Working with Colour

What is actually happening

Each face of the cube is an optically clear acrylic panel sealed with a subtractive colour filter. On its own, a face reads cyan, magenta or yellow. Look through two at once and the filters stack — each one removing its band of wavelengths from the white light passing through.

What reaches your eye is what survived. Cyan over magenta gives blue. Magenta over yellow gives red. Yellow over cyan gives green. Three deep, you get black — every wavelength subtracted, nothing left to see with.

This is why it holds up to attention in a way a screen never does. Nothing is being generated. There is no animation and nothing is being added. You are seeing by what has been taken away, and the rule does not change however long you look at it or whatever state you look at it in.

Why we think it belongs in the room

Somewhere for the eyes to go

Long stretches of a journey are spent with the eyes open and nothing worth resting them on. A phone is the worst possible object — it is bright, it interrupts, and it is full of other people. A cube asks nothing, tells you nothing, and rewards being looked at closely for a very long time.

Weight in the hand

Solid acrylic has real heft and a cool, smooth face. When attention scatters, a small heavy object with edges is a reliable way back into the body. It is the same reason people hold a stone.

It behaves the same every time

Turn it ninety degrees and the colour changes exactly as much as it changed last time. In a state where a great deal is moving, something lawful and repeatable is worth more than something spectacular. It can be checked. That is the whole of its use.

Before and after, not only during

Ours mostly get picked up in the hour before anything starts, and again the next morning — the long tail of a journey, when there is still a lot to look at and not much left to say. Set it on a windowsill and it works on its own all afternoon.

The collection

Made by CMY Cubes, an independent optics and STEAM studio in Australia. Every piece below is coming to the Sacred Menu — orderable with credits, shipped by us, alongside your medicine.