The Deceptive Oriental Fan

Gianni Sarcone

One of my earliest color illusions, created back in the 1990s, when I was immersed in exploring the physiology of color perception.

Do the pleated sections of the fan really have two different shades of brown?

They don’t. Every pleated “accordion” section is exactly the same brown. Only the thin light and dark bands bordering each fold differ. Those subtle edge contrasts trick your visual system into seeing alternating tones where none exist.

The color is perfectly uniform, but your brain interprets it differently depending on the surrounding contrast—a classic example of simultaneous brightness contrast.

Art as an Open Circuit

Gianni Sarcone

Art is sharing—an offering from the artist to the audience. Every audience calls for its own officiant.

In technological terms, a work of art is an output searching for an input. Without that exchange, it remains only a possibility. It comes into existence through its encounter with another mind, where it can generate emotion, doubt, rejection, or wonder. A work is born once in the artist’s mind, and then again in the mind of the person who experiences it.

The artist is a translator between an inner vision and the outside world. They offer a fragment of themselves, without ever being able to control how that offering will be interpreted. Every audience recognizes the artists who resonate with its own sensibility, its questions, and its time. Every audience calls for its own officiant.

But does an art exist that cannot be shared?

If we define art not as the final object—the painting, the book, the symphony—but as the state of consciousness and the act of creation itself, then that art is fundamentally impossible to communicate. The finished work is only a trace, the imprint of an inner experience that no one else can truly access. What the audience receives is never the act of creation itself, but its remainder: its echo, its shadow, and sometimes even its misunderstanding.

share your art
(To illustrate this point, I’ve added an ironic image circulating on the net. I hope you appreciate the irony—and my sense of humor.)

Topsy-Turvy Illusions from the Past

Gianni Sarcone

“The Lawyer and the Client” (1790), an etching by John Kay, is a clever visual joke—and a rather pointed one about the legal profession.

The Lawyer and the Client - Etching

Look at it one way and you see a smug lawyer. Turn it upside down and the same face becomes a worried client. A simple rotation changes the character completely, showing how appearances—and perhaps even justice—can depend on the point of view.

Below, another of Kay’s reversible caricatures: “Before and After Marriage.”

Before and After Marriage - Etching

John Kay (1742–1826) was a Scottish caricaturist and etcher known for his satirical portraits of Edinburgh society. Topsy-turvy caricatures were popular in the 18th and 19th centuries because they combined visual wit with social criticism, hiding two meanings in a single image.

The Cruel Paradox of Eternal Life

Gianni Sarcone

If there truly were a God, He would not promise eternal life. It would not be a reward but the most exquisite form of punishment. Hell may not be fire at all. It may simply be time that never ends.

What surprises me is how few believers seem to have stopped and asked what eternal life would actually mean for a mortal being. We long for immortality without ever considering its consequences, as though anything infinite must also be desirable.

Death is not merely the end of life; it is what gives life its shape. Without a horizon, there is no journey. Without an ending, there is no story. Life may have no inherent meaning, yet it is precisely its fragility that gives it value.

Eternity, by contrast, is an idea that would drive any intelligent mind to madness. Our lives are built around transitions. We leave childhood behind, then adolescence, then middle age. At every stage, part of us dies so that another version can emerge. We are never quite the same person twice. Death is simply the final transition, perhaps the only one that truly completes the narrative.

Mentally healthy people do not wish to live forever. They simply hope to live well, and for as long as it makes sense. Not to accumulate centuries, but to have enough time to do what matters to them, and then look back without feeling that everything important was endlessly postponed.

Eternity destroys urgency. Why create today what can always be created tomorrow? Why love now, travel now, write now, learn now, or take risks, if tomorrow never stops arriving? Infinity drains every moment of its value. It replaces desire with procrastination, curiosity with habit, and life with endless repetition.

We do not fear death as much as we fear leaving behind what we love. Yet perhaps death is what saves life from becoming meaningless. Without it, all that would remain is an eternity so vast that, in the end, it would erase even the memory of what it once meant to be alive.

The Geometry of Wonder

Gianni Sarcone
impossible objects: nested tribars

One of my finest sculptures: nested triangles, the central one in wood, the others in stainless steel…

nested tribars

Just kidding. It’s an impossible tribar composition — a sculpture that can exist only in the eye and the mind.

The Penrose triangle (or Penrose tribar) is generally credited to Roger Penrose, who, together with his father Lionel Penrose, published it in 1958 as an “impossible object.” However, the visual idea of creating paradoxical triangular forms and impossible geometries has older precedents.

Japanese visual culture is often mentioned in discussions of geometric illusion because Edo-period (1603–1868) art, decorative motifs, and craft traditions reveal a deep fascination with complex patterns, ambiguous spaces, and unconventional perspectives. Elements found in traditions such as sankaku mokkō (triangular motifs), karakusa patterns, architectural ornamentation, and woodworking designs show how Japanese artists and craftsmen explored visual structures that challenge perception. While no confirmed direct predecessor of the Penrose tribar has been identified in Japanese art, these examples belong to a broader historical tradition of creating forms that play with geometry and the limits of visual interpretation.

Japanese tribar

A glimpse below into traditional Japanese fabric patterns, where triangular designs reveal how interlaced geometry can create the sensation of impossible structures.

