PRISM

Generative Assets · Exhibit 96 · Dispersion

You split
the light.

A single white beam crosses this dark room. It carries every colour at once, folded together, and shows you none of them. Bring your cursor into its path — your cursor is a glass prism — and hold it there.

Move onto the beam

This page responds to your pointer. Use the arrow keys to move the prism across the beam and paint a spectrum over the text.

IThe cut

White is a crowd of colours walking in step.

The prism adds nothing. It only makes the crowd walk single file — bending each wavelength by a different amount, so that they leave the glass at slightly different angles and arrive on the wall apart. Red barely turns. Violet turns the most. Between them, every hue the eye can hold.

Hold the glass in the beam and the crowd fans out across the room. Take it away and the colours fold back into a plain white line, as though they were never there. They were always there. You were the one who looked.

IIReadings

Six lines out of the white.

IIIThe instrument

You are the only moving part.

  1. Raise or lower the prism and the angle of incidence changes with it. The fan tilts and widens — this is real refraction, not a picture of one.
  2. Sweep it sideways and the spectrum walks along the wall, tinting each word as it crosses. The letters were white a moment ago; now they wear the colour you brought.
  3. Stop. The room keeps no memory. Lift the glass away and it is a white line in the dark again — silent, colourless, waiting for a hand.