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Fast/Slow was an installation by Rob Lee at Prism 11, which took place in Sheffield in March 2012. "Rob Lee's wall paintings exploit the specificity of perspective. Cohesively viewed from only one location, elsewhere his words appear as distended and distorted shapes. Fast/Slow reacts to changing temporalities; as the world moves to a pace in which action, reaction and information seem to be processed almost instantly, the act of viewing these words requires work adjustment and articulation." (description taken from the exhibition leaflet) (photos © copyright Russell Light) For more details see: Rob Lee's  website Prism 11 page and Prism website

The camera lucida is generally considered to have been invented by the English chemist W. H. Wollaston in 1806-07, although there is some speculation that it is a reinvention of a device described by Kepler some 200 years earlier. The term camera lucida means 'light room' and it indicates that the device didn't require the darkened space that had been necessary for the earlier camera obscura. There is no projected image and it is based on very different optical principles. A camera lucida consists of a simple prism and lens that allow an artist to see the scene that they depicting superimposed over the paper that they are drawing on, so that they can simply trace around the image. The rest of the device comprises of a clamp and extendable arm, with which it can be securely fixed in position to one side of the artist's drawing board or sketch pad with the prism set at a convenient height. A French camera lucida or 'Chambre Claire Universelle', made by Breveté S.G...

Stenop.es is a project by Romain Alary and Antione Levi, creating videos from time-lapse images taken within a camera obscura. " An apartment is completely darkened. A hole is made in a window, letting lights from outside coming in. Projections are taking place everywhere inside. ‬" Literally translated, the Italian term 'camera obscura' means a dark room. Early camera obscura were used by artists as a means to create accurate perspective images. More portable devices became known as pinhole cameras and share the same optical principles as modern cameras. stenop.es  on Vimeo . Ghat  on Vimeo . (Image and videos © stenop.es) Romain and Antione are currently looking for other locations for movies. Make suggestions here .

The world's largest 3D painting is unveiled at Canary Wharf. Joe Hill's anamorphic pavement painting covers 1,160 square metres. Part 2 can be found here . Photo gallery of 3D street art on the Guardian website. More of Joe Hill's pavement art can be seen on his website . See also my other blog entries on anamorphic art by the Brothers Quay ,  Erik Johansson ,  Ross McBride   and  Yoichi Yamamoto

The current Vermeer exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge has reopened the debate about the significance of perspective in the construction of paintings. The Music Lesson, 1662  (source: Wikimedia Commons) The role of perspective and more specifically the use of a camera obscura in the work of Johannes Vermeer has been explored in recent years by a number of authors. Dubery and Willats (1983) demonstrated that the accurate perspective constructions that underlay Vermeer's paintings made it possible to work backwards from the finished painting and reconstruct the architectural space in three dimensions, using Leonardo's distant point method. In 2001, David Hockney and Philip Steadman both proposed convincing arguments that indicated that this accuracy was based not on a geometrically constructed perspectival space, but was instead derived from the use of a camera obscura. The camera obscura (literally a 'dark room') is based on the optical principles of lenses ...

Swedish photographer Erik Johansson has just posted videos showing his latest perspective illusions at Stockholm Central Station. Lindex illusion Designtorget illusion Further information and other illusions by Erik Johansson can be found on his website .

The Ames room was developed by Adelbert Ames Jr as part of his research into optics and perception during the 1930s and 40s. After an early career as a painter, Ames began to explore the relationship between visual art and the scientific study of vision. He studied opthalmology at Clark University, Massachusetts and became a professor of physiological optics, developing an interest optical illusions. As part of his research, he conducted a series of experiments that he called 'the distorted room demonstrations'. When viewed from the correct position, an Ames room gives the illusion of a standard orthogonal room. It is actually a trapezoid shaped space, which means that people standing in different corners at the back of the room and who appear to be the same distance from the viewer, look as if they are completely different sizes. The optical illusion is so convincing that someone walking across the back of the room appears to increase or decrease in scale as they move from one...