Into a world of illusion

Preeti Verma Lal

Have you ever conjured strange ideas in your head? Like, living in a non-gravity world and floating perennially? Serving someone’s head on a plate with the body invisible? Shrinking a friend and whooping, ‘Honey, I have shrunk you’! Walk on a ceiling? And swagger through a vortex-like tunnel? Have you created these brain-bashing illusions in your head and waited for all this to turn into reality one day? In Vienna’s Museum of Illusions, reality and illusion get muddled. All those brain bashers that you had stored in your imagination will come true through nearly 70 installations of holograms, stereograms, optical illusions that make people understand that not everything we see is real.

A narrow door in Wallnerstrabe 4 marks the beginning of the museum which was first established in Zagreb, Croatia. Illusions begin at the doorstep. Pencils look curved and wooden blocks create dilemma (these are called Dilemma games). In the Smart Playroom impossible knots, tricks and mathematical games challenge the grey cells. Another door leads the visitor into the installations. If you look through a square boxed mirror called True Mirror, you’d get confused with the optical illusions of your own face. As if that face-illusion wasn’t enough, there’s an Infinity Room which creates countless versions of you — tall, short, crooked, squished, lengthened.

The walls have framed images, which might seem ordinary to a not-so discerning visitor. But these aren’t ordinary. These are stereograms — a picture within a picture. Inside each image is a hidden object which you can only see if you look closely at the stereogram, so closely that you touch the image with your nose. Hold on to your head because the repetitive images on the stereogram can make one giddy. 

This might sound like the cannibal’s menu but in the museum you can eat your friend’s head for lunch. On a blue wooden table with a wooden spoon. Perhaps, the most popular exhibit, the Head on a Platter has an invisible body and the head popping out of a white plate. Knees go wobbly and the ground beneath the feet sways in the Vortex Tunnel in which shiny lights inside the tunnel are the only solace. 

In reality, the walk on the steel bridge is so short that one can run it in a blink; the illusion of a vortex gives one the adrenaline rush. In the Anti-Gravity room, gravity — and physics — go for a toss. Here, balls roll upwards, water flows uphill and your brain and eyes make unconscious inferences about whether you are standing on a flat or slanted surface.

The Mirage is a 3D object which you can see but is actually a handful of air. The brown/black cube seems to sit on white surface but when you try touching it, there is nothing. Nothing. The Holograms section tells the story of evolution through some of the best holograms in the world while the Kaleidoscope creates jolly pictures of the visitor. Add to it the Chair Illusion and the Bottomless Pit. 

Albert Einstein once famously said: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one”. In Museum of Illusion, Vienna’s newest museum, illusion and reality get addled. And you cannot separate the two.