99% Invisible - Trompe L'oeil

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Today, we have three stories about designs meant to fool you. Camouflage meant to fool U-boats. Highways designed to fool your brain into going way faster than it should want to. And impeccably made fake signs meant to guide you to the right freeway. Three classic, favorite 99PI's completely updated, remixed, and rescored.Trompe L'oeil Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Today we have three stories about designs meant to fool you, camouflage meant to fool you boats, highways designed to fool your brain into going way faster than it should want to, and impeccably made fake signs meant to guide you to the right freeway. Three classic favorite 99pis, completely updated, remixed, and rescored. Enjoy. I think if you ask somebody on the street, what is camouflage, I believe the most common answer would be to say, well, it's a figure and it's being hidden by being blended with its background. Scientists today call that background matching.

I call that high similarity camouflage. That's Roy Barron's. I'm Roy Barron's and I teach in the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa. I teach graphic design and the history of design. Barron's is also one of the foremost camouflage experts. Well, I wouldn't go that far. High similarity or blending is just one type of camouflage. It's kind of the boring one.

But another type of camouflage that you can find both in nature and in military use is disruptive camouflage. I call it figure disruption. Figure disruption. Because it breaks up the figure. It's the opposite of high similarity camouflage. It's high difference. So you're making it very difficult for us

to look at the figure and to see it as only a single continuous thing. Corruption. Figure disruption. Zebra stripes have long been thought see it as only a single continuous thing. ZEBRAS TRIPES ZEBRAS TRIPES ZEBRAS TRIPES ZEBRAS TRIPES have long been thought to be a form of disruptive camouflage. The stripes make it harder for a predator to distinguish one zebra from another when the zebras are in a large herd.

The stripes might also make zebras less attractive to blood-sucking horseflies, but I digress. But when it comes to humans, the greatest, most jaw-droppingly spectacular application of disruptive camouflage by the military is razzle-dazzle. Dazzle camouflage strictly applies to ship camouflage and even more strictly it applies to World War I ship camouflage. And it came about because it was discovered that it's almost impossible to make a ship invisible on the ocean. The horizon is changing in color, it's changing in amount of light. So there are all kinds of conditions that make it so a constantly moving ship can't blend into the background of the sea.

And even if you could make a ship invisible... You still have smoke coming out of the smokestack, so it's not as if you're hiding the ship at all. So the less not as if you're hiding the ship at all. So the less heavily armored ships were setting docks. The crisis came about at the time that the US had not yet entered the war. Remember, this is World War I. It was the British ships that were being sunk.

And the German submarines were sinking as many as 50 ships a week. Many of those ships were merchant ships, and they were bringing supplies to England, which is an island, of course, and it really depended on those. And then also there was armaments and other things that were being secretly taken there, too.

So the design solution was not about invisibility. It was about disruption. A number of artists decided that the best way to avoid getting torpedoed was not to make the ship invisible, but to make it hard to hit. That's why these kind of erratic, crazy quilt patterns came about, and that's why they were used in that war. It's gonna be hard to picture this, but I want you to try. There was once a time when military ships, even US ships by this point, were painted with, and I quote this from an anonymous

article from the New York Times from 1918, any New Yorker will see anchor, or coming in or out, numerous ships whose painted size reveals such wild extravagances of form and color as to make the landsman open his eyes with amazement and mystification. Black and white was very common. They consist of stripes and swirls and kind of arabesque, almost Art Nouveau shapes. Blue was used predominantly, especially in the British versions. But I think you'd be surprised at the range of colors.

There were reds that were sometimes used and greens and really quite intense oranges. Another unidentified US journalist wrote, You should see our fleet. It's camouflaged so it looks like a flock of seagoing Easter eggs. During World War I, dazzle ship camouflage was absolutely fascinating to the public.

You have to remember that this is happening just a few years after the, what's called the Armory Show in New York. It's the first international show of modern art in this country. And it was the introductory show of Cubism, Futurism, all of those things that people made fun of. And they thought that these are really crazy directions for artists to be going into.

So that when this happened, people looked at those ships and they said, oh, it's a Cubist nightmare. It's futurist, they've taken over the world. As you can probably guess, there were plenty of people who hated dazzle camouflage, traditional Navy men mostly. They compared it to the clothing that a prostitute would wear and they made fun of it.