Kagome patterns

To round things off, it’s worth mentioning the Valknut, a Scandinavian symbol dating back to around the 7th century whose interlocking triangles closely resemble the tribar.

valknut

Triple Klein Bottle

Gianni Sarcone

Τριαλάβαστρον (Trialábastron), a triple Klein bottle, is an artistic exploration of Klein bottle geometry. In topology, the Klein bottle is a non-orientable surface that cannot be embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space without self-intersection, though it can be smoothly realized in four dimensions.

A close relative is the Möbius strip, another non-orientable surface in three-dimensional space. On such surfaces, a continuous path can return to its origin with reversed orientation, revealing how geometry can twist the notion of inside and outside.

a triple Klein bottle

Here is another representation of a triple Klein bottle—UK sculptor Alan Bennett’s striking construction of three Klein bottles nested within one another. Of course, “inside” only applies in the sense of their embedding in physical space; from a topological standpoint, they remain entirely separate, non-interacting surfaces.

recursive Klein bottle

Why W Is Called “Double-U”

Gianni Sarcone

The letter W ultimately derives from the letter V, but its history is more layered than a simple invention after the Norman Conquest.

In classical Latin, inherited from the Greek and Phoenician alphabet traditions (Fig 1), the letter V served a dual function: it represented both the vowel /u/ and the consonantal sound /v/. There was no distinct symbol for /w/. In contrast, Old English (Anglo-Saxon) already had a need for this sound and used a separate rune, “wynn” (ƿ, Fig. 2), to represent it.

After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, scribal practices shifted toward continental Latin conventions. The rune wynn gradually fell out of use, and scribes began representing the /w/ sound by writing a doubled form of U (or V, since the two were not yet fully distinguished, Figs. 3-4). This “double u” convention eventually evolved graphically: two V-shaped characters were written side by side, then gradually joined.

From this duplication comes the modern name “double U,” which preserves the historical origin even though the visual form is closer to two V’s than two U’s. The lowercase w developed directly from this doubled form, simplifying over time into a continuous script shape.

In short, W is not a direct Roman invention, but a medieval solution: a hybrid born from Latin writing habits adapting to a sound already present in Old English.

Before War Had a Name

Gianni Sarcone

Since humans learned to stand upright without wobbling too much, they also learned how to organize confrontation—and how to justify it, which sometimes requires more invention than the act itself.

The archers painted on the rock shelters of the Spanish Levant—particularly in the Castellón region, around sites such as Morella and the Cueva del Roure area—belong to a broad artistic tradition dated to the late Mesolithic and early Neolithic (roughly the 7th to 6th millennia BCE). They are among the earliest narrative images known in Europe. The scenes show hunting in motion, and in some cases have been read as episodes of intergroup conflict.

Archers facing each other at Cueva del Roure, in Morella (Castellón). The scenes depicted in the Levantine Spanish rock paintings, dating to the 6th millennium BCE, are among the earliest known representations of warfare.

What is clear is not the confirmed presence of war, but the early shaping of its story. From very early on, humans did more than strike—they composed. They organized action into sequence, gave it form, and turned events into something legible. And perhaps that is where the deeper history of power begins: in the ability to convert chaos into composition.

So is war in our DNA?

No. DNA does not encode behavior. It defines capacities that are shaped by culture, history, and environment. Still, it leaves a clear paradox: we are built to cooperate, and we are built to exclude. Early humans lived in tight-knit groups, bound by cooperation, while competing with other groups for resources. That tension likely shaped both empathy and aggression.

The brain still carries traces of it. The amygdala rapidly classifies “us” and “them,” triggering threat responses, while the prefrontal cortex helps regulate and reinterpret them. Culture largely determines which patterns dominate. We see the same mechanism today in digital echo chambers, where similarity is continuously reinforced and difference flattened.

Organized warfare, as we recognize it today, appears relatively late in the archaeological record. Clear and recurring evidence becomes more visible around 14,000–10,000 years ago, and expands with the rise of sedentary and agricultural societies. Homo sapiens, however, has existed for roughly 300,000 years. Across most of that span, the evidence points more toward small-scale, episodic violence rather than sustained, systematized warfare.

War, in this sense, may be less an ancient biological destiny than a comparatively recent cultural development—built upon older cognitive and social instincts.

P.S. Early language systems such as Proto-Indo-European—the reconstructed ancestor behind many European and some South Asian languages—did not rely on a single abstract word for “war.” Conflict was instead described through specific acts like raiding, fighting bands, or disputes. The idea of “war” as a unified concept came much later, which is why Indo-European languages still reflect different, unrelated roots for it today.

Your Brain vs. Geometry: Rooftop illusion

Gianni Sarcone

Believe it or not, the green and purple rooftops are congruent—identical in shape, size, and angles. What changes is not the geometry, but your perception of it. Perspective, orientation, and contextual cues lead your visual system to interpret the same form as two different structures.

rooftop illusion, related to shepard tables

This effect is closely related to Shepard’s tabletop illusion and earlier studies in which identical parallelograms (A and B), when rotated (and superimposed), are perceived as different shapes, as the brain prioritizes interpretation over measurement.

Since some still insist these roofs are not congruent, I’ve put together a short animation that shows otherwise.

animated rooftop illusion