, its tales would unfold in parallel with Freud’s, like two intertwining themes of humiliation.
Abandoning the circumspection with which Freud handles what he still supposes to be ‘metaphorical’ stratal imagery, Dr Daniel Barker’s Cosmic Theory of Geotrauma, or Plutonics, flattens the theory of psychic trauma onto geophysics, with psychic experience becoming an encrypted geological report, the repercussion of a primal Hadean trauma in the material unconscious of Planet Earth. Further developing Professor Challenger’s model of ‘generalised stratification’, Barker ultra-radicalises Nietzschean genealogy into a materialist cryptoscience.
Consciousness / Separation
Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood or soul, the fact that there is something “that it is like” to “have” or “be” it, and the executive control system of the mind, or the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
Illustration of dualism by René Descartes. Inputs are passed by the sensory organs to the pineal gland and from there to the immaterial spirit.
A major part of the scientific literature on consciousness consists of studies that examine the relationship between the experiences reported by subjects and the activity that simultaneously takes place in their brains—that is, studies of the neural correlates of consciousness. The hope is to find that activity in a particular part of the brain, or a particular pattern of global brain activity, which will be strongly predictive of conscious awareness.
Another idea that has drawn attention for several decades is that consciousness is associated with high-frequency (gamma band) oscillations in brain activity.
In 2011, Graziano and Kastner proposed the “attention schema” theory of awareness. In that theory, specific cortical areas, notably in the superior temporal sulcus and the temporo-parietal junction, are used to build the construct of awareness and attribute it to other people. The same cortical machinery is also used to attribute awareness to oneself. Damage to these cortical regions can lead to deficits in consciousness such as hemispatial neglect. In the attention schema theory, the value of explaining the feature of awareness and attributing it to a person is to gain a useful predictive model of that person’s attentional processing.
Cognition
Civilization, comprising all the achievements of art and science, technology and industry, is the result of man’s invention and manipulation of symbols — of words, letters, numbers, formulas and concepts, and of such social institutions as universally accepted clocks and rulers, scales and timetables, schedules and laws. By these means, we measure, predict, and control the behavior of the human and natural worlds — and with such startling apparent success that the trick goes to our heads. All too easily, we confuse the world as we symbolize it with the world as it is.
Coming to our senses must, above all, be the experience of our own existence as living organisms rather than “personalities,” like characters in a play or a novel acting out some artificial plot in which the persons are simply masks for a conflict of abstract ideas or principles. Man as an organism is to the world outside like a whirlpool is to a river: man and world are a single natural process, but we are behaving as if we were invaders and plunderers in a foreign territory. For when the individual is defined and felt as the separate personality or ego, he remains unaware that his actual body is a dancing pattern of energy that simply does not happen by itself. It happens only in concert with myriads of other patterns — called animals, plants, insects, bacteria, minerals, liquids, and gases. The definition of a person and the normal feeling of “I” do not effectively include these relationships. You say, “I came into this world.” You didn’t; you came out of it, as a branch from a tree.
-Alan Watts
Other online sources:
Brazilian Archives of Biology and Technology. Extraction of Indigo from Some Isatis species and Dyeing Standardization Using Low-technology Methods — http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-89132015000100096
Georgia Encyclopedia. History of Indigo — http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/indigo
Historyworld.net. History of Trade —
http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?ParagraphID=hbk
Wikipedia. The Indigo Revolt — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_revolt
Spokensanskrit.de. How to spell Indigo in Sanskrit — http://spokensanskrit.de/index.php?beginning=0+&tinput=indigo+&trans=Translate
On the hunt for Indigo — http://www.projectbly.com/blog/on-the-hunt-for-indigo
Arnau Sala Saez 
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