Here's how it worked. I can lead you through the steps. At the time, torpedoes fired from U-boats were quite slow, maybe taking a couple of minutes to reach their target. So the person firing the torpedo had to lead the target. He had to anticipate where the target ship was going to be when the torpedo arrived. So he had to calculate how to do that, and that very much depended on knowing the exact angle it's headed toward.

That's terribly terribly important. And the other thing is that you have to figure out the speed of the ship because then you'll know how far it can go by the time the torpedo gets there. The dazzle camouflage certainly made the ship stand out, but the bulging shapes and vivid hues also made it difficult to determine the speed and direction of the moving ship. It's preying on our assumptions about things looking smaller as they are more distant. So you could paint perspective patterns on a ship that would make it look like it was turning in a different direction

when in fact you're actually seeing them frontally and they're absolutely flat. The dazzle patterns broke up the figure so it could look like it was shorter than it really was or it could make it hard to tell if there was one ship or multiple ships. They even painted fake bow waves on them and they would paint the fake bow wave either on the front to make it look like the ship was going faster than it was actually going because that was one way of calculating that. Or they would paint the bow wave on the back. And so you would glance at it while you're looking through this periscope and you might

conclude that, oh, it's going in that direction, not in the other direction. So then you surface again to calculate where you're going to shoot, and the thing is gone. It's an entirely different direction and location than you imagined. These patterns weren't just slapped onto the side of giant ships, hoping that they'd be confusing enough to be effective.

Camouflures, and that's what they're called, the camouflures tested toy models by inviting inexperienced submarine captains to peer through periscopes and report what angle they thought the models were pointed. They determined that sometimes on really effectively camouflaged ships, the calculation of the ship captains could be off as much as 55 degrees.

Dazzle only had to screw up the torpedo gunner's estimate by eight degrees for the target ship to effectively avoid a torpedo. The theater of war has changed, so camouflage has changed with it, but there is still dazzle to be found. Actually, if you look at military craft today, there is still dazzle being practiced. But of course, the conditions have changed. Just as in World War I, this came out of those particular set of conditions. We have to say, well, those aren't the conditions that we have now, so what would be most effective today? If you look at aircraft, it's broken up very often. If you look at ships, some of them are broken up through these geometric patterns.

If you look at some camouflage uniforms, infantry uniforms around the world, you'll find all kinds of break up with dazzle and so forth forth or tanks or trucks and so forth. But I am sad to report that there are no longer flocks of seagoing easter eggs. That was episode 65, Razzle Dazzle. A 99PI listener named Dylan Fry is a graphic design student at the University of Wisconsin Stout and for a class project he created a transcript of that episode in zine format. It is so cool. We'll have a link to it in the show notes and on our website where we also have tons of pictures of razzle dazzle ships which you need to go look at immediately.

They will change your life. Up next, another story of fooling the eye and fooling the mind, episode 68, Built for Speed. I want you to conjure an image in your mind of the white stripes. Not those white stripes, but the white stripes that divide the lanes of traffic going in the same direction on a major highway. How long are those stripes? You can spread your arms out to estimate if you want to. Over the course of many years, a psychology researcher named Dennis Schaeffer at Ohio State

asked students from many different parts of the country this question. And the most common response was two feet. So if you're like most people, you estimated that those white stripes are two feet long, maybe a little more. But if you did, you'd be very, very wrong. This is Tom Vanderbilt. My name is Tom Vanderbilt. I'm a writer in New York and author of Traffic, Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says

About Us. Every three pages of Tom's terrific book, Traffic, I could probably turn into a 99% invisible episode, but back to the highway. Well, early on in my research, I was talking to a highway engineer. And he said, if your car is ever broken down on the side of the road.

You've ever been forced to get out of your vehicle on a highway. Just take a moment to notice how strange the landscape is. If you're just happen to be standing near a road sign, these road signs are huge. I mean, they're not meant to be experienced as humans on foot. They're meant to be experienced at 75 miles an hour.

