Enigma

Imagine yourself as a child sitting on your bedroom floor, with a book close to your face. In your head you might be hearing yourself talk, “Ok, focus your eyes... well, unfocus your eyes. Why can’t I see that darn image yet?” You again pull the book close to your face, then slowly pull it back as your eyes are crossed but finally picking up something hidden beneath. “YES!” you scream, losing the hidden image. It’s ok because you know you can find it again.

Magic Eye books, MC Escher, and mindaltering art are all a part of a bigger realm of optical illusions. There are three different constructs: literal illusions, physiological illusions and cognitive illusions (this one has subsets of illusions; i.e. ambiguous, distorting, paradox and fictional).

Magic Eye books were one of my favorite books growing up and honestly still intrigue me to this day. The term optical illusion, also known as visual illusion, is described as a visual deception.

The Magic Eye books sure did just that. In the early to mid nineties these books were becoming hard to find already. They had just reached the shelves but stores couldn’t keep them in stock for long. Paradoxal visual distortion. It was hit!

Interesting that the Magic Eye began at a tech company in Boston. Tom Baccei was the employee who was to put an advertisment together to draw the attention of all intrigued into the world of tech. Little did he know he would work with a photographer who owned a stereo camera (3-D camera). Baccei was fascinated by the 3-D camera and bought one. As he did he learned about autostereograms.

Autostereograms are a perceptual concept that was invented in the seventies by Christopher Tyler, visual neuroscientist, who had studied under a famed neuroscientist for his research of the human brain’s visual system, Béla Julesz. Julesz had experimented and pioneered the concept of random dot stereogram - the visual trick on our eyes and how we can create the 3-D vision by looking at a pair of 2-D images filled with randomized, black and white dots.

Baccei took what he learned and produced what we today know as the Magic Eye. He had created the same 3D effect Julesz and Tyler did but used only one image. I had to search more into how all the different types of optical illusions are in the world of art and tech.

MC Escher’s work, you might have seen it (he is the artist of Relativity (1953) and Sky and Water I (1938)), creates such an amazing display of visual illusions with the way he confronts you with the way you perceive his work. Something very facinating happens when you look at any optical illusion and are captivated by it. “...the hippocampus and parahippocampal place area come in conflict with each other, and (in vain) accept the challenge to find a ‘best fit,’” according to Optical illusions and the work of Escher published by the Tijdschrift Voor Psychiatrie, the leading scientific journal for Dutch and Flemish psychiatrists. How cool is that?

Let me leave you with this thought. If our eyes and brain can differentiate between 2-D and 3-D and also see the 3-D within the 2-D, would we not someday be able to see into other dimensions if they exist?

“Mystery is the wine of this universe. It makes us dizzy and makes us feel happy! Man needs enigma so that he can get rid of the dullness of the reality!”

-Mehmet Murat Ildan

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SAMANTHA Y OCIUS PHOTO-TECH