Today, a bit of really, really cool art by Dennis Parren. This lamp features cyan, magenta, and yellow LEDs pointed around at slightly different angles and crazy wire shapes. When these three primary colors (more on that later) combine, they create white light. When one of the colors is blocked by the structure of the lamp itself, however, multicolored shadows are created and cast about the room. Observe:
CMYK up ‘switch on’ from Dennis Parren on Vimeo.
This takes an effect that many lighting companies have spent a lot of time and energy trying to eliminate – the multicolored shadows effect from LED wash lights and exploits in an incredibly clever way. The descriptions of the lamp claim that it uses red, yellow, and blue LEDs, so perhaps the designer had the LED emitters custom-made in these colors. I never really thought about combining “subtractive” colors of light in that way, but I guess it makes sense. Cyan is a combination of blue and green cones stimulation, yellow a combination of red and green cones, and magenta a combination of red and blue cones, so it should (if I’ve thought this out correctly) make white. Either way, it’s a really, really cool idea and one I wish I’d thought of.