With that clear view typeface. Perfectly visible, retro reflective. And then there are the white stripes. If you actually kind of got out of your car and were able to walk on a closed highway and walked from one end of those stripes to the other, you'd find that, I mean, years ago in the United States, the highway standard was 15 feet long, which is longer than a car itself. Current federal highway administration guidelines suggest a length of 10 feet,

with 30 feet between the dashes. That's something that is shocking to people. And remember, most people in the Schaeffer study said that those stripes were two feet long. That's such a vast gulf there between. It's not sort of like, you know, they're actually five feet. We thought they were two, you know, margin of error kind of thing. And it goes back to this fundamental point that when you're in a car at high speeds, you're experiencing only a sense of the landscape rather than the actual landscape.

This kind of sense of landscape has been presented to you to essentially make you feel comfortable. And to make a highway work in what are really evolutionarily ridiculous speeds for a human to travel. in what are really evolutionarily ridiculous speeds for a human to travel. You have this big, flat, wide open, kind of stretch of road that, even if you have a 65 mile an hour sign, the message of the road is telling you something entirely different.

And I think that's really where a lot of our behavior comes from. Sometimes you have sort of willful speeding, willful kind of law breaking, but a lot of it is just people are paying attention to the visual messaging of the road, not to their speedometer. Long dividing lines and clear vistas give the illusion

that you're going at a reasonable speed. As soon as something encroaches into view, you get a sense of how fast you're going. That's one reason why those temporary concrete walls that crews put up right next to the road during construction are so unnerving. The error in perception of white stripe length is attributed to the fact that when we drive on the highway, we tend to look so far ahead that we usually only experience the dashes

and gaps when they are very far away and at an angle so they look shorter. But there's no consensus as to why people all over the country were so consistently wrong with the two feet estimate. It's, yeah, become my favorite, one of my favorite cocktail party facts. Mine too. Stump the driver with this white stripes information. I don't want to leave the impression

that the wide dividing lines are uniform though. You won't find 10 foot highway lines on say a boulevard in New York City. And you You won't find 10-foot highway lines on, say, a boulevard in New York City. And you probably won't find 10 or 15-foot stripes on bridges or highway on-ramps. Or let's hope you don't, because that's an entirely inappropriate design language for that space. Limited-excess highways are designed for a very precise purpose. The highway is meant for uninterrupted, fast-flowing traffic.

Get people from point A to point B as quickly as possible with no interruptions. I mean, that sort of environment does not work in cities or suburbs. The problem is when that approach is grafted into places where it doesn't belong. I think we're actually kind of paying the price for this right now in some suburban environments where you find these kind of arterial highways that were built almost to an highway engineering standard with again these long sight lines, wide roads encouraging people to go fast. And then we went and built all kinds of development along those arterial highways, which was never really supposed to be there. With so many people driving on these roads, they became absolutely irresistible to commerce.

This is kind of the new American main street, right, where you have your Costco's and your fast food and all sorts of in and out parking lots, driveways, drive-throughs, yet people also going very fast. And Eric Dunbaugh does a lot of research suggesting that these are really some of the most dangerous places to currently drive in America, not crowded urban cities, which is what a lot of people would think. The whole approach is called the forgiving road. The idea was that, you know, to first try to minimize the potential that a crash could happen through again, again, through lack of obstacles,

you know, generous sight lines, all these sorts of things. But then if a crash did happen to kind of mitigate the effects of what would happen to not punish the driver for the mistake that he will inevitably make. This was, I'm quoting some of the language from the time. So you see that nowadays in things like in California, you'll have your guard rails that are sort of wire guard rails that if a car strikes that guard rail, it tends to catch on the guard rail rather than being bounced back out into traffic, which causes another series of collisions. So this forgiving road is a positive thing in terms of good safety engineering.

But they were so sort of seduced by it that the call was made to bring it into even the surface street network. So things like street trees began to be deemed hazards by engineers, just outright hazards. And that makes sense on a high-speed country road, but if you're talking about residential street where you're not supposed to be going more than 25 anyway, is the presence of a street tree on the side of the road where it's providing shade and comfort to pedestrians, you know, is that the same sort of hazard? Is it even a hazard at all?

