Where is the boundary between internal and external? This series of animations serves as the title for an exhibition of the installations created in MIT’s Vision in Art and Neuroscience course, each engaging the constructive nature of perception in their own way. They are on view at the MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery (10–150).
Kinegrams make a static image look like an animation by moving it behind a grid. This image is comprised animation of slices of an animation of 3–5 frames.
The animations are created with a physical and digital layer that create an animation together. The physical layer is a vinyl sticker on the gallery window. The sticker was designed based on the pixel grid of a projection on the back side of the window.
In the case of fully functional eyes, you can perceive three colors. The combination of those in different ratios can help us see other colors. This principle is called trichromacy and it can be used to create optical illusions.
Imagine you were to show cyan, magenta, and yellow with only the RGB colors your eye can perceive. You could combine green and blue to make cyan, red and blue to make magenta, and green and red for yellow. The same can be done for other colors and hues, just by combining red, green and blue in different ratios. This is how color works in all perception.
Say you have a surface with vertical, repeating red, green and blue lines. If you place this behind a grid that covers exactly the width of one line, you'll see a different ratio of the three colors every frame. This combination of trichomacy and the kinegram principle is used to create the title animations for this exhibition.
The physical is always slightly imperfect, and upon testing the vinyl sticker, we saw it had a small offset in a part of the composition, causing the color effect to be somewhat unpredictable. In a test where only the blue stripes should be shown, a circular area of red and even greenish stripes showed up.
This meant that even with very detailed refinement, the animations would display some moiré when creating detailed kinegram animations. Therefore, the focus of the project shifted towards the color perception area of the project.
The exhibition is currently on display in the MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery until the end of the Spring 2024 semester. The title animations are visible from the main lobby, and can be seen from outside the gallery.