Curiosities

The Exposure of Time

Gianni Sarcone

Not so long ago, before the digital age, photographs were fixed on silver gelatin photographic paper. But there are other, far more powerful mediums capable of freezing a moment — sometimes even an entire civilization — in space and time: ash and forest.

Take Pompeii. In AD 79, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius abruptly brought life in the city to a halt, burying its streets, houses, and inhabitants beneath volcanic debris. Pompeii became, in a sense, a three-dimensional photograph of a precise moment in time. Walking through its streets today, we can still see traces of everyday life interrupted: decorated houses, shops, familiar objects, inscriptions on the walls. Everything seems to tell us what was happening just moments before time stopped: the bustle of the streets, voices mingling, merchants calling out to passersby, children crying, lovers meeting away from prying eyes. As if all those lives had been imprinted in stone.

Then there are the Maya cities, such as Palenque. Here, the shutter seems to have worked much more slowly. It did not capture a single moment, but the gradual disappearance of an entire civilization. After the city was abandoned, the tropical forest slowly covered its temples, palaces, and plazas, until it almost completely absorbed them.

At Pompeii, ash stopped time. In the Maya cities, it was the forest that covered it.

Two very different ways of preserving the past: one through a sudden interruption, the other through the slow return of nature. In both cases, what we discover today bears a strange resemblance to a photographic image — except that here, the image is three-dimensional, and its frame is time itself.

And there is something quite extraordinary about that: time, which normally erases everything, has left an image behind. An image without film, without a camera, without a photographer.

And perhaps that is the most haunting photograph of all: one that no one ever took, but that time itself developed.

Pompei
Pompeii
Palenque
Palenque

YAACOV AGAM — YOU NEVER SEE IT ALL

Gianni Sarcone

“When I finish a work, it is just starting.” — Yaacov Agam

One of my favorite Op Art artists and a true visionary, Yaacov Agam (Hebrew: יעקב אגם) was a pioneer of kinetic and Op Art. His work explored movement, color, time, and perception, making the viewer an active part of the artwork rather than a passive observer.

Born in Rishon LeZion in 1928, Agam studied at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and later with Johannes Itten in Zurich. He moved to Paris in 1951, where he became one of the leading figures of the European avant-garde. His first solo exhibition was held there in 1953.

Agam died in June 2026, at 98, after receiving the Israel Prize for Visual Arts. His work is represented in major museums around the world.

Among his most remarkable achievements is the Salon Agam, commissioned by President Georges Pompidou for the private apartments of the Élysée Palace and created between 1972 and 1974. Now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, it is essentially a kinetic environment: walls, doors, ceiling, carpet, color and geometric forms change as the viewer moves through the space.

Agam understood something fundamental about visual art: the work is not always what you see. It is also what happens when you move, look again, and see something different.

Is Nature Already a Work of Art?

Gianni Sarcone

Art may not be exclusively a human affair. Nature has its own creative force and aesthetic power. Crystals, shells, clouds, and landscapes produce forms and patterns that we often find as fascinating as works made by artists.

Without disturbing Kant too much—and his somewhat dated distinction between natural and artistic beauty—where does art actually begin?

Nature: the original artist?

Nature creates without any apparent intention. It does not try to please us or express an idea, yet it can produce forms of extraordinary complexity and beauty.

  • Spontaneous beauty: Crystals, landscapes, spirals, symmetries, and biological patterns can display structures we perceive as beautiful.
  • Creation without a plan: Nature produces forms without an artist, a blueprint, or even an audience.
  • Our first inspiration: From the beginning, humans have observed, imitated, and transformed natural forms into their own creations.

For Kant, this is precisely where the difference lies: a work of art involves intention and a concept of what it is supposed to be, whereas natural beauty can be appreciated without knowing any purpose behind what we see.

But is intention really necessary?

Does art require intention?

The idea that we must know what an artist intended in order to understand or judge a work has been questioned for a long time. In 1946, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley famously called the attempt to use an author’s intention as the basis for interpretation the “intentional fallacy.”

And art can go even further.

It can be improvised, accidental, discovered rather than made. It can emerge from a chance encounter between an object and a particular way of looking at it.

