Mighty Optical Illusions » Art Installation

Best Optical Illusion EVER!

Vurdlak — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:03:41 +0000

Reading the title, and understanding it came directly from me, I suppose adds some weight to the actual Leopard Illusion you see below. It’s hard for me to explain how this illusion came to be, without revealing the actual solution, thus ruining the surprise-effect for you. There is much relevant info and background for it, but for now I’ll retain myself just on revealing the author behind it – the magnificent Craig Tracy. First thing you’ll notice is that it’s not some photo of an actual animal, rather a realistically painted picture. But you’re still far from seeing the illusion. Only tip I can give you, is that leopard’s eyes were painted on a concrete floor. I suggest you examine the picture more closely before seeing this final hint. I’ll monitor the forthcoming ratings, and am eager to see if you agree with me that this must be one of the best optical illusions ever created!

Village Turned into Optical Illusion

Vurdlak — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:45:13 +0000

We’ve featured Felice Varini dozen of times, so I encourage you to check some of our previous articles to learn the background and goals this particular artist set for himself. It’s because I dislike repeating myself. In his newest installation, the buildings in the town of Vercorin in the Swiss Alps contribute to this impressive piece. The set was called Cercle et suite d’éclats. But what I recon interests you the most, is how all of this was turned into practice. Well, the pattern was projected on the town from the vantage point, and then traced and painted. If you shoot a photo from the same spot in daylight, you’ll quickly realize how the town looks flat – almost like a postcard. The interesting part is how he got the whole town to approve this? Don’t miss the panoramic view on Varini’s website. More photos from different angles are included below…

Georges Rousse’s Illusory Illusions

Justine — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:00:47 +0000

It’s me Justine again, sharing my second post on Mighty Optical Illusions website. You’d think that being an illusionist would be enough for any artistic person who enjoys tweaking reality. But Georges Rousse, Paris artist born 2 years after the end of The Second World War, has taken it a step further. He is creating illusions of an illusion!

Back in the eighties, Rousse started out as an ordinary laboratory photographer, but then moved on and began taking photographs of vacant car parks, empty roads and condemned buildings.

After a while an idea hit him, so he started painting figures of people on walls of these buildings, and then photographed these. Later on, he switched from figures to illusory shapes. Soon he grew tired of all this, and began superimposing photographs on spaces, realities on other realities.

I find Rousse’s combination of photography and illusions, combined with installation art somewhat confusing – perhaps annoying even. It’s impossible to really know what you are seeing ,ever! I’m not sure I would enjoy any of his works hanging from my walls…

Take the above photo for example. At first glance it looks as if one is looking at the scene through a circular filter. A closer look reveals that the shapes in the circle appear to be entirely separated from their background, as if an unrelated photograph has been superimposed on the area behind.

Nothing in the “normal” part of the area lines up with a single part in the white photo. I don’t know about you, but I feel cheated by this kind of artifice. My eyes want the circular part to fit into the main picture so much, but it just won’t! You may find more of Rousse’s work below:

Guido Moretti’s Ambiguous Art

Vurdlak — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:33:36 +0000

Same sculpture seen from two different angles

Guido Moretti is an Italian artist captivated by the beauty of analytical geometry. At the Faculty of Engineering at Padua University he created his first sculptures in plasticine. Little later, his creativity knew no bounds – from stratification he moved on to rotations followed by orthogonal intersections. He created a set of sculptures of orthogonal intersections with various optical illusion shapes and impossible figures.

At the end of this article I have included rich gallery containing some of the most famous ambiguous sculptures done by Guido. But what is special about them, you might ask. Well, check out the photo that appeared in your widgets today. Same one you see on your right. Off course, the “impossible objects” motive you see is put in the second plan. More interesting part is that both of these photos represent a single unique sculpture. How is that? Well, if you remember one of our previous posts where we explained Shigeo Fukuda’s “Encore” sculpture, the answer will come flying at you instantly!

