| "Although Italian scientists (unaware
of Duchamp's work) found and named this particular form
of illusion as "the stereo-kinetic effect" in 1924,
Duchamp apparently discovered this perceptual phenomenon
independently in the early 1920s, and completed his
first set of discs in 1923. Duchamp recognized that
by spinning designs composed as sets of eccentric but
concentric circles, a viewer would see the resulting
pattern as a three dimensional form even through one
eye alone, without the supposedly necessary benefit
of stereoscopy! By the 1930s, Duchamp had constructed
from his experiments a wonderfully whimsical set of
12 spinning images--from a goldfish in a bowl, to the
eclipsed sun seen through a tube, to a cocktail glass,
to a light bulb--in order to emphasize his discovery
of these three-dimensional effects. (Ironically, as
another example of harmful separation between truly
unified aspects of art and science, art museums almost
invariably exhibit these discs as framed, static objects
on a wall--whereas they have no meaning, either artistic
or scientific, unless they spin. We are constrained
to present a similarly static image in this printed
magazine, but readers can observe the discs in their
proper motion at http://www.artscienceresearchlab.org
Duchamp knew what he had done, and he explicitly regarded the
Rotoreliefs as a contribution to science. He wrote to Katherine
Dreier in 1935: "I showed it to scientists (optical people)
and they say it is a new form, unknown before, of producing
the illusion of volume or relief. ... That serious side of
the play toy is very interesting." Moreover, Duchamp took
great pleasure in the efforts of a professor who wished to
use his Rotorelief discs to retrain the three-dimensional
insights of soldiers who had lost one eye in the First World
War. [At a recent talk, one of us (R.R.S.) demonstrated the
rotating discs to a physics professor, blind in one eye for
more than a decade, who almost wept for joy at his first sight
of three dimensions in so many years]. Duchamp also understood
the general basis of his illusion when he wrote in a letter:
'I only had to use two circumferences--eccentric--and make
them turn on a third center.' "
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