The visual system generates the perception of a world of
meaningful three
-
dimensional objects from
a stream of retinal
signals
–
in the psychologist Richard Gregory’s words ’images in
the eyes’. When this perception is consistent with information
from other sources such as the ears and the muscles that guide
movement, all is well and we are almost entir
ely unaware of this
process. But when it is not, we see illusions. To adopt Gregory’s
phrase, ‘strange phenomena that challenge our sense of
reality’
1
.
The project is inspired by the work of the German artist Ludwig
Wilding (1927
–
2010), who refined appr
oaches to the everyday
phenomenon of moiré interference patterns to generate
dramatic illusions of depth and movement in shallow box frame
structures.
1
Gregory Richard L. 1990.
Seeing Through Illusions
. Oxford: Oxford University
Press. p186
Based on the principle that the intersection of two sets of
parallel lines generates the appearance o
f a third set of lines, or
moiré bands,
Wilding’s innovation lay in the discovery that, by
introducing a shallow space between the two
layers of printed
lines and by tilting and rotating
them
, the size and
orientation
of
the
se moiré
bands
can
be
manipulate
d
to produce converging
contours and texture gradients that are perceived by the visu
al
system as forms in depth.
This thesis builds on these observations to investigate the
potential of the material and optical qualities of glass in
combination with moiré interference effects to generate
inconsistencies between th
e images in the eyes and the objects
that produce them, creating illusions of space.