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Posts Tagged ‘Illusions’

Underground Illusions: Anamorphic Parking Lot Turns Flat Paint into Sculpture

06 Jul

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

You’re driving through an underground parking garage when suddenly, the colorful geometric shapes splashed all over every surface pop out into three dimensions. Try not to crash your car! When optical illusions line up right, they can be really disorienting, and it’s always cool to see them carried out on a large scale. Argentinian artist Elian Chali got to take over an entire parking lot in the Saint-Gervais Mont Blanc region of France, transforming it into a trompe l’oeil canvas.

“This artwork, which uses basic geometry and primary colors, makes use of the architectural factors where it inhabits,” says Chile. “Each element adopts a new function and the space becomes a huge sculpture. The relationship with the environment is not easy to achieve, therefore not only the walls will be intervene, but the painting will invade everything that you find in your way in order to offer to the users of the parking, the possibility of breathing inside a work of art.”

 

It’s a pretty cool effect, with some triangles stretching dozens of feet and crossing ceilings, support pillars and walls to end on the floor. Presented by 2KM3 Contemporary Art Platform and curated by Hugues Chevallier and Zoer, the piece comes together as an optical illusion when you hit just the right spot while driving through.

Chali is known for applying his signature vivid style to buildings around the world in the form of massive murals, often taking up entire multi-story facades. Each one takes its respective environment into account in its composition, paying homage to the history of the building and its setting, the materials it’s made of, and the ways in which it has aged or weathered. Keep up with his work on Instagram.

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Trippy Transformations: Makeup Artist Creates Unreal 3D Illusions

26 May

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

Makeup artist Mimi Choy slices, disjoints, stretches, blurs and otherwise radically transforms her own face in stunningly realistic optical illusions using nothing but makeup. No templates, prosthetics or Photoshop go into the creation of her surreal photos – she freehand them all, often using standard cosmetics from brands like MakeupForever and Kryolan theater makeup. The Vancouver, Canada-based artist shows off her trippy looks on Instagram alongside her more standard everyday makeup looks.

Mostly using herself as a canvas for her optical illusions, Mimi says, “To be honest, I never thought anybody would be interested in following my bizarre late-night creations a few years ago because it wasn’t ‘on trend.’ But I continued because illusion art is challenging and I like having to push limits each time. Later on, I realized it’s not about creating looks that are ‘popular’ or would guarantee likes/follows, it’s about creating our own trend and breaking barriers.”

Mimi says she rarely even has a specific plan in mind when she starts painting – she just goes for it, and allows the result to come about spontaneously. Check out her Instagram @mimles for lots more wild and intricate makeup creations.

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[ By SA Rogers in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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Vertigo Wallpaper: Warped 3D Room Illusions Transform Flat Gallery Surfaces

31 Dec

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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You could be forgiven for cautiously entering one of these rooms full of wavy sketched lines, stepping over obstacles that aren’t really there, uncertain whether parts of the walls are really projecting out toward you. Artist Peter Kogler creates spatial illusions that take over every surface of a gallery, turning it into a ‘virtual maze.’ A master of the large-scale print, he’s spent the last 30 years perfecting his techniques. The ones involving grids of lines pull off the most disorienting effects.

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Pictured here are installations from the last few years, including work displayed at the ING Art Center in Brussels this year, the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna in 2015 and the Galerie im Taxiplalais in 2014. His computer-generated works have even adorned the exterior walls of pavilions and museums, and often feature imagery of snakes, ants and pipes.

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According to his artist statement, “Kolger has been interested in new, innovative art practices, not only in the field of visual, but also in performative arts, sound and music. He continued his work by shifting the boundaries of artistic expression and developed a very impressive, emotionally and artistically convincing world, whose layered meanings open communication paths to the widest public.”

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“After several years of research at the beginning of his artistic career, in painting, performance and experimental film, since 1984 Kogler has used computer technology. Heralding the future development of computer-generated art already in the ‘60s, in the spirit of that positivist-optimistic time, Michael Noll wrote: ‘The computer is an active medium the artist can interact with at a new level, liberated from many physical limitations of all former media. The artistic possibilities of this kind of creative medium as the artist’s helping device are truly exciting and challenging.”

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Peruse Your Illusions: 21 Mind-Bending Urban Works of Art

30 Jun

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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Optical illusion art brings a bit of magic to the streets, using paint, paste-ups or photographic tiles to transform urban surfaces into massive sinkholes, bizarre portals and mysterious doors offering entrance to places unknown. Three-dimensional objects seem to float in midair, people walk across vertical surfaces and entire buildings seem to be melting beneath the sun in these fun works of large-scale urban art.

Graphic Wormhole Mural by Astro

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A huge, boring side wall of an apartment building in Loures, Portugal just got a lot more fun to look at with the addition of a massive optical illusion mural by the street artist ‘Astro,’ who made it seem like a blue abyss. The artist has completed similar illusions in other spots, like a patch of concrete beneath an overpass.

