gestalt (13. 431)

Via Clive Thompson’s latest linkfest (lots more to discover there), we discover this catalogue of scores of visual phenomena and optical illusions catalogued and indexed by one Michael Bach, polymath and ophthalmologist. Each entry includes details about the provenance and with an explanation of what’s going on perception-wise, including how to unsee it. Furthermore, unlike this sample GIF of Roget’s Palisade, the illusion first described by the author of the eponymous thesaurus though his take on the mechanism behind the illusion does not quite fit with the current understanding of what’s classed as the rolling shutter effect, the animations that Bach has created can be paused, the colours denuded and sped up or slowed down. Let us know your favourites and what you find most befuddling.

7x7

a midnight train going anywhere: take the nightline through an infinite metropolis—via JWZ  

炬燵: a giant, living room sized electric blanket from Japan called a kotatsu 

pop culture c-span: mining the US government archives for movie and television references and reviews—via Waxy  

doctor zaius, doctor zaius: researchers splice human genes into embryonic marmosets to increase their brain size 

just a little plastic bag with little handles on it: the arbiter of packaging 

peripheral drift: an interesting rotating circles optical illusion  

zoomquilt: follow the thread for an infinite exploration—via the New Shelton wet/dry

the mind-body problem

Pioneering experimental psychologist, physicist and philosopher who taught at the University of Leipzig and is considered the founder of the branch of study known as psychophysics—a hybrid discipline that researchers stimulation and perception—Gustav Theodor Fechner (*1801 – †1887) has been honoured on this day since 1985 by the academic community on this anniversary of Fechner awaking from a dream with an epiphany, an insight into the relationship between material and mental sensations that changed the course of scientific thinking.   In 1834, Fechner was appointed adjunct professor of physics and focused on his early fascination with colour theory—the effect named for him—and the optical illusion of colours in the spinning black and white patterns (see also) of the Benham top, but within five years had severely damaged his eyes, forcing him to change disciplines, leading to crucial and influential breakthroughs in our outlook on the way we experience the world and interpret our perceptions. Later in 1871 Fechner conducted the first study of phenomenon we’ve come to recognise as synaesthesia (previously) and studied the corpus callosum and bilateral symmetry of the brain, correctly assessing the outcome of thought-experiments not conducted until a century later.

¡oho!

Via Print Magazine’s regular feature column, the Daily Heller, we are introduced to the cut-short but prolific portfolio graphic designer, muralist and stage backdrop painter Rex Whistler (*1905 – †1944), as well-known known for his portraits of London society of the 1920s and 1930s as he was for his commercial and caricature work. While this visual trope of reversible faces, as collected in this volume published posthumously in 1946, was not invented by Whistler these ambigrams of perspective were among his most popular and enduring legacies not associated with a specific press or advertising campaign and promoted the use of optical illusions. Explore a whole gallery of Whistler’s works at the links up top.

visual circuity

The ever interesting BLDGBlog introduces us to the concept from Mark Changizi that supposes a sort of visual vernacular of optical illusions that could be presented and preserved as architectural elements or useful grebbling ornaments to cue viewers to perform a computation—a reminder, encoded instructions or a formula that easier to convey and intuit by sight rather than through words.
Façades, as light and shadow pass over them throughout the day, become engaging and transformative as logical operators—though I suppose could be programmed for propaganda as well. The notion that mathematics can be reified and intuitive recalls both the cymatic diagrams of Friedrich Chladni and the visual proofs of the Pythagorean theorem or quadratic equation.

monochrome

Optical illusions, like this one from artist and software engineer Øyvind Kolås (note no gratuitous metal umlauts here) that illustrates the brain’s facility for colour assimilation (also called the von Bezold spreading effect for the Münchener meteorologist who first described it), have always engaged and captivated (see also) us because of their sheer pernacity in showing us how easily we’re fooled in a form that’s not so simply rebuffed or dismissed, like saying we’d never fall for this hoax or be a victim of that scam.  There’s no disenchantment in the explanation in a video at the link up top either, and maybe if you look hard enough you will see it’s a black-and-white photograph of a classroom overlaid by those chromatic grids.

