Seeing is not the perception of reality, we are constantly interpreting and constructing a reality based on visual input. An anamorphosis is a deformed image that appears in its true shape when viewed in a particular unconventional way … the viewer must seek out the unconventional viewpoint from which the visual trick is resolved. In the case of trompe l’oeil, the viewer, standing in one particular (and usually conventional) place, is tricked into seeing an invented image as if it were reality.

Colombian artist Fernando Botero responded to his distress over the prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison by creating his latest series of paintings depicting the violence, inspired by written descriptions of the abuse rather than by the photographs. Referring to Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, Botero said his intent is to emblazon the images upon the consciousness of the world.

An interesting and amusing site about the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture, Hanzi Smatter, reminds me of another of my favourite sites, Engrish. Rather than being a communication tool, written language may be used as a design element in products, advertising or tattoos. There may be no attempt to get it right, nor do the vast majority of the population attempt to read or understand the design element in question.

The Object Not Found website is basically a collection of found photos, notes and other ephemera, started in late 1997.

From Damien Frost, the creator … I seem to have this uncanny knack for finding discarded photos and notes and like a lot of other people, once i’ve picked up these things to examine in passing i find it hard to throw it away again, as if by finding it you have gained some sort of responsibility over the object and if indeed it was originally accidentally lost you feel you should by finding it, at least give it a good home. My good home used to be a mantlepiece or a shoe box, until one night while browsing the web i came across an “error 404 Object not found” message and it got me thinking about all these “lost” web pages that are not “found” and how it might be analogous to all these real world pages/photos that i have actually found. Continue »