How To See The World With “Magic Eyes”

The Weirdness of Vision, Encountering the Unknown, and 1990’s Kitsch

Brian Deines
10 min readFeb 18, 2019

If you came to our house at any point around 1992, you’d have encountered a small curation of ‘Magic Eye’ posters.

Magic Eye posters, with their secret three-dimensional worlds, hidden beneath computer-rendered quasi-psychedelia, were a legitimate craze of the 1990’s.

I you can’t see this… you won’t hear me speak of it’s deeper imagery.

Whether you could see the hidden 3D image was a matter of bragging rights. If you could not see the magic picture, it felt like you were locked out of a secret society.

Indeed, those who could not see, were not worthy.

After we brought home our first Magic Eye poster from Golf Mill Mall I stared at it in frustration for hours.

My muggle eyes could not complete the magical leap and hold the 3D image for more than a moment. Ripples — brief edges of something — that’s all I could see for days.

Until finally… magic happened — and I could see.

“Synchronicity is an ever-present reality for those who have eyes to see.” —…

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Brian Deines

Pattern recognition is the task of A.I. (Artistic Intelligence). *This is the pattern recognition you’ve been looking for