Tag Archives: visual

Art and Math: Poemotion (Takahiro Kurashima)

Poemotion and Poemotion 2 books of astonishingly beautiful patterns. They are beautiful because they are so simple and yet I struggle to describe them here. The book comes with a lined overlay, and when the images of the book combine with the overlay, they dance and amaze.

These dancing patterns arise from something called a Moiré pattern, a creature of math and physics. These kinds of patterns naturally arise when two patterns are overlaid.

Moire pattern (wikipedia)


You’ve probably seen Moiré patterns when people wear busy patterns on tv:

We usually associate Moiré patterns with annoying visual artifacts, but science has found several ways to exploit them. Moiré patterns can be used to measure strain in materials. They can also be exploited to take microscope images at high magnification. The little lines on US dollars are designed to create Moiré lines when scanned, as a mechanism for defeating counterfeiters.

Kurashima’s Poemotion (just in black) and Poemotion 2 (in color), contain dozens of Moiré patterns. Every time I look at them, I feel such simple joy. The patterns are so deeply familiar and yet I had never consciously noticed them before. These books made me look at the world differently.

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