Melting Facade in Paris

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A mural added to the entire exterior of a building in France makes it look as if the structure is melting like a Dali clock. Imagine walking down an alley while under the influence and then looking up to see this. It’s disconcerting enough as it is.

Mind Your Step by Erik Johansson

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Pedestrians crossing Stockholm’s Sergels torg square either dangle dangerously close to a giant sinkhole or appear to miraculously walk right over it while interacting with an amazing street art illusion by artist Erik Johansson. ‘Mind Your Step’ was created off-site and assembled using large printed sheets, with a yellow platform indicating where passersby should stand to make the illusion come together.

Skrapan Illusion by Erik Johansson

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Equally fun is Johansson’s ‘Skrapan Illusion,’ commissioned in the summer of 2012 for a Stockholm shopping center. The artist’s rendering of a city as seen from a perilously high vantage point is so realistic, you could get a bit of vertigo standing on the ‘edge.’

3D Portals by 1010

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Surprisingly colorful inner layers of exterior walls seem to have been peeled away to reveal the pitch blackness inside, making it seem as if each building contains some kind of intriguing mystery. Germany-based street artist 1010 started with small framed paper cuts and then realized he could achieve the same effect with paint on a large scale. “I call them holes, abyss, passage or portals, names that leave enough space for interpretation and projection for the viewer.”

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Peruse Your Illusions 21 Mind Bending Urban Works Of Art

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Walk on the Wild Side: 13 Crosswalk Illusions & Interventions

27 Apr

[ By Steph in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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Optical illusions that seem to produce real 3D speed bumps on a flat street may enhance safety by encouraging drivers to slow down, but such colorful crosswalk paintings could soon become extinct in the United States. Now that the Federal Highway Administration started cracking down on anything that distracts from the contrast of bright white crosswalk lines, citing concerns that drivers will get confused, attempts to make intersections more interesting could come to a screeching halt. Bright patterns on asphalt may fade, but other crosswalk interventions will live on, like interactive dancing signals, fist-bump buttons and roll-out guerrilla-style crosswalks for busy areas.

Colorful Crosswalks by Carlos Cruz-Diez
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Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez has been painting crosswalk interventions since the 1970s, creating potentially disorienting effects for the pedestrians who walk along them. Some of the street paintings seem to morph in color and shape, taking on movements of their own, as you cross. “The daily journey through urban spaces changes our personality and makes us into habitual beings who obey rules that nobody questions,” says Cruz-Diez. “The artist can create ephemeral expressions that, by generating completely new events, transform urban ‘linearity’ and at the same time inject an element of surprise into urban routine. These ephemeral works are a way of producing different readings of urban spaces and of deconsecrating the utilitarian objects of urban furniture.”

Faux Roadblocks Encourage Drivers to Stop
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Drivers might actually slow down for pedestrians trying to cross the street if they think their car could get damaged by barreling forward – or at least, so hope two women in India who created this illusion. As you approach the intersection, it looks like there’s a roadblock, but it’s an anamorphic effect. As seen in the second photo, the technique has also been used in China.

Interactive Dancing Crosswalk Signal
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Tiny car manufacturer Smart hopes pedestrians will be so mesmerized by their animated dancing crosswalks signal, they’ll forget to jaywalk. A nearby dancing booth translates the dance moves of passersby into the ‘don’t walk’ silhouette, adding an element of interactivity and making the performance entirely unpredictable. Smart says 81% more people stopped at the light instead of walking out into the street while it was installed.

Virtual Speed Bumps

The idea with faux speed bumps like these is to catch drivers’ attention just briefly enough to get them to slow down, but not so much that they cause a traffic disruption. Philadelphia hoped to boost safety in the streets with these triangular 3D markings, which cost a fraction of real speed bumps and require very little maintenance.

Virtual Wall Crosswalk
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If the illusion of road bumps isn’t enough for you, maybe a virtual wall projected right in front of your car will get you to hit the brakes when approaching a pedestrian crossing. This concept by designer Hanyoung Lee uses plasma laser beams to project oversized pedestrians in front of vehicles, making it very clear that they need to wait a minute before continuing.

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Walk On The Wild Side 13 Crosswalk Illusions Interventions

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Luminous Illusions: 14 Interactive Spaces Made of Light

26 Nov

[ By Steph in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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Step into three-dimensional blueprints made of light, gaze at flickering ghost ships and walk beneath artificial aurora borealis with this stunning set of interactive illuminated installations. Often reacting to physical stimuli like the movement of the wind or the people viewing them, these light art projects blur the lines between what’s real and what’s illusion.

Five-Story Glowing Star in an Unfinished Building
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The concrete shell of a partially completed building in in the Malaysian town of Butterworth is currently occupied by a five-story glowing star by artist and architect Jun Ong. Inspired by glitches, the installation consists of five hundred meters of steel cables and LED strips and is meant to highlight the once-bustling city’s fragmented identity.

