Fata Morgana Art Installation

30 comments

This art installation is named Fata Morgana, and was set up by Ralph Helmick and Stuart Schechter in 2001 at Ft. Lauderdale, FL. This sculpture is a romantic pictorial exercise pushing a traditional painterly subject--the seascape--into three dimensions. As you can see, the central image is a cruise ship and its reflection. Over 16 000 cables are suspended from a framework attached to the ceiling. If you jump inside the article, you can see the sculpture up close, and you will notice that it is made of thousands of smaller sculptures. Absoultely amazing! If you love these kind of illusionary installations, be sure to check Mark Jenkins project "Embeds", along with Unity Triangle, levitating dumpster, house on a museum...









30 Comments

  |  

Add your comment

 |  
  1. Anonymous Pandas 

    what the heck? is that just painted on the wall or something?

  2. Anonymous J-money 

    That is SOOO cool.

  3. Anonymous Anonymous 

    Pandas, this is a 3D image made by hanging objects from the ceiling.

  4. Anonymous Mark 

    That is very intruiging. Must have taken the designer quite a while to allign all of those hanging shapes.

    Pandas...Read the article and look at the other pictures. It is not a painting, it is a bunch of shapes suspended from wires that when viewed from a distance make a whole shape.

  5. Anonymous Anonymous 

    Aaah... but does it actually make a whole shape, or is it just making your brain fill in the gaps and think there is an object there? Or is it relying on the frailties of human sight to not be able to see the spaces between points?

    Or am I just full of garbage?

    A very cool illusion, this one.

  6. Anonymous Ashley Rose 

    I love this kind of art work, they have one like this in Midway Airport in Chicago called Rara Avis.

  7. Anonymous I'm Canadian, eh? 

    Wow, that's so skilled. I applaud the guys who made that.

  8. Anonymous scotthue 

    i like how the artist uses the pyramids for waves

  9. Anonymous YooPoo 

    It's a painting, I know because I can tell. Open your eyes people! At least it's not photoshoped this time.

  10. Blogger Narro87 

    Right...it's a painting...it's so obvious, especially considering that it looks completely different from different angles...yep, definitely a painting. ;)

  11. Anonymous bluethen 

    Why would they paint strings?

  12. Anonymous Ashley Rose 

    YooPoo it's not a painting....I looked in to the sculpture I mentioned earlier and it's by the same artist...I've see his work personally it's not a painting.

    to see more of this artists work take a look at http://www.handsart.net/

  13. Anonymous Anonymous 

    Narro87. can you not see that it is individual little things hanging from the ceiling and plus he said so in the discription yeesh

  14. Anonymous Lynn 

    Wow... That is amazing!

  15. Anonymous Anonymous 

    it is not a painting. it is objects hanging from the celling.

    that is very cool!

  16. Anonymous Anonymous 

    hey, don't underestimate his ability to tell things. that's not fair.

  17. Blogger Jonas 

    YooPoo, is ya head full of poo? Or is it that you just can't you imagine that some people are called artists for a reason? Some boys and girls are actually skilled you know.

    And let's not get overexcited though, it is not that hard making a sculpture like this these days. All you need is some 3d modelling software like Autocad, 3d Max or similar, a lot of thin wire, a lot of beeds and a lot of patience. Ralph Helmick and Stuart Schechter had these. Difference between them and us is that they had the idea and made it into practice. That's why we call them artists and call ourselves ...

  18. Anonymous Anonymous 

    that is so awsome

  19. Blogger otowi 

    YooPoo: It is definitely NOT a painting. Did you not see the second picture which shows a close-up of how the ship image is made? Have you never gone out and seen such a thing in person for yourself?

    It is a bunch of objects hanging from the ceiling by string, arranged at various heights and depths to create the desired image.

    Try it yourself. It is not that hard to create something like this at a basic level.

  20. Anonymous chick 

    The first picture looks pretty amazing; it is something to make you think about. After seeing the other pictures it just makes it a little confusing and I think it takes away from the first picture. It is still definite talent and I wouldn't be able to do it! Props to the artist!!

