An optical illusion I created years ago for the Gewerbemuseum of Winterthur, Switzerland. The orange halo around the contour of the eye doesn’t exist, it’s a construct of your brain.
This illusive effect is related to the “neon color spreading” phenomenon.
Look carefully at the saw-tooth wave patterns on this picture. Is the background of the picture uniformly gray or are there different shades of gray?
Brightness constancy makes some vertical strips look darker, when in fact the gray background is all the same shade of gray.
This op art work is available as prints and canvases from my official online Gallery.
Geometric shapes are not limited only to the figurative aspect, they can also play active roles, for instance, serving in microelectronics to build operational printed circuits such as: small inductors (magnified, fig. a below), resistors (fig. b) and capacitors (fig. c). (image taken from my book “Almanach du Mathématicien en Herbe“)
In 1997, I remixed the Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting Mona Lisa into 142 perfectly spaced color beads placed at the intersections of an imaginary two-dimensional triangular network. Close up, the picture of the set of beads makes no sense, but if you see it from a distance you will perceive (or at least ‘guess’?) the portrait of Mona Lisa, the most famous Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting.
Is this a real perpetual motion machine?
Obviously not… The closest thing to a “perpetual motion machine” is the Beverly clock whose mechanism is driven by variations in atmospheric pressure, and by daily temperature variations.
This is one of my earliest color optical illusions. There is no yellow or green in the diamond shapes, just vertical black lines! (If you don’t believe it, use a eyedropper tool to check it.) This intriguing visual effect is mainly due to “simultaneous color contrast induction“.
“Deep Blue”, the yellowish rays you see in this picture are a construct of your brain. My op art work is available as prints from Saatchi Art gallery.
Salvador Dalí : Sept corps nus et un crâne, 1951 (Human skull consisting of seven naked women).
Focus is an Italian monthly popular science magazine published in Milan, Italy, with which I have collaborated for more than 10 years.
Focus Magazine issue #336 featuring my article and my optical illusions has been released on October 2020. It contains my special 10-page dossier on visual perception with over 13 original visual illusions of my creation and their related explanation.
The cover also features a special effect I designed for Focus: as you read the main title, the cover image moves and, curiously enough, the title changes if you look at it closely (ILLUSIONI) or from a distance (COSA VEDI?).
My autokinetic optic art will be presented and discussed in the German fashion magazine “Barbara” to be released on July 8.
