Years later, after finding out more about how colour worked in relation to perception, I encountered two elements that caught my attention in the Victoria and Albert museum. The first was a shelf of Roman blown glass, mostly belonging from 1st – 4th century. The colours were stunning, and similar to others I encountered in my iridescence research. More modern recreations of the rainbowlike effect in glass was, according to the museum: “achieved by spraying the surface with metallic chlorides and reheating it in a reducing atmosphere or with a direct flame, or by the introduction of metallic substances into the glass.”

Another research I encountered on inridisence on the New Scientist (Allen, 2021) confirmed this by stating that iridescence was an effect that could be achieved in almost every surface. It explained iridescence as a phenomena to the fact that “colour can also be produced by surfaces that reflect, or scatter, different wavelenghts of light back in slightly different directions”.

Going back to the Victoria and Albert museum, I also saw an architectural model where engineers used transparent models to calculate the stress that a material had been put onto. Polarized light, either linear or circular, is what allows us to examine transparent materials using photoelasticity in order to see the invisible structure underneath. 

 I am currently looking into concepts such as birefringence and tetrachromacy to understand better materiality under the scope of human perception. I find these concepts interesting since I consider that not everyone is familiar with the idea of accessing the invisible structures behind transparent objects. Scanning litmus cellophane in movement, showed interesting results about how light can be interpreted.