Vantage Tees
See Tees Differently
Most tees are the same: splashy graphic or logo centered on a shirt for others to read. Vantage Tees are site-specific art pieces using optical illusions and body-specific effects to change everything about how people interact with their attire. Some shirts look different if you are looking at them or wearing them. Some ask you to be really close or really far. Others take time to see them. Vantage Tees will look different to everyone—it all depends on your vantage point.
Vantage Tees: Anamorphosis
Almost simultaneous with the codification of perspective in the 15th century, distortions and perversions of perspective became part of the rise of verisimilitude in drawing. Anamorphosis, a cousin of perspective, is an image projected obliquely against a surface, obfuscating the content until the viewer stands at the point of projection. This distortion was immediately popular because of the ability to hide subversive images, typically political messages or erotic imagery--useful in an age of royal court intrigue and pious decorum. Erhard Schön, student of Albrecht Dürer, was especially talented in his anamorphic projections, producing erotic murals visible only to the lord of the house from his private bedroom.
The contemporary t-shirt has enjoyed a central place in popular culture, where images can announce counter-culture messages, declarations of beliefs, and signs of tribe membership. All t-shirts face out; they are all intended for frontal presentation to the public. What if that traditional role was reversed? Vantage Tees contain anamorphic images that only the wearer can decipher. The shirts contain images not generally acceptable to the public: erotic and explicit sexual imagery, politically sensitive messages, and extremely violent images of death. These are all images that are custom to the wearer, both in content and distortion. Different body types yield different surfaces onto which images are projected; a pregnant woman yields a different distortion than an athletic male.
