omnia mea mecum fero

The eye and the intellect play off one another in surprising and beautiful ways in the art of M.C. Escher. Where the Renaissance masters used shading and perspective to create the illusion of three-dimensional depth on two dimensional surfaces, Escher turned those tricks in on themselves to create puzzles and paradoxes. He manipulated our faculties of perception not simply to please the senses, but to stimulate the mind.

Via Luca Baptista, dj Goddessa, Sakis Koukouvis

If you watch this video normally, the moving circles in the first animation rotate while the shifting dots in the second clip follow a horizontal path. But if you look away and watch the movie out of the corner of your eye, the direction of motion will appear to change. In both cases, the moving objects seem to follow the direction of the background stripes.

Via Sakis Koukouvis