animals: zebra

This series is an experiment in messing with perception, using landscapes and hidden animal forms to explore how the eye makes sense of an image. I’m interested in pareidolia, the tendency to see familiar things in unrelated shapes, like a face in a rock or an animal in the clouds. I want to see how far I can push that recognition while still letting each image work as a landscape on its own. Each frame has a different environment built around the same animal form. Viewed separately, they look like landscapes with something slightly off about their shape or composition. When they flash together in a fast sequence, the animal starts to show through. The scenery keeps changing, but enough of the underlying shape stays in place for your eye to pick it out. Something that was difficult to see in a still image becomes clearer through the movement. A lot of the process is finding the right balance. If the animal is too obvious, there’s nothing to discover. If it’s buried too deeply, the connection gets lost. I’m looking for the point where the landscape feels convincing but still gives your eye enough information to find something else inside it. I’m also interested in what happens after you see it. Whether you can go back to looking at the landscapes the same way, or if the animal stays with you even when the sequence stops. That shift in how you read an image is what I want to explore: how something can sit in front of you unnoticed, then become difficult to unsee.