The Kaleidoscope: An Endless Psychedelic Transformation

For many, it’s just a nostalgic childhood toy, but the geometric, multicolored, psychedelic and mutating shapes generated by the kaleidoscope have provided inspiration for filmmakers, fine artists, photographers and fashion designers for decades. Even the masters of psychoanalysis, Freud and Groddeck, used to discuss theories about the human psyche using a telescope (Freud) and a kaleidoscope (Groddeck) to represent the psychic system. For Groddeck, the kaleidoscope constituted the perfect metaphor for human reality—ever-changing, colorful and continually recreated.

The kaleidoscope itself has seen a variety of permutations throughout its existence, which seem as infinite as the multitude of visual variables it can produce. When it was invented in 1817, it was just a cardboard tube with tilted mirrors and colored glass fragments. Nowadays, we have countless kaleidoscope simulators that come in the form of web apps, iPhones apps, photo and video manipulation software, or even large-format installations that give users the experience of "diving" into a kaleidoscope.

Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has explored the idea of infinity and the kaleidoscope's distortion in a show staged at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco in 2007. He called his works “devices to experience reality,” and in pieces like the One-Way Colour Tunnel—a giant kaleidoscopic hallway made of triangular acrylic panels arranged in a logarithm pattern—he succeeds in leading us down the technicolor rabbit hole to an altered state of reality. In the same exhibition, you can see the artworks Color Spectrum Kaleidoscope and Sunset Kaleidoscope (a box installed in a window that creates and distorts the view of the outside world).

The show then traveled to MoMA PS1 in NYC where the artist sat down to explain some of the ideas behind his work:

American artist Jen Stark achieves similar psychedelic results but employs manual techniques and a simple "copy/paste" approach. Stark makes paper sculptures, or “paper kaleidoscopes,” using stop-motion animation and layering multicolored, three-dimensional designs to mimic the view of a kaleidoscope:

You can try your hand at creating virtual kaleidoscopes or giving kaleidoscopic effects to your images using some of these techniques:

Krazy Dad is a website that translates any picture into a kaleidoscopic style but, to be honest, it’s kinda lame. For more impressive effects you can download applications like Photo Echoes, which offer many effects options allowing you to experiment and customize.

Online personality Ze Frank also offers up two good links to “trip” with: this one and this one. Choose some geometric shapes and colors from a toolbar, drag them over a window and the watch the images emerge before your eyes.

For iPhone there are some digital kaleidoscope apps like Mandala Scope 1.0 and Kooleido. Both allow you to modify the shapes by touching the screen:

We’re sure these fragmented forms will continue to inspire and fascinate artists for generations to come, and the kaleidoscope will likely continue to be reinvented in a variety of forms, perhaps as generative art or parametric architecture.