Rapha Mey: IOR Bends Red and Blue Through a Glass of Water
Rapha Mey's only 1/1 of 2026 is IOR, a code-made loop of a glass-like vessel that lets red and blue pass through each other, made for the Searching for Balance auction on Tezos.
Rapha Mey calls IOR "my only 1/1 work for 2026." Short for Index of Refraction, it is a 3D animation created and rendered entirely with code, soundtrack included, and it comes with a spatial video made for the Apple Vision Pro. It is lot 10 of Searching for Balance, a generative art auction on objkt from ACCOMPART'S, curated by Anton Dubrovin (MCHX) and Sergey Shendrik, which opened on September 29 with 13 artists asked how balance holds up inside the invisible systems that shape daily life.
The starting point is what Mey calls his "current obsession with 'virtual glassware': reflection, refraction, absorption." Code lets him build shapes that could not exist in a real glass studio and play with different indices of refraction, the values that decide how light bends as it enters a material. In IOR the material looks like glass but behaves closer to water, with few inner reflections and "plenty of gorgeous transparency." He ties it to Bruce Lee's idea of being water: "adaptable, shape shifting, balanced, focused but open to new experiences."
There is also a political reading, which Mey laid out on October 17. In the US, left and right are coded blue and red, and he had long wanted a work that shows that divide while inviting a way out of it. In IOR, blue and red fill the background, but as the camera circles the vessel, both colors pass through the glass together. He wonders whether, "with a little change of perspective, we could understand other people's views better," and calls the work "just a reminder that our point of view is not universal."
The form is kept simple on purpose. Rather than refine a perfect curve, Mey builds volume with boolean operations: a torus subtracted from a sphere, with the cut smoothed out. "The idea is not to get perfection," he wrote, "but to rediscover how simple principles can yield (hopefully) beautiful results." The result is a seamless loop of glass, water and sound, best watched with the volume up.
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