Check the photo below to see this particular sculpture from three different angles, and be sure to view this video and experience the rotation. As I previously mentioned, I’ve added additional gallery beneath, where you can see few more of Guido’s creations.

Guido Moretti’s Ambigous Sculptures:

The Invisible Man: Liu Bolin

Vurdlak — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:39:41 +0000

Probably you read me by now… As hard as I force myself to put new illusion each day (mostly because of the widget’s name “Optical Illusion of The Day“), you have to take into account I’m still on my vacation. Thus in reality, new post is written up every 1.5 to 2 days. I hope you’ll live this through for few more days before I return home. Anyhow, today I’m giving you this monster gallery of Liu Bolin’s art installations. This month, one year ago I posted 9 photos of Liu Bolin’s incredible camouflage artwork. It appears that in the meantime Liu was very active, so today I bring you 10 new photos of his disappearing attempts. I know how some of you don’t prefer our galleries, but trust me – this is the best way to bring page-load time to the minimum, and lower the cost of our bandwidth (more pages, more ad impressions). Please reply which camouflage was your favorite!

Liu Bolin is able to blend into any surroundings - no matter how complicated they might be!

Liu Bolin’s Camouflage-artwork Gallery

Matchstick Men Optical Illusion

Vurdlak — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:50:04 +0000

I heard some advices how I should develop “Optical Illusion of The Day” app for iPhone/iPod Touch. Are you kidding me? We already did this :) It was our main news months ago. If you look a little bit closer (just below the header), you may even notice the “iphone app” link. Now that we concluded this little misunderstanding, let’s check today’s art installation:

This photograph came along with no accompanying description. I can’t tell you who the author is, nor when was this taken. But what I can tell you, is that the shown artwork greatly resembles Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s “Shadow Sculptures“. My next guess would be that the author behind them was Kumi Yamashita. If you have more info, be nice and share. Hope that this illusion wasn’t too scary – it’s just garbage on a stick, after all.

Two Heads are better than one, ayeh?

“Anamorphosis” by Luc d’Hanis

Vurdlak — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 21:34:16 +0000

I’m glad that my writer’s block lasted this short, and hopefully I’ll be swinging back in full rhythm now. Am not sure if you noticed, but I’ve added “Top 10 Optical Illusions” section at the bottom of my sidebar. Based on your ratings, only the best optical illusions will automatically appear there. There are some rules though – optical illusion need to have at least 5 votes before they can candidate themselves. I hope that in time, all of the posts will get much more votes than needed. Hopefully as time goes by, we will have credible leaderboard of top optical illusions. I’m very excited about this new feature. What else do you suggest? I’m closely listening to your suggestions, and currently the best one I heard is advice to create some kind of a form, where you could submit your articles, images, etc… so they are completely ready, just waiting for me to approve them. Will keep you informed about this…

Today’s gallery is called “Anamorphosis“, and was created by Luc d’Hanis & Sofie Lachaert. This technique is very well understood by our old visitors, but if you’re a newbie you may want to check the Anamorposis category first. In today’s example when porcelain platters meet reflective object, the distorted drawings of precious birds on the platter become perfectly reflected on the bottles or cups. The awareness of the birds’ potential extinction emerges only when objects are carefully aligned as a pair. The distorted drawings on the platters only reveal themselves when you place a reflective object in the middle of the platter. Hope you’ll enjoy these “minimalistic” optical illusion photos. Oh, by the way – don’t forget to vote after you check our archived illusions. We need as many votes possible, to bring some credibility to out “top illusions” leaderboard.

The secret is revealed when you place a reflective object in the middle of the platter.

