Devorah Sperber: American Gothic Thread Works

via designboom
“Sperber’s upside-down spool sculptures made up of 4,392 spools of colored thread create a visual experience directly connected to the method in which one's brain must piece together sensory data in a clear, physical representation. The flow of information from the eyes to the brain is known as 'top-down processing'. With each spool of thread being a dot of color, equivalent to that of a 'pixel', the human eye is able to recognize the larger visual pattern once witnessed through a clear convex surface…”

See more of her works here. Earlier versions of American Gothic were only made of 500 spools of thread. Amazing what only a limited number of spools can do. 

United Pixelworkers

This shirt from United Pixelworkers makes me smile.

Inverted Art Made with Spools of Thread

via a friend
“Devorah Sperber is showing some fantastic works…What Sperber does is take multi-colored spools of thread and arranges them in a way so that they appear like pixels. Taken as a whole, the spools look like a hot mess, in other words, like your grandma went crazy and glue gunned her thread collection on a wall. Look through a viewing sphere (a small, transparent ball) that's conveniently placed in front of the piece, however, and get ready to be amazed. As Brooklyn Museum states, ‘Sperber deconstructs familiar images so that the brain can reconstruct them. Her framed crystal reproductions similarly address the way we think we see versus the way the brain processes visual information.’”
Read and see more here.