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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:720621 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Webster, Shelley |
| Publisher | Royal College of Art |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/2829/ |
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