Tony Oursler. Blue Dilemma (installation view: Ventriloquist Dummy). Video installation, mixed media. 1999–2001.

Camelia Gupta discovers that seeing isn't always believing at the Hayward Gallery's latest exhibition.

Eyes, Lies and Illusions, running at the Hayward Gallery until January 3, explores the relationship between art, science and optical trickery.

The final piece in the show, Anthony McCall‘s Line Describing a Cone, 1973, perhaps best encapsulates Eyes, Lies and Illusions.

I walk down a pitch-black corridor, having to feel my way along. Suddenly a room - lasers and smoke ‘describe’ a cone, emanating from a point of light in the far corner expanding to a circle large enough to stand in.

However, factual description does nothing to convey the impact of this piece.

Anthony McCall. Line Describing a Cone, 1973. Film installation with 16mm projector and hazer. Shot at the Whitney Museum, New York, 2002. Photo: © Henry Graber, 2002.

It’s the atmosphere - the experience - that astonishes. My brain refuses to believe I can’t touch the cone.

Crawling ‘underneath’ it I watch the clouds of smoke play across its ‘surface’. Beautiful. I could lose myself in here; it’s a transcendental experience. I lose myself, my sense of time and space…

The application of scientific principles produces something magical. Trailing my hands in the ‘smoke’, I feel like I’m dipping my hand into heaven.

And it is this power that is at the heart of this show. A show that looks at our fascination with optical illusions. Central to it all is the collection of optical illusion equipment of its curator Werner Nekes, experimental filmmaker.

Introducing the show Nekes, asked why he collects these ‘toys’, pulled a contoured stick from his breast pocket. He held it against a wall, and shone a torchlight on it. The silhouette of a woman ‘appeared’.

Etienne-Jules Marey. The jumper. Phases of the high jump shown by Chronophotography (detail). In: Etienne-Jules Marey, “Le Mouvement” Paris, c. 1890. Werner Nekes Collection.

It’s a wonderfully apt answer. This show transforms the Hayward into a riot of trickery, joy, illusion and play. It entertains and questions but perhaps most excitingly, takes us on a dizzying ride.

The Ames room, for example, is as close as we’ll ever get to Alice’s ‘Wonderland’. A conceptual illusion, it comprises a room and a peephole.

I watch someone appear to shrink to midget-size as they cross the room. I can move my head a foot or so to the room’s doorway and ‘know’ that no one is shrinking.

As soon as I’m back at the peephole, however, the illusion is once more utterly convincing. It’s disorienting and great fun to play in. My 21st century brain ‘knows’ it’s not happening, but my eyes believe and are entranced.

It’s interesting that much of the more contemporary work is very similar to pieces from the 16 and 17th century. Marcus Raetz’s sculptures appear, from one angle, to profile a bottle of wine, from another, a glass.

Above: Lantern of Fear. From: Gulielmo Jacobo s’Gravesande ‘Physices Elementa Mathematica’. Geneva, 1748. © Werner Nekes Collection.

It’s a very old idea, and overall the show is suggestive of the continuing power of the optical illusion to fascinate us.

Work made hundreds of years apart embodies the same fascination with using emerging technology, whether mirrors, motors or lasers, to explore perception.

It’s fascinating to note that we know that we’re being deceived and positively welcome the deception.

This is evidenced by examples of ‘Catoprics’, which we’re told is the 18th century science of special effects through reflection. We’re shown its satirical use in representing political figures. A contemporary pamphlet notes: “the world wants to be deluded”.

The scope of this show is vast, but repeatedly, whether through magic lanterns, halls of mirrors or shadow play, confirms this.

Marcel Duchamp. Rotoreliefs. Six cardboard disks (detail). Paris 1935. Photo: Courtesy Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln (A. Wagner). Werner Nekes Collection. © DACS.

Eyes, Lies and Illusions is a beautifully designed show. Consistent with its subject, the exhibition is itself a dazzling spectacle. We’re allowed behind the scenes of individual illusions but not of the show itself.

There are wonderful details, for example, the way a linking corridor is lined with angled mirrors at ground level. It’s oddly disorienting to see your own feet reflected as you walk.

Cumulatively, it’s an appropriately bewildering space. I see other visitors bump into glass cases and fail to recognise friends. I guess I’m not the only one feeling the effects!

It’s a complex space, there’s no set route for the show: wander around, lose and find yourself.

Ascending to the upper floor, one either encounters Christian Boltanski’s sinister shadow-projected Hanging Man (1988), or the overwhelming intense colour field of Ann Veronica Janssens, Scrub Colour II (2002). Either route involves a sensory smack in the face.

Christian Boltanski. Les Ombres (Shadows), 1986. Installation view. Electric fan, light bulb, mixed media.

I watch a group of schoolboys using the light to make the kind of hand-shapes that I saw downstairs in 18th century diagrams and models; this stuff truly is timeless, perhaps universal.

This show appeals on so many levels.

It’s great fun, and the child in all of us can enjoy the games. It’s also full of what Werner Nekes calls ‘philosophical toys’. These induce experiences that provoke questions about the nature of reality and truth, our need for belief.

It’s also an impressive historical survey, demonstrating optical illusions and their reach across divides of the obvious and obscure, the scientific and magical, art and science.

Eyes, Lies and Illusions embodies some very human qualities; on the one hand the desire to know, show and explain, and on the other, to dream. Visit and enjoy the ride!