  21. Anonymous Anonymous 

    Please don't take this the wrong way; I mean no offense and it is obvious that English is not your 1st language, but I must point out that every single picture on your site has the same mistake:

    ... and share it's link with a community...

    There's no apostrophe in it's unless you mean "it is". And, in the context you are using, you don't.

    Also, I assume "Stumble Upon" is a Website(?) and, if so, it should be capitalized or italicized not only to be proper, but to make the sentence readable.

    If you really do want to make your site more popular, please show your commitment to quality. and fix these errors Thank you in advance.

  22. Anonymous Mr. P. 

    C'mon, don't you guys see the tiny cables?
    They show up clearly contrasting against the wall.
    Nice work!

  23. Anonymous Tiny 

    anonymous, I think you're right. I mean, look at the third and fourth pictures. If you hadn't seen the others both of those would seem like random dots in the air! Cool illusion by the way.

  24. Anonymous Anonymous 

    I recognize this is supposed to be real... I understand the different pictures from different angles and all but ...really.... look at the pictures again. Sorry, I am not buying it. You could design this in 3dsmax and view from multiple angles too. this may be good manipulation but without more info... I actually find myself agreeing with YooPoo. Look at the staircase shadows, look at the top of the pillar shadows, these all look to formulated and "perfect". Perfectly fake if you ask me.

  25. Blogger Narro87 

    ...remind me never to be sarcastic again...I think it's real, not a painting.

    But I come to one conclusion from all of this...people don't think that an optical illusion is real unless it's flawed, which is something really ironic. The *better* job someone does, the less likely it is that people believe it. Isn't that exactly what an optical illusion is? Something unbelievable? I assume Thomas, that you won't be happy about whether it's real or not unless you see it yourself, in which case, it is truly strange that you come to a site like this, where all we have are pictures of the objects and no direct access to the physical ones. What here *couldn't* be Photoshopped if someone wanted to hard enough? We have to make a drastic assumption that the person presenting the illusion is telling the truth about it. If you don't, then what here counts? One by one, all of these illusions can be dismissed because they have the potential of being fakes.

    We're now left with two possibilities when we're confronted with what appears to be a legitimate optical illusion. Either we trust the submitter, or we don't. I'll leave that for you to decide.

  26. Blogger Jonas 

    Dear Thomas Rodgers,

    If these pictures wouldn't look "perfect", you'd say "look at the picture, all blurry and bad lighting, obviously faked..." wouldn't you?

    Of course these images can be made with 3dmax, but than it would be a virtual image, an image of something that isn't an actual part of the real space we live and move in. In a few minutes I can draw you a portrait of your person having breasts, wearing a zebra striped skin with a tree growing out of your behind whilst flying a space shutlle, but that wouldn't be as cool as making it really happen, would it?

    Of course I could get the ball in the hoop easier by lowering the hoop, but I would't like the game anymore. Would you?

    This is a cool piece of art and I guess you just can't stand others doing things differently and still end up having a nice product. I challege you: go ahead, make your 3dmax images and show 'em to the world ! In several public and semi public spaces these two artists already did... learn to live with it, dude.

  27. Anonymous Anonymous 

    this is really cool. props to the artist who designed this. it looks sort of like a "ghost ship" type thing.

    it took some time to do this.

  28. Anonymous candice 

    if you're convinced that it's fake, you're stupid. there's one of those in the evanston library too. it's above some stairs and it looks like a face.

  29. Anonymous spaceguyp 

    wait...

    what?

  30. Blogger Jessie 

    I've seen this in the philadelphia airport, just that its planes, and i think anima;s




Optical Illusions







Links











Mighty Optical Illusions (c) is a website dedicated to optical illusions, magic tricks and puzzles. Mighty Illusions, Mighty Networks, Mighty Optical Illusions, moillusions.com, moillusions and variations are copyrighted trademark of Mighty Networks, and can not be used without written permission. All photos, pictures, videos and other shapes of art placed on this web site were submitted by individuals not connected with moillusions.com While most of the submission are made by their original artists, some of them were probably just collected from internet. If you hold copyrights to any of the illusions posted to this website, and would like us to remove them immediately, email us and we'll be glad to do so.