A pile of trash is pretty visually flexible when you're aiming for a desired effect on the other side. So is a welded together mess of pots and pans, or whatever that is. These pieces have one subject. What I'm talking about is a piece with two distinct subjects, IE a statue of object A that casts a shadow of object B. What would complicate this is that the shadow is fixed (2-D) but people could look at the 3-D part from different angles.

Flint -- even better if different light angles produced different shadow images. Then you could have the 3D object on a rotating platform and the shadow would change to show different 2D images.

A pile of trash with two seagulls is an identifiable sculpture. Being easy to create or "visually flexible" has no bearing on it. It's recognizable and casts a shadow of something completely different. If you want it to be a more defined sculpture, why don't you go make one and stop bothering the adults?

Interesting. What I've been working on is casting a flat image on an irregular surface, so that when viewed from a specific angle, the visual data compiles back into the original flat image. The obvious limitation, depending on how you look at it (no pun intended) being that you have to view it from that specific angle. Now, I don't know about moving images, but I suppose I could attempt maybe three fixed images viewed from three distinct vantage points, cast on one 3-D object. (I'll leave it to your imagination what specific object I'm using as a "canvas" here...)

Julian Beever has done some interesting 3-D sidewalk drawings with chalk, like:
http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/images/coke.jpg

and

http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/images/sosie.jpg

Here's another good one:

http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/images/batman.jpg

Keep in mind that these are all 2D, and only look right from one angle.

You can find more here.

More than the other ones, at least. They're all amorphous, but one has seagulls.

This reminds me of the digital sundial (check out #8).

Couldn't find a good recipe.

The closest thing to what I'm thinking, regarding multiple images cast and reproduced on a single, complex 3-D surface, and this is a gross over-simplification, but you know those billboards that change as you drive by? Like that, but, not to name the particular object, it's much more interesting than parallel, vertical louvers with angled facets.

To do what I'm talking about, you'd need something like a Tracer, which I do have, and which most notably a friend and I used to blow up a single eye from an india ink, cross-hatched illustration (he did) of a photograph of a model's face, up from about one inch to about ten feet across, then re-colored it with oil pastels, thus making a perfect photographic reproduction of a human eye that you can only see from at least twenty feet away.

And what did it's shadow look like?

Aren't all piles of trash amorphous at first glance? That was the point, they are supposed to appear as piles of trash and not hint at the shadow they would produce, even though they were carefully constructed like any other sculpture.

To carry this idea to a really ridiculous level (because, why not?), I suppose you could cast the shadow of one 3-D object onto another 3-D object, and have the resulting image represent a third subject (appearing to be 2-D on the surface of the second 3-D object). Continuing to expand upon the idea of shapes and images projecting and changing upon the surface of one another, eventually you could build an Escher-esque funhouse where you wouldn't even be sure what you were looking at! This thread certainly opens up what you might even call a can of worms. Like, art worms.

Seagulls, shadows, or whatever, we're all fortunate to be viewing this away from the stink of 6 month old garbage.:yelsick:

I think that was Flint's point.

Wow, do you or he have any close vs. far pics of that? I would love to see how that turned out!

I'd say this is definitely a case of someone suffering for their art!

I don't have any pics; but as soon as I get a chance (whenever I go to my friend's house next) I will take some from the normal standing-next-to-the-wall-looking-at-a-painting range, and then from the distance-that-the-image-starts-to-make-sense range.

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So, I sketched up some diagrams...
..the first two involving casting shadows on 2-D and then 3-D surfaces, while the 3-D surfaces retain their information...
..the third involving projected, visible light images, reproduced on 3-D surfaces, so that different images become visible depending on the angle: