Refraction/Projection, 2020

Refraction/Projection is a two-channel looping video of light refracting through a rotating piece of hot-formed glass, viewed in two different ways.

The first channel was recorded as a series of exposures of light captured by a DSLR sensor with no lens. The idea and methodology was based on an experimental type of lensless photography called Refractography. Since the images are captured using a very small amount of light, each exposure took a while to capture. Therefore, to extend the technique to create a moving image, I created a stop-motion animation from a sequence of many still photos. Between each exposure, I rotated the glass object slightly, which altered the pattern of light that landed on the camera sensor.

The second channel was recorded with a normal video camera (with a lens), which was pointing directly down at the glass object from above as it rotated. This created an image which is more representative of how the object appeared to the human eye, compared to the complete abstraction of the no-lens capture of channel 1.

The drawing below shows a top-down view of the recording setup for channel 1.