Hans Thierstein: Quatroscopy

Hans Thierstein shares his newly gained fresh perspective with us, which has emerged from his idea for a quatroscope. If you don’t know what that is: read about it here!

This artwork is part of our campaign "Perspective matters". With start'19 in mind, we asked artists what they saw in the apostrophe from our event logo – or if it even is an apostrophe in their eyes. The responses to this call for entries revealed a multitude of perspectives that we want to share with our readers. More information about the campaign can be found HERE. 

Hans Thierstein’s perspective has changed quite recently, during the construction of a three-dimensional gadget he calls a quatroscope.  

A quatroscope is a square tunnel made of four elongated mirror glasses joined at their long sides. When an object is placed at one end of the tunnel, it gets reflected many times in four directions, when observed from the other end of the tunnel. Visitors at Hans Thierstein’s studio can try this out and experience the effect themselves. The artist, however, has turned to digital technology by now. His quatroscopies are mainly done on the computer these days, by using software to compute the repeated reflections of digital images. The second and the third dimension become deeply intertwined in this process – a three-dimensional object is turned into a two-dimensional photo and then modified into completely new perspectives. “A quatroscopy thus reveals a new characteristic of a two-dimensional image”, says Hans Thierstein about his idea, “novel and beautiful patterns produced by the repeated reflection of a single image in four directions” For sculpture network’s campaign “Perspective matters” he created a quatroscopy of a fig which grew in his backyard – which, if you look closely, resembles an apostrophe in itself from certain angles. Many perspectives meet in this quatroscopy. What do you see? 

 

 

Are you inspired by this perspective? Don’t hesitate to show your own, then! To get you started we have prepared a craft template – download it HERE. As part of our campaign, we want to encourage everyone to look at their own perspective and maybe re-think it. While making such a small sculpture, you have the best opportunity to turn both things around: the paper sculpture and your own perspective ... we're curious to see what comes out of it! Show us your results with the hashtag #checkyourperspective