I was going through some of my photo albums today when I came across this:

It’s a photo I snuck a picture of at the Vancouver Art Gallery a while back. Unfortunately I failed to get the name of the artist and had no idea when I took the photo. I decided to head over to tineeye.com in the faint hope that maybe it would return something – and unbelievably, it did!

http://www.tineye.com/search/90a61cb0fdc3ce0501eaaa839c6d98535213c923/

Turns out there’s a Globe and Mail article about the VAG Olympic exhibition that this painting was displayed at. Unfortunately I hit another snag, the article was behind a pay wall.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/subscribe.jsp?art=1458364

So I looked high and low for some kind of cached version of the article without success. Again, in a last ditch effort, I decided to see what kind of options there were to ‘license’ the article – maybe I could just pay a small one time fee and get the information. Amazingly, clicking ‘print’ at this stage actually gets you completely around the pay wall.

http://license.icopyright.net/user/viewFreeUse.act?fuid=MTM3MDM0MTA%3D

I was almost there, except that the picture tineeye returned was nowhere to be found and there was no specific reference I could see to it. The most I found was a reference to some surrealist native art by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun – bingo! This was it. The man sure has some fascinating art:

http://www.lawrencepaulyuxweluptun.com/retrospective.html#null

And here finally was the picture:

Guardian Spirits on the Land: Ceremony of Sovereignty, 2000. Acrylic on canvas

Now I just need to figure out how to order a print of this and I’m set!

Ambigrams are a kind of word play using the form of one word to construct another. Originally called “inversions”, credit for the idea is generally given to Scott Kim. The creativity and depth of Kim’s work is unsurpassed. Isaac Asimov once called him “The Escher of the alphabet”. An impressive collection of Scott Kim’s ambigrams can be found here but I’ve provided the three below if you’re feeling lazy.

TEACH LEARN

INFINITY CIRCLE

SYNERGY

Unfortunately for those of us who do not speak Italian, one of the best works on ambigrams is a book written by Douglas Hofstadter called “Ambigrammi” which has only ever been printed in Italian. Many readers might remember the name Hofstadter from the Pulitzer prize winning book “Godel, Escher and Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid” or from the “Metamagical Themas” column in Scientific American which Hofstadter wrote for a number of years. I managed to get a copy of Ambigrammi¹ and wanted to generate some interest in the work by showcasing a few of the English ones².

MIRROR ALPHABET

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

ELIZABETH REGINA

OHIO

The underlying power of each ambigram lies in the flexibility or “fluidity”, of our letter concepts. Contextual pressure changes how we percieve the “roles” or relevant constituents of letter forms. For this reason, ambigrams have become a fascinating area of study for cognitive scientists who are interested in the relationships between perception and cognition. One of the most interesting explorations of these ideas was undertaken by Gary McGraw, John Rehling and Douglas Hofstadter in their program Letter Spirit ³. This program explores how inter-letter analogies affect perception by biasing the stochastic mechanisms that people use when assessing how well the parts of a letter combine in to “roles”⁴ and how well those roles can then be put together to form wholes. If that was too much of a mouthful, you may want check out Hofstadter’s book, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies or the synopsis written by John Rehling.

NIXON NAPOLEON

LINCOLN KENNEDY

And of course for those familiar with Dr. Hofstadter’s work, “Egbert B. Gebstadter” (gruesome quality I know).

I hope you enjoyed this collection and if you have any suggestions or additions you’d like to make, please feel free to contact me.

Footnotes

1. The book is out of print but available used on Amazon if you’re willing to shell out a couple hundred bucks. I have a copy of the book though if anyone would like to buy it off me for a bit less than Amazon. Maybe there’s someone out there who speaks Italian and could try translating it in to English.

2. I apologize in advance that some of the pictures suck, my camera is awful.

3. I am currently trying to get the Letter Spirit program working again but don’t have much experience with Scheme. If anyone out there is interested in helping me ressurect this, I’d be very grateful for the help.

4. A role is a collection of parts or “quanta” whose collective activations most closely correlate to something that might be called “left bowl” or “ascender”.