MetaFilter posts tagged with Escher

I am a strange loop.

loquacious — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:30:41 -0800

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid has been recorded as a series of video lectures for MIT's Open Courseware project.

Droste Effect Video

le morte de bea arthur — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:45:24 -0800

You might have seen the Droste Effect before, perhaps even the animated version. But here's a new iteration - a music video.

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

kiltedtaco — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:45:56 -0800

This week in mathematical physics, John Baez looks at the amazing tile patterns in the Alhambra in Granada, dividing the patterns into their characteristic Wallpaper Groups based on their symmetries. And if these patterns aren't good enough for you, try drawing your own with the Escher Web Sketch tool. Previously.

FrEscher than Relativity

solipsophistocracy — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 07:27:18 -0800

OLE Coordinate System is the software that drives Echochrome, an Interactive Optical Illusion. The playable demo lets you play in an Escherian space. [via]

Escher prints in 3D LEGO versions

allterrainbrain — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 02:18:08 -0800

Andrew Lipson and Daniel Shiu build faithful, 3D versions of Escher prints using LEGOs: Relativity, Ascending and Descending, Waterfall, and Belvedere. (Only one of those four images required any photo manipulation to create its "Escher effect" -- can you tell which one, without scrolling down to see the descriptions on each page?) Other people's LEGO adventures: a playable harpsichord, the Golden Gate Bridge, and a portrait of Catwoman.

Victim of The Brain

empath — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 05:44:26 -0800

Victim of the Brain A 'docudrama' about Godel, Escher and Bach author, Douglas Hofstadter, and philosopher Dan Dennett produced in 1988. I'm not sure how to describe it, other than incredibly strange and fascinating.

Seb Przd's mind-bending photos

MetaMonkey — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 06:21:40 -0800

Seb Przd's photos specialising in delightful and mind-bending spherical panoramas and conformal mappings.

ground becomes figure

Aghast. — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 17:33:52 -0800

Fascination with ground and figure carries on in various fields after The Rubin vase / face Illusion, M.C. Escher, and Marshall McLuhan. Besides being extremely important in the fields of photography and poetry, the figure/ground relationship is important to physicist Paul Davies, who says "the true miracle of nature is to be found in the ingenious and unswerving lawfulness of the cosmos, a lawfulness that permits complex order to emerge from chaos, life to emerge from inanimate matter, and consciousness to emerge from life." Also, Peter Grundy and Yiang Yan discuss how contextual ground relates to linguistic figure in Bill Clinton's famous apology, Andrew Graydon plays with the distinction between sound as environment and sound as music, and W.C. Richardson creates paintings in which "positive and negative spaces seem unstable; figure becomes ground, ground becomes figure."

Escher's "Relativity" in Lego

nthdegx — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 17:57:10 -0800

Escher's "Relativity" in Lego (original) [source]

The best of YouTube (to date)?

taosbat — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 19:58:57 -0800

The Thief And The Cobbler. Richard Williams via Garrett Gilchrist. The best of YouTube (to date)? You decide. Want some animated M.C. Escher, Rube Goldberg mayhem, magic, despair, true love, a happy ending...and more? Click the link and try the "Play All Videos" link on the right (17 segments make up the whole). Cast and Crew. If you categorically hate YouTube links, pass it by. via

Tile it!

Gyan — Sun, 13 Feb 2005 07:48:54 -0800

Escher Web Sketch [Java]

Art of Deception

euphorb — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 00:29:22 -0800

The sculptures of Shigeo Fukuda show that shadows and reflections (mpegs) may not be what they appear to be. When you turn M.C. Escher's drawings into sculptures, you can get some impossible objects (mpeg). And Dick Termes paintings on globes are stunning examples (Quicktime) of six point perspective. All of these works of illusionary art are featured in the book Masters of Deception: Escher, Dalí & the Artists of Optical Illusion and must be seen to be believed.

Cultural Entomology

vacapinta — Sat, 28 Aug 2004 15:49:06 -0800

The Gold-Digging Ant-Lions of India is but one tale about insects and culture. Although, The Cultural Entomology Digest seems to have been out of circulation for a decade, you can still read about Japanese Crests based on Butterflies, Chinese Cricket Culture and hints of a Greek Cricket culture, Beetles as Religious Symbols or the Insects of MC Escher.

Snakes

jonah — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 13:18:17 -0800

Snakes. An animated film based on a woodcut by M.C. Escher. Slow to load, beautiful to watch (and listen to).

Speaking of LEGO...

Mr_Spook — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 09:00:46 -0800

LEGO Escher is an amazing collection of some of the more famous prints by famous surrealist M.C. Escher rendered in LEGO. There's tons more like this at LUGNET (LEGO International Users Group Network).

Smarter than the average water feature

klaatu — Wed, 21 May 2003 06:49:25 -0800

GardeningFilter! James Dyson's Wrong Garden - water going uphill in a perpetual-motional Escher-like fashion; how is it done...?

bhell13 — Mon, 07 Oct 2002 16:57:39 -0800

M.C. Escher + Lego = ? I used to make spaceships and houses with my Lego not 3D representations of famous optical illusions! [via Filepile]

alms — Tue, 06 Aug 2002 14:38:59 -0800

Mathematician Henrik Lenstra was intrigued by a blank space in he middle of a drawing by MC Escher. Over two years he managed to describe the mathematical structure of the drawing, project what should go in the missing space and produce an extraordanary animation of the result.