The Shadow Refuses the Afternoon

Two objects with mutually incompatible contours stand in glaring light. The red object has a round hole; the yellow object has a skewed pentagonal opening. Beneath the red object remains a segment of ordinary projection that stretches and contracts with the light direction; farther away, a purple-black dark seam crosses the ground, yet keeps the yellow object’s opening inside itself. It has no complete outer contour: both ends are cut off by the viewport, its upper and lower edges continually narrow and swell, and the colored solids shear away parts of it from above.

Move the pointer, and the normal projection and the dark seam on the ground pivot along the same light direction, but the round hole and the pentagonal opening do not thereby pair back up. Keep pressing the image, or hold the spacebar, and the light approaches an artificial zenith: contact darkness and ordinary projection retract continuously, while sky, ground, and the two materials separately approach overexposure; the dark seam remains in the receiving plane, and the borrowed pentagonal opening does not disappear either. Even without interaction, the work slowly passes through the same process of light and dark.

There is no correct angle to be found here. The viewer can verify that the direction of light is indeed consistent, but cannot make the result acknowledge its own source. When an outcome obeys almost every visible rule and leaves only the question of “who it belongs to” blank, will we still continue to call it a shadow?

Controls: move the pointer or press the left and right arrow keys to change the light direction; keep pressing the image or hold the spacebar to approach the artificial zenith; press S to save the current PNG still.