EXPERIMENT 01 / LIGHT OUT OF FOCUS
A hundred points of light far behind a lens focused close, drifting upwards while the whole field turns round the colour wheel: red, then green, then blue, a full turn a minute. Move the pointer and the nearer lights move more.
How it works ↓WHERE THE DISCS COME FROM
The lens is focused half a metre away and the lights are between one and a half and thirty metres behind it, so each becomes a disc nearly the size of a point at infinity: the nearer ones a little smaller, rising faster and swaying wider.
A disc is the lens's aperture drawn at that light's blur, carrying exactly the light of the point it came from. Where discs overlap they add, which is what makes a crowd of them look photographed rather than drawn.
Every light takes the same hue, give or take the spread, and the hue moves on in real seconds. Its brightness is evened out so the green third does not glare: it breathes, and never flashes.