munker-white illusion

Though these spheres seem to come in three colourful varieties, David Novick created this optical illusion by exploiting a neurobiological factor known as lateral or antagonistic inhibition—the ability of a stimulated neuron to calm its neighbours so as not to overload the sensory system. Objectively, all the spheres are shaded identically and are a uniform brassy colour. The whole trick, impossible to unsee otherwise and probably not advisable to try, is broken down layer-by-layer with some philosophical musings and more examples at Bad Astronomy at the link above.

a l’egs-istential quandary

Using such a figure-ground confusing optical illusion as this impossible pachyderm (like the blivet but imaginary instead of an anatomic violation) as a heuristic tool to explore mental rotation and how generalisation emerges in learned behaviour (judging distance and sequence), the creator, cognitive scientist Roger Sheppard, offers something unique in the visual dissonance ever advancing with one foot or leg always unaccounted for.

dark they were and golden-eyed

Our faithful antiquarian, JF Ptak’s Science Books, finds some lush, poetic language in the debate that spanned from the time when astronomer Percival Lowell’s assistant Carl O Lampland described the exacting photographs taken of the surface of Mars by Eugene Michel Antoniadi.

Lampland came by this poetic license by way of an Italian false-friend (falso amico) but the mistranslation sparked a vigorous back and forth about Martians and design that lasted from 1886 to 1909, when the photographer accounts for the optical illusions in the channels that captivated the public and attempts to finally dispel the persistent illusion. There’s an excerpt below in translation but be sure to visit the source up top for more verses and more finds from old books and journals.

Our observations lead us to divide the channels into several categories, namely: In diffuse shadows, more or less irregular, some of which appear double in a fleeting way; In gnarled blobs; In gray masses, shapeless and disjointed; In irregular, thin blurring, in the construction of a hedge of Martian seas, and widen into a vast and confused shadow further on, like new with their tributaries, seen at a great distance.

troxler fading

TYWKIWDBI introduces us to a curious optical illusion that occurs when one focuses at the single black dot in the centre of this image with the wash of colours surrounding it will disappear after about twenty seconds of uninterrupted staring. Click on the image to open it in a separate screen in case there is distracting marginalia on the page.  The visual effect which happens at least in part in the brain (and not in the eyes) was first identified and described by Viennese physician and philosopher Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler and is explained as the perceptual neurons (there are parallel effects for the other senses besides just sight) become inured to an unchanging background and begins to ignore it.

The above animation illustrates a variant of Troxler fading called the Lilac Chaser, credited to Jeremy Hinton circa 2005, and you’re invited to stare at the black cross-hairs for about thirty seconds and see what happens. Clinically and metaphorically, learning about ways that our perceptions are liable to compromise we’re finding simultaneously enlightening and leaving us wondering how we might be benighted.

zigzag

Researcher Kohske Takahashi presents a new sort of optical illusion that he has named “curvature blindness” which is manifested as the identical sets of lines pass over the grey field and appear to retain and take on alternating properties of a wave and a more angular trough. No one is certain about the mechanism behind this cognitive illusion but Takahashi suspects that registering sharper corners might be the default, Gestalt mode of human visual perception and what we retreat to when faced with a confusing arrangement. Same-otherwise, this visual trickery and related stunts could also be grounded in the self-deception that the human brain creates for our benefit that reduces the granularity of the senses and make things seem smooth and continuous, despite gaps and delays.

industrial arts

Back in 1935 surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp plied his craft in a purely commercial venture at the gadget fair Concours Lépine in Paris—a sort of invention-convention for debuting new household appliances—with his Rotoreliefs.
These kinetic works of art designed to rotate on a turntable and propagate optical illusions unfortunately missed the target audience at the fair, who were naturally more interested in the latest slicers and dicers than record albums that didn’t have any audio content. Duchamp was not disheartened by this entrepreneurial set-back and continued honing his trade in collaboration with other artists. Be sure to check out the whole curated article at Hyperallergic for more Rotoreliefs in action and short film Duchamp made with fellow surrealist Man Ray.

