Robert.adlington at 12:49, 4 July 2026

2026-07-04T12:49:54Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 12:49, 4 July 2026
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	* 54. But it's a specific type of imagination - one that involves stretching category boundaries left and reight. That is to say, violating norms left and right. And another term for norm-violation is cheating. That's the name of the game in ambigrammie - cheating left and right, cheating up and down, cheating across the board, cheating every which way.		* 54. But it's a specific type of imagination - one that involves stretching category boundaries left and reight. That is to say, violating norms left and right. And another term for norm-violation is cheating. That's the name of the game in ambigrammie - cheating left and right, cheating up and down, cheating across the board, cheating every which way.
	* 55. The human perceptual system is vary forgiving - up to a point. It is forgiving because there are often many redundant clues as to category membership. If one clue is missing or is even severely contradicted, that may not matter, because othe clues can make up for its naughtiness.		* 55. The human perceptual system is vary forgiving - up to a point. It is forgiving because there are often many redundant clues as to category membership. If one clue is missing or is even severely contradicted, that may not matter, because othe clues can make up for its naughtiness.
			* 57. Oscillation in ambigrams involves neither rotation nor reflection, but just a perceptual shift.
			* 58. When reading, a human brain is doing two things at once - namely, reading letter and reading words. (I'm simplifying for the sake of clarity. The reading brain is doing many things at once, but that's not crucial for our purposed here.). When reading in a bottom-up fashion, you put letters together to hypothetize a word that contains them in the given order. Conversely, when reading in a top-down fashion, you perceive a word as a whole and hypothesize the existence of several constituent letters inside it.
			* 58. But how could someone read a whole word without first having recognized the letters inside it? That sounds like nonsense. Indeed, it seems self-evident that when you read, you mentally put together strokes to see letters, then letters to see words, and then words to see phrases - in other words, you carry out perception from the bottom up, always moving from smaller visual elements to larger ones.
			* 61. Your brain has a repertoire of visual concepts of words as wholes, and thanks to those higher-level expectations embedded in it, it often sees words faster than it can make out the letters that make them up. Moreover, your brain even has visual expectations for written language-chunks at levels higher (meaning larger) than that of words. See Scott Kim's boxed proverbs.
			* 63. Your lifetime as a speaker of your native language has provided you with countless thousands of words, names, and phrases, and those are the concepts that embody your passive expectations.
			* 75. A top-notch ambigram is one whose out-and-out cheating aroused no suspicion on the part of most viewers; it reads easily (hopefully instantly) in both directions, and merely seems to have some innocent little embellishments that add charm to it.
			* 79. Terms like "read" or "readable" get very blurry. Is the red display above a genuine instance of the word "salsa"? Or is it merely very close to being one? Are the second and fifth shapes in the display actually "a"s?
			* 83. To make ambigrams well, you have to develop a strong and reliable internalized Peoria, and you can develop such a model is and only if you regularly ask the opinions of viewers who feel have reactions that are typical of your larger and unseen intended audience.
			* 85. Art is a spread-out social phenomenon. The lasting quality of a piece of art, or of an artist, is judged not by one person but by humanity as a whole, or at least by large chunks of humanity. A great work of art jibes

Robert.adlington: Created page with "* 10. As in any work of art, almost the entire creative process lies hidden beneath the surface. * 16. Cheating of this sort, and of a myriad of other sorts, lies at the heart of the art of ambigrammia. * 20. Is that first shape really a "D"? Is the final shape really an "E"? Such questions make it sound as if precise scientific determination is called for, but category membership is blurry and is influenced by context, and the nearby letters (or nearby shapes, to use a..."

2026-07-04T08:04:17Z

Created page with "* 10. As in any work of art, almost the entire creative process lies hidden beneath the surface. * 16. Cheating of this sort, and of a myriad of other sorts, lies at the heart of the art of ambigrammia. * 20. Is that first shape really a "D"? Is the final shape really an "E"? Such questions make it sound as if precise scientific determination is called for, but category membership is blurry and is influenced by context, and the nearby letters (or nearby shapes, to use a..."

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* 10. As in any work of art, almost the entire creative process lies hidden beneath the surface.
* 16. Cheating of this sort, and of a myriad of other sorts, lies at the heart of the art of ambigrammia.
* 20. Is that first shape really a "D"? Is the final shape really an "E"? Such questions make it sound as if precise scientific determination is called for, but category membership is blurry and is influenced by context, and the nearby letters (or nearby shapes, to use a more neutral term) form a context in which each of these four shapes is perceived. Even if each shape taken in isolation is a somewhat shaky member of its intended alphabetic category, it's a different ballgame when all four are placed side by side, since now, the shaky alphabetic suggestion made by each one, supplemented by the prior existence of the familiar name "DAVE" results in each questionable part reinforcing all the other questionable parts, and the overall upshot is, mirabile dictu, a strong member of the higher-level "DAVE" category.
* 21. After all, written words, no less than letters are visual categories, and they too can have members and non-members, and dubious in-between cases.
* 28. Over the next fifty years (from 1920), experimentation with far-out letterforms continued apace, passionately exploring heretofore unimagined regions of alphabetic space.
* 35. A successful ambigram is an artwork delicately balanced on the knife-edge between creation and discovery. It is, on the one hand, a highly personal artistic invention, and yet it is, at the same time, a find that anyone could have made.
* 35. Well, no - I take it back - not anyone! That's the most important point here. In order to be a high-quality ambigram-discoverer, you must be able to see, in your mind's eye, a myriad of ways to distort letters while maintaining their identities, and all sorts of novel ways of breaking letters into pieces (or combining letters or letter-pieces into new wholes).... But no only imagination counts; also a reliable intuitive sense for designs that will probably "play in Peoria"... versus those designs that veer so far off into wild territory that their readability is lost. And lastly, a strong sense of esthetics is crusial - the ability to imbue a calligraphic design with a unified, appealing style.
* 35. Only someone who possesses all these skills will be able to see the beautiful metaphorical shell lying on the metaphorical beach, partially covered by drifts of metaphorical sand. Yes, the exotic shell is objectively there, lying in plain sight for "anyone" to see - but, ironically, very few people have the vision needed to recognize it.
* 35. Creativity as seeing.
* 36. I would argue that artistic creativity in general is nothing but selection - and for me photography reveals this truth more clearly than any other activity does.
* 40. Picasso: "In a flash, they joined together in my head. The idea of the bull's head came to me before I had a chance to think."
* 43. The seldom-noticed ambiguities lurking under nearly every stone in everyday language are similar to the potential ambiguities lurking in the letters making up each word and name we encounter - ambiguities that allow an ambigrammist to turn a word or phrase into an ambigram - but it takes a lot of practice to develop a sensitivity that allows one to "see" what is there (and always was there) but that goes unseen by nearly everyone.
* 54. But it's a specific type of imagination - one that involves stretching category boundaries left and reight. That is to say, violating norms left and right. And another term for norm-violation is cheating. That's the name of the game in ambigrammie - cheating left and right, cheating up and down, cheating across the board, cheating every which way.
* 55. The human perceptual system is vary forgiving - up to a point. It is forgiving because there are often many redundant clues as to category membership. If one clue is missing or is even severely contradicted, that may not matter, because othe clues can make up for its naughtiness.

Ambigrammia - Revision history

Robert.adlington at 12:49, 4 July 2026