M.C. Escher used to do it with his drawings — leaving us bewildered about where those staircases really led, and how those drawings didn’t disrupt the space-time continuum. His drawings are particularly impressive because they were made by hand; these days, architectural optical illusions are far easier to pull off with the aid of computers.
All images courtesy Peter Kogler.
Austrian artist Peter Kogler uses digital design software and fabrication technology to produce some of the most bombastic and convincing illusions yet, on view now at the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art. Printed at the scale of the gallery, the two-dimensional graphics read as three-dimensional environments that appear bent and distorted.
The sculptures are mainly grids that have been transformed into topographic drawings, a physical, inhabitable rendering of computer space that not only merges virtual and real, but also confuses our brains as a blown-up 3D mesh at room scale.
Kogler started in more traditional conceptual art including performance, video, film, painting, sculpture, and architecture. He began using the computer in 1984 to harness the spirit of the positivist-optimistic 1960s. As critic 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.”
Via Juxtapoze