Eleen Deprez
Window installation
8 February – 16 February
every day
10am-5pm
This minimal installation accompanies the upcoming talk, “What is it like to be a tetrachromat?” by Michael Newall, Saturday 15 February at 2pm.
Walk by the gallery and look through the peephole in the window. You’ll see two rainbows: one projected on the wall by the refraction of white light through a prism, the other a digital recording played on an LCD screen.
Tetrachromats have an additional colour receptor in their retina. When looking at a rainbow they perceive extra colours or bands beyond the familiar red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—sometimes distinguishing up to ten distinct bands.
“Backstreet Laboratory of Scientific Proof” offers a tentative test. LCD screens are trichromatic (each pixel contains a red, green, blue subpixel which combine to create colours). As such, an lcd screen cannot produce a tetrachromatic colourspace, which would require a fourth subpixel. To most trichromatic viewers, the two rainbows will appear only slightly different—perhaps the LCD screen struggles to render the vibrancy of violet, or the green band appears somewhat reduced. However, if the difference between the two rainbows strikes an observer as significant—if they see additional bands in the prismatic rainbow that are absent from the LCD rainbow—they might be tetrachromatic.
We’d be excited to conduct further research with willing participants—get in touch if you think you might see beyond the ordinary spectrum!
Disclaimer: The Little Machine and its director/artist, Eleen Deprez, have no scientific credentials whatsoever. In fact, Dr. Deprez failed high school physics. We accept no liability for any existential crises, optical illusions, irreversible expansions of colour perception, and/or sudden realisations about the limits of human perception. Volunteers for further scientific experimentation will not be paid, nor can we guarantee their safety—but we will enthusiastically document the results and use it as anecdotal evidence.
Photography: Eleen Deprez
