Dutch Design Week: this lamp by designer Dennis Parren casts a network of coloured shadows.
Three different-coloured LEDs project light upward from a circular platform at the base of the CMYK lamp, past thin white metal bars that split the light to cast cyan, magenta and yellow shadows onto surrounding surfaces.
Red, green and blue shadows are created where the different colours overlap.
Cyan, magenta and yellow, along with black, make up the CMYK subtractive colour model used in printing, while red, green and blue make up the RGB additive colour model common to electronic screens.
Parren explains how the properties of LED bulbs enabled him "to show how the primary colors of light - red, green and blue - on the one hand, and the pigment colours - cyan, magenta and yellow - on the other, interact. The effect it produces may be called the aesthetics of LED light."
"You can’t really say 'that chair is red'," he continues. "Actually, the chair is reflecting red light while absorbing green and blue light. It is light that colors the world."
He adds that the CMYK lamp is "not designed to demonstrate how and why, but to show that light is the true custodian of color."
Different iterations of the design have been presented at various shows since Parren's graduation from the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2011, including a small table lamp in Kortrijk, a version on stilts for a Parisian gallery and a little corner lamp in Milan.
The large CMYK pendant lamp shown here was nominated in the autonomous design category at the Dutch Design Awards, which took place as part of Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven - see the winning projects here.
You can see all of our coverage of the event here.
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