Leonardo da Vinci already understood this. He suggested looking at stains and irregular patterns on old walls because they could trigger visions of landscapes, battles, figures, and strange compositions. Chance could become a generator of images.

In other words, the work is not always entirely in the object.

Sometimes, it appears in the eye of the beholder.

Take a stone polished by the sea. It might suddenly remind you of a sculpture by Henry Moore. Nobody sculpted it. Nobody intended it to represent anything. Yet your brain detects a form, gives it meaning, and perhaps even sees a sculpture.

So—is it art?

From found object to readymade

With Marcel Duchamp, things get even more complicated.

The readymade takes an existing object, removes it from its ordinary context, and presents it as art. Duchamp began exploring this idea as early as 1913 with Bicycle Wheel.

The object itself may have little or nothing to do with traditional ideas of beauty. What changes is the context, the choice, and the way we look at it.

Art therefore moves, at least in part, from something made by the artist to something that can be selected, discovered, and reframed by the artist.

And this makes the boundary between creating and discovering surprisingly thin.

A natural form can resemble a sculpture. A stain can become a landscape. An ordinary object can become a work of art. And sometimes a work becomes art only because someone recognizes it as such.

Perhaps the artist does not always create something from nothing.

Sometimes, the artist does something more subtle:

he reveals what everyone else was looking at but never saw.

So where, exactly, do we draw the line between art and non-art?

And ultimately, what makes something art: the object, the artist’s intention, or the eye of the beholder?

Newspeak and Esperanto: When Simplifying Language Simplifies Thought

Gianni Sarcone

At first glance, Orwell’s Newspeak in 1984 and Esperanto seem to have little in common. One is the fictional language of a totalitarian regime; the other was created by L. L. Zamenhof as an international language designed to make communication easier between people from different countries.

Yet they share an interesting structural principle: the simplification of language through regularity and word formation.

In Newspeak:

good → ungood → plusgood → doubleplusgood

Instead of good, bad, better, or excellent, one basic word does much of the work through prefixes and modifiers.

A surprisingly similar pattern exists in Esperanto:

bona → malbona → pli bona → bonega

good → bad → better → excellent.

The resemblance is structural, but the intentions are radically different. Esperanto uses regularity to make a language easier to learn and to generate words without memorizing endless irregular forms. Zamenhof’s aim was not to restrict thought, but to facilitate international communication.

Newspeak, by contrast, is designed to reduce the space in which thought can operate. Its ultimate purpose is not merely to simplify communication, but to make certain ideas increasingly difficult—or eventually impossible—to formulate.

There is, however, an intriguing historical footnote.

For decades, it has been speculated that Orwell’s antagonism toward his aunt’s husband, Eugène Lanti, a French socialist and prominent Esperanto speaker, may have influenced his conception of Newspeak. The claim remains speculative, not an established fact. But the story is fascinating in its own right because it leads back to the 1920s and 1930s, when many people on the political left regarded Esperanto as more than a neutral language: they saw it as a vehicle for international solidarity, social change, and working-class emancipation.

That makes the apparent linguistic connection even more intriguing—but it is important not to confuse historical speculation with evidence.

The deeper issue lies elsewhere.

A language does not merely describe thought. It also provides many of the distinctions through which we organize it.

Words do not correspond one-to-one with things or ideas. They exist within a network of synonyms, antonyms, associations, contrasts, and cultural practices. Meaning is therefore, in an important sense, holistic: a word cannot be fully understood in isolation from the larger linguistic system in which it lives.

If excellent, remarkable, magnificent, admirable, and exceptional are all reduced to variations of good, we have not merely simplified the dictionary. We have reduced the palette of distinctions available to us.

Of course, structural simplicity does not automatically produce impoverished thinking. Esperanto is a good example: a language can be highly regular and economical while remaining capable of expressing complex ideas. The danger begins when simplification stops removing unnecessary complexity and starts removing meaningful distinctions.

And that is perhaps the point worth remembering:

Distinctions matter.

So don’t be afraid of linguistic complexity. When you write, use a good thesaurus. Look at the synonyms and antonyms. Explore the neighboring words and the subtle differences between them. Then choose the word that says exactly what you mean.

