Temporary exhibition
Museum of Illusions between Art and Science
Historical Apartments of Palazzo Barolo - Turin (TO)

From Saturday 16.09.2023 to Tuesday 31.12.2024
Seventy installations and photographs show the mechanisms of perception and their deceptions: static images appear to be in frenetic motion, parallel lines meet, two dimensions become three. "When we observe something it is the brain that assembles the scenes sent by the retina and optic nerve: the eyes, however, can see different things and so the visual cortex jumps from one image to another, without deciding which is the real one. This 'contradictory game' gives rise to optical illusions of shape, colour, movement, geometric, perspective,' explains Vincenzo Florio, a psychiatrist in Bolzano and a scholar of cognitive mechanisms.
The exhibition also hosts a series of multimedia and interactive installations that, through the use of advanced technologies, show how virtual reality can alter the perception of things. The installations and photographs on display, true works of art, offer visitors the opportunity to reflect on the relationship between images and reality.
During the visit, children and people of all ages are accompanied by a personal and virtual guide, the friendly Professor Umberto Lesperto (no apostrophe!), which helps everyone enter the secrets of physics and optical-perceptual mechanisms.