Figure-ground ambigrams 

Hello my friend, do you know what a figure-ground ambigram is?

Hello Vassilis! I think I do, but can you show me an example first?

Of course! Here’s a piece by Punya Mishra, it’s called “good-evil”. What do you read first?

Well, I read “GOOD”. Where is ev…? Oh! I saw that! “EVIL” is inside “GOOD”. That’s so creative!

Remember talking about perceptual shifts and how they take advantage of the middle forms of the letters?

Yes, I do.

Now, this is even crazier. The artist plays not just with the forms of the letters, but also with the negative space.

What’s negative space?

It’s the space around and between the subject of an image. In typography, it’s the space around, in between or inside the letters.

Also, it’s called ground. In this example, you can think of the black letters as the foreground and the white space as the background. Now name those two as ‘figure’ and ‘ground’.

Give me more details. Why did I read “GOOD” first?

Well, we usually read black letters on white paper. So it’s habit to look for a word in black on a white background. But in this piece, there are some details that show something else is going on. Let’s see the ambigram again.

You may have asked yourself, why are the two Os different? Why is the spur of G like this? Why is there a liquid drop on the bowl of the D?

Well, it’s because the artist intentionally manipulated the negative space, in order to create the second word, “EVIL”. For those who still can’t read it, here it is.

That’s a nice way of creating ambigrams. Can you show me some more?

Of course. Here is a piece, called “us” by John Langdon.

Here’s a piece, called “create-destroy”, by Chump.

And another one from the same artist, it’s called “body-soul”.

Now this technique is great! Using the negative space in order to create letters in an out-of-the-box thought.

Indeed. I would say that this category, mind ambigrams, is astonishing! And that’s because when you try to invent new types of mind ambigrams, you must think of ways of how people read, how the mind works and how the viewer can possibly read a typographic art piece in more than one way.

It seems to me that the perceptual shifts took advantage of the letterforms, while figure-grounds are using what’s not a form.

That’s correct!

And it also seems to me that since there are two things here, the form and the negative space, maybe there’s not more that we can explore. We’ve explored all the parts of the image!

That’s not correct.

Why is that? What else is there besides these two?

Well, to answer this, we need to focus on other things that our minds can do. And we can use those brain functions in order to create art that has two or more ways of interpretation.

Well, can you say more about that?

An example of such a function is…

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