Second Prize: The Real Thing?? (Matt Pritchard)
Matt Pritchard’s ‘The Real Thing??’ isn’t an illusion as we typically expect them, but more an exploration of how our brain perceives the world around us and how it creates templates to speed up our image processing that occasionally leads to misinterpretations. A clever mockup fools the brain into thinking that a frame sliding into place is a mirror reflecting a pop can in the foreground, but for a split second after the frame is revealed to be just a window looking at another can, the brain still believes it’s looking at a reflection: an illusion that’s still not completely understood.
