An Iris's Grammar of Light

An Iris’s Grammar of Light

Digital light is often engineered through the emission of red, green, and blue (RGB) color signals to represent the full visible light spectrum. Most computer screens are limited to RGB schematics, but many stage lights often incorporate more color signals, such as lime, amber, or cyan to create a “richer” visible spectrum.

Here, I have automated the RGBL (red, green, blue, and lime) color signals of a stage light to create the same white light with different combinations of colors over time. The different colors composing the same white light are exposed by the refraction of the Iris prism.

In the late 1920s, botanist Edgar Anderson researched variations of the Iris flower by collecting precise measurements of Iris petal and sepal lengths. In 1936, this data set was used in the eugenics publication “The use of multiple measurements in taxonomic problems” to propose means of statistical speciation. These data and statistical methodologies are still used in introductory data science courses today.

Irises, however, are full of lively potential, and they are a favored flower of hobby horticulturalists precisely because of their infinite varietals.

In creating this iris light prism that refracts color channels and exposes the perceptual limitations of color categorization, I also hope this figure of the iris can be seen as reveling in the limitations of “the human” and reductive methods of classifying existence.

Made possible by a grant from the Duke University Co-Lab.