cognitive inference

Perhaps avert your eyes if you find such optical effects to be headache or vertigo inducing, but Jacques Ninio’s classic Extinction Illusion has twelve fleeting dots on the grid that dash away when you try to focus on them is really worth a spare moment or two. Hardly anyone can see all the dots at once due to poor peripheral vision and the mind’s eye tends to generate solid crossings over the scintillating, contrasting gaps. I wonder how someone manages to design an optical illusion that’s meant to be evasive and dazzling in the first place.

side-scrolling

Sometimes, you come across a truly mesmerizing animation—the sort you could nod off to, having let your attention be dominated for too long to do anything else, like this one of a running Mario (whose motion is itself an optical illusion generated by the passage of the grate, sort of like the effect of lenticular printing) posted at a site called Mlkshk and spotted by the keen eye of Madame Jujujive of the Everlasting Blört.

montasir

Dangerous Minds has a nice appreciation and curation of the kinetic work of French-Hungarian design pioneer Victor Vasarely, acknowledged as the founder of the op art movement, whose formal apex came some three decades later on the cusps of the Midcentury Modern style—and revival. The panels and the henges of psychedelic monoliths are pretty amazing, and though artistry is maybe lost to the dazzling and dizzying the principles of teasing the perception lives on in optical illusions and Gestalt frameworks.

forbidden colours or darkly adapted eye

I am not positive that the so-called chimerical colours aren’t an explanation of that dress and the phenomena doesn’t truly strike me as an optical illusion and something more akin to a more intense exercise than one subjects his or her eyes to, but nonetheless catching a fleeting glimpse of the stygian colours—that is something both dark and super-saturated, is something to behold. There are other flavours of colours outside the visual gamut, what can be displayed, reproduced, or seen due to the structure of our eyes or even imagined in the conventional sense, but these contrasting hues and resultant impossible blue are suggestive of the mythological river Styx that separated the world of the living from the underworld.

To achieve the effect, one ought to stare at the target within the yellow circle for a full minute, then glance over the black square. Staring at the bright spot fatigues certain colour and light receptors (not like an after-image burnt into a television screen) and then those receptors that are used primarily to boost night-vision are excited, and one should briefly see the contradictory spectre. Maybe some have the ability to see such things everywhere—although the concept of colours can be communicated to an extent, I suppose we never know what another person perceives, and there was probably also a time not too long ago when unnatural colours like hot-pink or the florescent- and neon-tinged ones were unheard of and novel. Other descriptors include luminous and hyperbolic, and I think it would be fun to give names to that whole spectrum of overlapping colours and challenge our brains and eyes to see the impossible. Are these chimera colours—like the hot, bitter, baby and shocking, once seen unable to be unseen or must they be conjured up every time?

gestalt

Campaigning sets off a dissonance that I think goes hidden, unexamined too quickly for both the presenter and for the audience. It is not the art of oration, in my opinion, to suggest and convince segments of the public that what they want to hear untangles half-truths and heated promises, nor does anything more than mask the compromise and confusion. Though we’d like to look away and turn inwards, sometimes it is necessary to try to reconcile what does not quite correspond with reality.

widget

Hungarian artist Martzi Hegedüs crafted an impossible character-set called Frustro, the font inspired by the Penrose tribar and MC Escher-esque architecture. I think this is brilliant and I wonder if advances in three-dimensional printing could manage to produce tubes for neon signs that appear to twist like this.

When I was little and first posed a question of hypothetical industrialists—i.e., someone running a widget factory, I always wondered (and still do envision it like this) what their product would be. I imagined a widget must have been this other impossible shape—a blivet or the devil's tuning fork, whose tines also produce a frustrating and dizzying optical illusion.  I thought that was as good a hypothetical product as any.