Here you may check some more Anamorphic examples:

Russian Living Statues Collection

Vurdlak — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:56:39 +0000

Probably you grew bored from all those Ultimate Galleries I’ve posted during the past week, never the less – I’m sure you’ll love this one. At least if you have nerves going through each photo in this gallery. But before we continue, I’d like to show you an interview I did for Environmental Graffiti website. The interview can be found here. If you have a spare minute, I welcome you to read it and you are invited to post your comments here (you may even see a nasty photo of me). Now let’s explain what all those photos are doing here. If you visited any major Europe city over the past decade, I’m sure you’ve came across all those people who pretend to be a statues, standing on the street somewhere in downtown, during the summer. They are usually painted in gold, standing so still that you hardly can believe they aren’t statues at all. By freaking out the passers by, they earn some spare coins. English Russia reported that all those performers came to Russia recently, more precisely they visited city of Sochi to participate in the biggest Living Statues Contest, the world has ever seen. Now these bring our Body Paint category to the next level, don’t they? Which of these “living statues” you think did the best disguising job? Which one did you favor the most? Tell me, tell me!

It's pretty difficult to see these "statues" are real, live human beings

Don’t be scared by the size of this gallery – Enjoy yourself:

Shigeo Fukuda’s “Encore”

Vurdlak — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:57:19 +0000

Ambiguous Violin Player

Japanese artist Shigeo Fukuda is the most prolific and versatile of all the illusion artists. Fukuda’s sculptures and installments were some of the most important additions to our optical illusions site. It is worth mentioning that his artistic opus is more than incredible, and that his works are displayed all over the world. Still, Shigeo is most known in Japan, where most of his work is on display.

He has created illusionistic art (two-dimensional and three-dimensional) in all manner of categories: impossible objects, ambiguous sculptures, distorted projections, anamorphic art, etc. Additionally, he is the author of three Japanese books on optical illusions.

Ambiguous Piano Player

Now that we have covered some background on Shigeo Fukuda, we may proceed with his installment that deserved today’s spotlight. Title of this ambiguous sculpture is “Encore”. I have included all three photos of this incredible sculpture, each one being taken from slightly different angle. If you observe the first photo (same one that appeared inside your widget), you will see a perfect profile of a violinist playing a violin. Now, looking at the second photo on your right, you may think its impossible this is the very same sculpture pictured in the first photo. Well, I can assure you, it is.

Encore by Shigeo Fukuda

What we are seeing as a result, a representation of a pianist and violinist in the same sculpture when viewed from two vantage points.

“Encore” truly reveals the importance of a vantage point. Further, this sculpture utilizes “visual” vantage points – where understanding can only be accomplished visually. Such works of art make evident how orientation and position can work together to produce more than amazing results. The latter photographs illustrate, in tangible form, the many faces a 3-dimensional work of art may have.

As you have witnessed, this sculpture makes the most of the human visual system, making the surreal exist before our very eyes. Below you may see a gallery with few more photos, taken at on the different location Enjoy!

Gallery for Shigeo Fukuda’s “Enecore”

1+1=3 Art Installation

Vurdlak — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:59:44 +0000

Ok, bare with me: I’m testing some new gallery function inside Wodrpress. If you “continue reading” this article (supposedly you are on the homepage), and jump inside thi article, you will see some small thumbnails below this first photo. Each thumbnail represents a photo from this art installation photo set. Now here is the cool part – by clicking each image, you will see this image in full size, but on its very own separate page! There you will be able to easily scroll to “next” and “previous” photo, till the end of the collection. Please test this for me, and report all your findings and errors you may experience. In the mean time I have updated all the video illusions, which may now be found inside this section. Additionally, I have started assigning categories to all my archived posts. This can be done very quickly in wordpress, so expect all posts to be categorized by the end of this week! I have few more ideas for the near future; like implementing pools, tests and all sort of goodies. Stay tuned! Now let’s explain today’s post which was submitted by Francois Buhagiar via email (thank you).

This year, the final-year students of Beckmans College of Design have created an art installation at the Stockholm furniture fair. The students have created a space where they wish to inspire informal gatherings of people, in the same way as you would meet spontaneously about town – sitting at the edge of a monument, on a front porch or a flight of stairs. The furniture in the showcase is based on an individual briefs, to create a specific type of furniture. In contrast to what is usually the case in the fair, where many prototypes are for view only, students have encouraged the visitors to interact with the furniture and the space. You can view this exhibit from different angles, by clicking on the gallery thumbnails below. Enjoy!