Kermit the Frog Becomes Miss Piggy (Just Add Milk!)

Several jars of creamy white milk make Drzach & Suchy's Muppet Show shadow art look good enough to eat. The latest innovative artwork from the Swiss artistic team who previously brought eternal sunlight to the dark of night with their solar-paneled palm trees, Got m? combines i.materialise's 3D printing capabilities with dairy, and the artists' specially designed Shadow Casting Panels (SCPs) into a five-panel, hybrid image of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy, that milkily metamorphoses back and forth between characters depending on the direction of light pointed at it.

As demonstrated in their behind-the-scenes video, Got m?'s illusion operates through five monochromatic SCP panels. This unqiue system of visual encoding, invented by Dzrach in 2004, allows the artists to convert the intended image into a pixelated raster image, and divide that between several panels. “More precisely,” the artists explain on their website, “the images are considered in a pixel-by-pixel manner, and for each pixel of the an appropriate building block is placed at the corresponding place in the panel. The type of the block depends on the colors of the particular pixel in the images to be encoded. The actual blocks can have various geometries, yielding a variety of possible designs and perceptions.”

For Got m?’s bright spectrum, Dzrach & Suchy built their blocks with transparent, colored film, which, when back-lit, shines in red, yellow, green, blue and black. Layering each panel onto the next, the artists then filled a shallow shadow box with an overzealous serving of milk to obscure the panels' stringy gird. Finally, by exposing the versatile SCP’s to varying levels of light, hybrid images of the Muppet Show and Sesame Street stars played out in a partially submerged gradient of grinning shadows.

For more projects from Drzach and Suchy, visit their website.

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