Waterlicht: An Artificial Aurora Borealis

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The sky over Westervoort in the Netherlands is illuminated in swaths of eerie blue, mimicking the natural phenomenon of the ‘northern lights,’ or aurora borealis. Artist Daan Roosegaarde made use of the area’s foggy conditions to reflect beams of blue Led lights to raise awareness about the Dutch waterworks that keep the country from being inundated with water.

Rainbow Tunnels Mimic Movement of Nearby Water

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Another light-based installation in the Netherlands reminds visitors that without the modern interventions that are in place, the Netherlands would be underwater. These two tunnels linking a newly developed area of Zutphen to the historic city center were transformed by Herman Kuijer, their rainbow hues slowly shifting in time with the movement of nearby water.

Enormous Light & String Installation in Boston
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Barely visible during the day and illuminated at night, one hundred miles of twine suspended above the city of Boston aims to “visually knit together the fabric of the city with art.” Artist Janet Echelman tied over 500,000 knots to create the 600-foot-wide installation, which undulates irregularly in the wind.

Stellar Caves: 3D Thread Drawings

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Artist Julien Salaud coats thread with UV paint so it glows under ultraviolet light, and then weaves it into incredibly intricate three-dimensional drawings that occupy entire architectural spaces. The ‘Stellar Cave’ series creates an enchanting environment filled with silhouettes of animals and constellations for a mystical effect.

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Luminous Illusions 14 Interactive Spaces Made Of Light

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Trick Photography: Creating Appealing Illusions with Your Camera

16 Apr

Trick photography – creating appealing illusions with your camera Trick photography helps in creating an illusion of the scene through the ideas of the photographer. While there’re many, some of the popular trick photography ideas include tilt-shift, infrared, high speed, light painting, zoom & panoramic photography. Trick photography is a way to make a scene look more appealing and attractive Continue Reading

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Radically Surreal: A Strange World of Mind-Bending Illusions

28 Feb

[ By Steph in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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Reality is malleable and nothing is quite as it seems in the surreal world of photographer Erik Johansson, who takes hundreds of photos of a single subject, merges them together and digitally manipulates them to produce optical illusions and the strangest of scenes. Often, these subjects are creating the illusions themselves, changing their environment in unexpected ways.

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A single woman spreads a snowy landscape by way of a giant white quilt, while a man climbs a ladder to erect pleasantly sunny surroundings like wallpaper to replace his dreary reality. Roads cut with giant scissors curl like fabric. Houses and streets are seen from multiple perspectives at once, M.C. Escher-style.

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The Swedish-born, self-taught photographer starts with a sketch and begins the planning process, which can take months or even years for each shoot. “This is the most important step as it defines the look and feel of the photo, it’s my raw material,” says Johansson. “This step also includes problem solving, how to make the reflections, materials etc. realistic.”

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Curious about the whole process? Johansson offers a layer-by-layer breakdown of his image “Let’s Leave” in the video above. Check out some of the artist’s earlier work, too.

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Illusions in Iran: Surreal 3D Murals Transform Urban Tehran

25 Jul

[ By Steph in Art & Street Art & Graffiti. ]

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The blank concrete facades of urban Tehran offer an irresistible canvas for playful large-scale murals that seem to bend reality in unexpected ways. A city of 12 million people that has been politically and economically isolated by Western powers for decades, Iran’s capital isn’t exactly known for a sense of warmth and fun. But artist Mehdi Ghandyanloo is helping to change that, with the blessing of Tehran officials.

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Optical illusions make it look as if bicyclists are riding up the sides of buildings, children climbing sixth-story window frames, monstrous goldfish emerging from underwater structures in oversized aquariums. Some buildings appear to be folded like accordions, others playing host to all sorts of gravity-defying activities.

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Many of the murals have a decidedly Dali-esque feel. In ‘Life Cycle,’ ladders float within ocular cut-outs connecting one level of an open elliptical space to the other, while men walk along the ceiling against a bright blue sky.

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“The city is an architectural mishmash with buildings often having only one facade and the other three just left blank and grey. This doesn’t make for a beautiful city but it is a great environment for mural work. I think the municipality really felt the need to bring some cohesion or at least colour to the often confused and smog-smeared architectural face of the city.”

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Detailed views of dozens of these murals can be seen on the artist’s Behance page.

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SmugMug Films: Master of illusions

23 Apr

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We’ve been following SmugMug Films’ ongoing behind-the-lens series and have found the clips to be an interesting look at people who follow their passions in photography. The latest installment features Joel Grimes. He’s been a commercial advertising photographer for more than 30 years and is most known for his composite portraits. Grimes considers himself more than a photographer – an artist and illusionist, creating images that are larger than life. See video and read Q&A

News: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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