Abstract
Visual illusions behave like unexpected phenomena useful to create and sometimes to solve theoretical and epistemological issues and problems. They allow science to go further actual reality to explore the possible. Art itself is an illusion of human mind, primarily based and living within the domain of possibilities by continuously exploring possible worlds, possible selves, possible futures and theories on the basis of possible pasts. The unique combination of illusion and Art creates something special, attractive, astonishing, shocking, emergent, and, as shown in this entry, it involves even mathematics within the domain of possible.
Illusions, generally assumed as “mismatches/disagreements” between geometrical/physical and phenomenal domains, are attractive phenomena that manifest at least two basic phenomenal attributes, useful to understand their special role in Science and Art. They are called “illusoriness” and “realness.” The illusoriness describes the naive appearance of the notion of illusion expressing unreal, ambiguous, fallacious, misleading, and deceptive properties. Not all illusions appear illusory in both Art and Science. Some of them manifest an opposite sense of realness imprinting to stimuli and artworks a clear appearance of being true as actual objects, definitely not imaginary or hallucinatory. In this entry, illusoriness and realness are demonstrated to be related to a truth/falsehood antinomy, instilling to Art a self-referential power that triggers interesting issues and paradoxes threatening the very existence of Art and, at the same time, speeding up its evolution. These issues are proved by means of thought experiments, corroborating within Art those already demonstrated in mathematics by Gödel, Turing, and Tarski. Their theorems about consistency, completeness, decision, and truth declared general statements analogous to those phenomenally achieved in our experiments. The results indicate intriguing connections between Mathematics and Art, suggesting that they are top performances of human thinking not very different and requiring deeper combined investigations and studies. On this matter, thanks to this entry, we propose new scientific hints and directions of research within the possible and the barely explored land placed between the science of illusions and Art and between Mathematics and Art.
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Pinna, B. (2021). Illusion in Art. In: Glăveanu, V.P. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_130-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98390-5_130-1
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