Art and Visual Perception: Motion and Depth

Project start date: 2000-02

Project end date: 2001-04

Optical art, which should be termed "art using visual perception" (brain rather than light and lens), has been around since the early part of the twentieth century. It has been explored through the work of the Bauhaus and artists such as Marcel Duchamp (his Rotoreliefs), Bridget Riley and Victor Vaserely. It is now part of the vocabulary of contemporary art appearing in the work of artists such as Gabriel Orozco and Peter Davies. All have been interested in the phenomena of visual perception, but the majority of this work has consisted of still images or structures, with less works using projected or screen based moving image and virtually none using computer animation. This is our area of research: to use visual perception as an aesthetic and conception tool in the creation of artworks rather than a way to explore the underlying mechanisms of the brain. The specific area of visual perception we aim to cover is that of the illusion of motion and depth in a moving flat image. The work has a particular relevance to Computer Related Design as is deals with motion and depth on a flat plane (the screen or the interface).