Refraction is the change of direction and the slowing of light as it passes through one material to another of different density. This slowing down is distinct from reflection which is the ‘abrupt change in the direction of propagation of a wave that strikes the boundary between different mediums’.(1) Refraction results in dispersion - the splitting of white light into different wavelengths.

Samuel Delany is a science-fiction author who works with refraction in his narrative structures - his novel 1972 novel Dhalgren for example is a refractive, and disorientating flux. For Delany, refraction is an important process as it makes things multiple and fragmented.(2)

I am especially interested in the fragmentation that refraction facilitates.

Fragmentation, says Dan Byrne Smith in his introduction to Science Fiction, is a trope in science-fiction narratives as they assemble together pieces of reality and fiction.(3) Fragmented narratives give us new insights into our reality, as mirror images are sliced to reveal the - literal - layers of colours that form our world. Fragmentation is disorientating but freeing. For the poet Anne Carson whose collection of poems Float uses fragmented forms, to fragment is ‘an opportunity to put the imagination to work.’ (3)

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Slow glass has a large refractive index, which is why it is able to seemingly absorb and hold light within its frames. This slowing of light results in an image of a past time being projected onto a seemingly present time. This out-of-joint, fragmented, time reminds me of Delany’s use of refraction to create shifting temporal borders - similarly to the Slow Glass publication series.

It occurred to me that so often we see refraction from an external perspective - a pencil seemingly cut in two as it refracts through water, or the shifting of light from above a glass prism. To create my own understanding of refraction, I wanted to see the world refracted and fragmented, not above - but through - the glass.

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