Because language is not beautiful despite its complexity.

Language is beautiful because of it.

How fast do we actually see the world?

Gianni Sarcone

Our visual system does not work like a camera shooting at a fixed number of frames per second. There is no single human “FPS.”

Reality is continuous, but our brain processes visual information on different time scales. Some visual mechanisms are remarkably fast; others are much slower. What we perceive depends on what we are looking at, the stimulus, its brightness and contrast, and even where it falls on the retina.

Flicker is a good example.

When a light flickers fast enough, we stop seeing individual flashes and perceive a steady light. But there is no universal cutoff such as 30 or 60 FPS. Under some conditions, humans can detect flicker well above 60 Hz, and the threshold changes with luminance, contrast, stimulus size, retinal location, and other factors.

And detecting a very brief visual event does not mean that we see at 250 FPS. Temporal resolution is not a single number. Different visual tasks have different limits.

Then there is the famous wagon-wheel illusion.

A spinning wheel can appear to slow down, stop, or even rotate backward. In films, this is a straightforward consequence of the camera sampling the motion at discrete intervals. Interestingly, similar effects can also occur under continuous illumination, suggesting that temporal sampling or aliasing may also occur within the visual system itself. The exact mechanism, however, is more complicated than simply saying that the brain “takes snapshots.”

And what about the feeling that time slows down during danger?

It can certainly feel that way. But experiments have found no evidence that frightening situations suddenly increase our temporal resolution—as if the brain switched to a higher frame rate. Instead, the experience seems to involve changes in attention, memory, and the way the event is reconstructed afterward.

So forget the idea that your brain runs at 30, 60, or 250 FPS.

There is no single frame rate for human vision.

We don’t simply record reality.

We construct our experience of it.

How minimal can a drawing be?

Gianni Sarcone

How far can you strip away a design and still leave it readable? Take almost everything out, and your brain will still fight to make sense of what’s left.

Here are two experiments in pushing that boundary:

  • 24 Configuration: The curve of the 2 flows straight into the diagonal of the 4. The brain uses the Gestalt principle of closure—filling in the missing pieces so you see two distinct digits sharing a single outline.
  • 45 Configuration: Standard typography is stripped back to raw vertical and horizontal lines. The crossbar of the 4 turns directly into the top curve of the 5, relying on your memory of numbers to decode the abstract shape instantly.

When you remove the noise, viewing becomes interactive. You aren’t just looking at a drawing—your mind is actively completing it.

👉 For more patterns, and mathematical curiosities, explore these number facts.

Lions, Elephants, and the Medieval Imagination

Gianni Sarcone

Lions had already appeared in Roman arenas, where they were set loose to devour Christians. Hannibal famously dragged elephants across the Alps. Yet, strangely enough, very few artists left us reliable images of these exotic beasts from the time.

So, centuries later, European artists faced a minor problem: how do you draw an animal you have never seen?

Simple. You copy someone who also never saw it.

This was the medieval version of the telephone game. A lion might be described in a manuscript, copied from an older drawing, or reported by a traveler as “a huge cat with a mane.” Each artist then copied, misunderstood, embellished, and passed the result on. After enough generations, the lion could acquire a human face, bizarre feet, and the general appearance of a creature that had escaped from someone’s nightmare.

The same problem survived well into the Renaissance. Take Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1515 rhinoceros. Dürer had never seen a rhinoceros. He worked from a written description and a sketch made after a real Indian rhino arrived in Portugal. He added armor-like plates that the animal did not actually have.Yet his rhinoceros became so influential that Europeans kept copying Dürer’s imaginary details for centuries.

There is something wonderfully philosophical about this: we rarely inherit reality itself. We inherit other people’s descriptions of it—and then confidently mistake the copies for the truth.

Details and Attributions for Each Picture

Top Row (Left to Right)

1. Top-Left (Manticore / μαντιχώρας)
Author / Artist: Unknown Medieval/Renaissance Illuminator (Greek manuscript tradition)
Date: Unknown (c. 16th Century / Early Modern Era)
Source / Context: Greek bestiary depicting the legendary Manticore with a lion’s body, human head, and scorpion-like tail.

