STATION 01 · GALLERY NORTH
Anamorph
Six hundred shards hang in white air. From one station on the floor they close into a red circle around the word FORM.
Chaos, with one honest viewpoint
Anamorphosis is the oldest trick in perspective's book: an image smeared across space so it only assembles from a single point. Holbein hid a skull in The Ambassadors in 1533; since 1979 Felice Varini has painted rings and wedges across whole halls, exact from one tile of the floor and wreckage from every other.
Anamorph builds that argument out of six hundred floating shards. Everywhere in the room the work is debris — red slivers, grey offcuts, tilted panes hanging between four and twenty-six metres deep. At exactly one station it confesses: a circle, a word, a held breath. Then the camera keeps walking and parallax tears it apart again.
Solved against the sight rays
The figure is drawn flat first: a circle of radius 3.55 units inscribing four letters, tiled into small rectangles along its strokes. Then every rectangle leaves the page. Four rays are cast from the station through its corners, a depth is thrown along the centre ray, and a tilted parallelogram is solved — a 3×3 linear system per shard — so that all four corners still ride their original rays.
That makes the lock geometry, not a crossfade. Nothing morphs, nothing dissolves; the shards never move at all. The projection from the station matches the drawing to nine decimal places, and from anywhere else it is honestly, measurably wrong.
Shards that would pierce the gallery floor have their depth capped per-ray; a cone around the sight line is kept clear of stray debris so nothing photobombs the lock.
Stand on the red disc
The camera paces the gallery in a 26.8-second loop — out through the debris field, a hesitation at the far wall, then the long approach. Its speed is choreographed to die exactly at the station: the readout climbs, the shear closes, and for 1.8 seconds the figure holds perfect. A red disc on the floor marks the spot the way Varini's museums chalk theirs.
Move your cursor to lean off the path — the room gives you parallax everywhere except at the lock, where leaning is switched off. Some viewpoints are not negotiable.