Any questions or concerns about this website (broken links, outdated items, etc.) can be directed to IMPC webmaster Rawb Leon-Carlyle.

A Note on Color: about merleauponty.org

A decent website, like a rolling hillside in Aix-en-Provence, should deepen one’s experience of time while obviating any event happening outside the screen. The transition from real world to online has to be seamless: this is why scrolling pages on your computer and touchscreen are programmed to have inertia and “bounce” as you hit the bottom. The right colors, then, are indispensable to this experience. Color isn’t something “out there” that presses upon the eye, but is rather a conversation between my moving and my perceiving in order to maximize both. Perceiving color is an act of orienting oneself, be it the driver who waits for the light to turn green or the synesthete who can find Middle C because she knows it’s blue. The task of the designer is to provide the materials that the guest requires to situate herself; the work of the designer is situation.

The color scheme of this website was designed with specific reference to Cézanne’s various renderings of Mt. Ste-Victoire. This required merleauponty.org to undergo several dishevelled, confused iterations as I attempted to make the website actually resemble Cézanne’s work. It was with the current color scheme that I realized what I had been attempting to borrow from Cézanne was light – not the sunlight of the Good or of Provence, but that light that subtends visibility and makes sound, texture, and odor too possible.

merleauponty.org was created under the direction of Gail Weiss and David Morris following the Circle’s vote in 2016 to redesign the existing site and move to a non-university server. The previous website of the IMPC was hosted by the University of Rhode Island and maintained by Galen A. Johnson, without whose help merleauponty.org would not exist today.