Cover Image: November 2011 Scientific American Magazine See Inside

Sculpting the Impossible: Solid Renditions of Visual Illusions

Artists find mind-bending ways to bring impossible figures into three-dimensional reality














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And the Winner Is …
For several years, Italian sculptor Guido Moretti has donated copies of his Three-Bar Cube and other impossible sculptures as trophies for the Best Illusion of the Year Contest. Depending on your vantage point, Three-Bar Cube can appear to be a cube, a solid structure or an impossible triangle. For more information, see http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/trophies.

Industrial-Size Triangle
Artist Brian McKay created a giant version of the impossible triangle in Perth, Australia, in collaboration with architect Ahmad Abas. How did they do that? A photograph taken from another angle reveals the trick.


This article was originally published with the title Sculpting the Impossible: Solid Renditions of Visual Illusions.



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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

STEPHEN L. MACKNIK and SUSANA MARTINEZ-CONDE are laboratory directors at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. They are authors of Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions, with Sandra Blakeslee (Henry Holt, 2010; http://sleightsofmind.com) and of Champions of Illusions (forthcoming from Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux).


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