2. Top-Middle (Elephant and Dragon / “De La Nature Del Olifaunt”)
Author / Artist: Unknown French Illuminator
Date: Unknown (c. 13th–14th Century)
Source / Context: Old French bestiary manuscript (Bestiaire) detailing the natural history and allegorical nature of the elephant and its rival, the dragon.

3. Top-Right (Monkey Riding an Elephant / Text: “aut letanias omnium”)
Author / Artist: Unknown Medieval Illuminator
Date: Unknown (c. 13th–14th Century)
Source / Context: Medieval manuscript marginalia / Book of Hours depicting a caped monkey riding a castle-bearing elephant (Howdah).

Bottom Row (Left to Right)

4. Bottom-Left (Smiling Lion in Floral Border)
Author / Artist: Unknown European Illuminator / Miniature Artist
Date: Unknown (c. 15th Century)
Source / Context: Illuminated manuscript page with ornate floral acanthus border work showing a stylized lion.

5. Bottom-Middle (Trumpet-Trunked Elephant with Trees in Framed Border)
Author / Artist: Unknown English or Northern European Illuminator
Date: Unknown (c. 13th Century)
Source / Context: Latin Bestiary miniature showing a stylized medieval elephant with trumpet-like trunk and tusks.

6. Bottom-Right (Paw-Raising Lion under Fruit Trees)
Author / Artist: Unknown Medieval Illuminator
Date: Unknown (c. 13th–14th Century)
Source / Context: Medieval Bestiary illustration depicting a lion gesturing toward fruit trees.

Authors Write Books. Publishers Rename Them

Gianni Sarcone

Many people believe that a book’s title is born directly from the author’s brilliant mind. Cute idea… but often completely wrong.

In reality, titles are frequently chosen by publishers — and, above all, by their marketing teams, who sometimes treat a book title like a product label rather than a piece of literature.

Take one of the most famous titles of the 20th century: 1984 by George Orwell, the great English political writer. When Orwell wrote the novel in 1948, its working title was The Last Man in Europe. His publisher found it a little too gloomy and uninspiring, suggested reversing the last two digits of the current year, and voilà: 1984 was born.

Not a bad decision. That “commercial” title went on to become a cultural landmark, and many ideas and expressions from the book are still part of today’s political vocabulary.

1984

As an author, I’ve often had to fight battles to prevent publishers from giving my books painfully dull — or downright silly — titles. One of my books, for example, was given the wonderfully imaginative title Optical Illusions by the publisher. A title so original it could probably hide in a crowd of a thousand other books.

And yet… this “masterpiece of originality” went on to win the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize for the best science book for children.

Yes, yes. Sometimes even a boring title can carry a surprising little trick inside.

The Deceptive Oriental Fan

Gianni Sarcone

One of my earliest color illusions, created back in the 1990s, when I was immersed in exploring the physiology of color perception.

Do the pleated sections of the fan really have two different shades of brown?

They don’t. Every pleated “accordion” section is exactly the same brown. Only the thin light and dark bands bordering each fold differ. Those subtle edge contrasts trick your visual system into seeing alternating tones where none exist.

The color is perfectly uniform, but your brain interprets it differently depending on the surrounding contrast—a classic example of simultaneous brightness contrast.

Triple Klein Bottle

Gianni Sarcone

Τριαλάβαστρον (Trialábastron), a triple Klein bottle, is an artistic exploration of Klein bottle geometry. In topology, the Klein bottle is a non-orientable surface that cannot be embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space without self-intersection, though it can be smoothly realized in four dimensions.

A close relative is the Möbius strip, another non-orientable surface in three-dimensional space. On such surfaces, a continuous path can return to its origin with reversed orientation, revealing how geometry can twist the notion of inside and outside.

a triple Klein bottle

Here is another representation of a triple Klein bottle—UK sculptor Alan Bennett’s striking construction of three Klein bottles nested within one another. Of course, “inside” only applies in the sense of their embedding in physical space; from a topological standpoint, they remain entirely separate, non-interacting surfaces.

recursive Klein bottle