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.
posted by loquacious on May 30, 2009 - 74 comments

You might have seen the Droste Effect before, perhaps even the animated version. But here's a new iteration - a music video.
posted by le morte de bea arthur on Nov 25, 2008 - 28 comments

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. [more inside]
posted by kiltedtaco on Jul 24, 2008 - 20 comments

OLE Coordinate System is the software that drives Echochrome, an Interactive Optical Illusion. The playable demo lets you play in an Escherian space. [via]
posted by solipsophistocracy on Jul 18, 2007 - 15 comments

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.
posted by allterrainbrain on Jul 8, 2007 - 17 comments

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.
posted by empath on Apr 11, 2007 - 19 comments

Seb Przd's photos specialising in delightful and mind-bending spherical panoramas and conformal mappings.
posted by MetaMonkey on Feb 15, 2007 - 10 comments

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."
posted by Aghast. on Aug 12, 2006 - 3 comments

Escher's "Relativity" in Lego (original) [source]
posted by nthdegx on Aug 9, 2006 - 17 comments

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
posted by taosbat on Jun 22, 2006 - 22 comments

Escher Web Sketch [Java]
posted by Gyan on Feb 13, 2005 - 6 comments

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.
posted by euphorb on Nov 15, 2004 - 6 comments

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.
posted by vacapinta on Aug 28, 2004 - 8 comments

Snakes. An animated film based on a woodcut by M.C. Escher. Slow to load, beautiful to watch (and listen to).
posted by jonah on Jan 28, 2004 - 16 comments

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).
posted by Mr_Spook on Oct 15, 2003 - 14 comments

GardeningFilter! James Dyson's Wrong Garden - water going uphill in a perpetual-motional Escher-like fashion; how is it done...?
posted by klaatu on May 21, 2003 - 9 comments

M.C. Escher + Lego = ? I used to make spaceships and houses with my Lego not 3D representations of famous optical illusions! [via Filepile]
posted by bhell13 on Oct 7, 2002 - 29 comments

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.
posted by alms on Aug 6, 2002 - 32 comments