The conclusion many planners came to was, yes, trees are a hazard. You find pre-war suburbs, you have the street, a set of trees, and then the sidewalk. Coast War, this sort of shift began to happen where the trees were moved on the other side of the sidewalk. Coast War, this sort of shift began to happen where the trees were moved on the other side of the sidewalk. Suddenly pedestrians were put in the position of being the buffer between drivers and those menacing trees. There was sort of a pernicious thing that happened here is that as you move those trees away, the visual sensation of the road became wider. And if there's one kind of iron law

of traffic engineering, it gets into this visual perception thing as well, the wider a road is or is perceived to be. The faster driver speed tends to increase. And of course, you know, the final, if you look at sort of 1990s era, you know, suburbia, that they just kind of eliminated the sidewalk and the trees altogether. So that was sort of the final, the final solution, just eliminate any kind of eliminated the sidewalk and the trees altogether. So that was sort of the final solution, just eliminate any kind of hazard. And Tom Vanderbilt says,

you can almost date a subdivision's development based on that shift. And this points to one of the problems about road engineering is that humans tend to consume the extra engineering measures that have been built in for their safety. Much in the same way, I like to draw the analogy with some of the research that's been done on food packaging by Brian Wanzick at Cornell University.

You're doing experiments where if you give people, just random group of people, large buckets of popcorn filled to the top with popcorn and give them a smaller amount of popcorn in a smaller package, they'll just eat more of the larger package. It has nothing to do with their level of hunger. It's just the size of the package influences their behavior. I think a lot of our road environments are sort of like that. They're over-engineered for the safety and then we tend to consume a lot of the extras getting us back to this kind of homeostatic edge that we're always kind of playing with,

I think. Another Remix Classic 99PIPI after the break. We're back with the story from reporter David Weinberg. This is episode 152, Guerrilla Public Service. At some point in your life, you've probably encountered a problem in the built world, something that was poorly designed and the fix was obvious to you. Maybe a door that opened the wrong way or a poorly painted marker on the road. I notice this kind of stuff all the time, even more so now after creating this show. I'm sorry if you do too, because you listen to this show.

And mostly when we see these things, we grumble on the inside and then do nothing. There are all sorts of reasons for our inertia. We don't know how to fix it. It's not ours to fix. We could get in trouble. That's producer David Weinberg. You might notice these little design flaws

for years, silently fuming. Until one day. He called me and said, you know, okay, we're doing it. It was early Sunday morning, August 5, 2001, in Los Angeles, California. Richard Ancrum and a group of friends were on the Fourth Street Bridge over the 110 Freeway. They were about to commit a crime. and a group of friends were on the 4th Street Bridge over the 110 Freeway. They were about to commit a crime. It's going to be a high profile, dangerous situation.

Not only could I get arrested, I could kill somebody. Really, I was terrified of that. But let's back up. About 20 years prior, Richard Ancrum, an artist living in Orange County, was driving north on the 110 Freeway. As he passed through downtown Los Angeles, he was going to merge onto another freeway, the I-5 North. But he missed the exit and got lost. And for some reason, it just stuck with him.

Years later, when Richard moved to downtown Los Angeles, he was driving on the same stretch of freeway where he'd gotten lost a decade before, when he looked up at the big green rectangular sign suspended above. I realized why I missed the exit is because it wasn't adequately signed. Bad wayfinding. The exit for the I-5 wasn't indicated on the green overhead sign. There was even a big open space

where there should have been a blue and red interstate shield and above that it should have said north. It was clear to Richard that Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation, had made a mistake. So Richard, an artist and sign painter, decided to make the Interstate 5 North Shield himself and install it in the place he thought it should have been all along, high above the 110 freeway. He would call it an act of guerrilla public service. The whole idea was to be sort of a public servant

or actually to show what you can do with artwork. You can put it in plain sight and have a functioning working thing for everyone to use. Richard started by studying LA freeway signs, holding up Pantone swatches to perfectly match the paint color. He dangled over bridges to measure the exact dimensions of other signs.

And most importantly, he downloaded the Necronomicon of California Road signage, the Mutt Kid. The M-U-T-C-D, the manual on uniform traffic control devices. Quote, to provide for uniform standards and specifications for all official traffic control devices in California. It's not a beach read. I have it as more of a lazy Sunday afternoon read. All the specs are online so people can bid on projects.

Richard wanted his sign to be built to the exact specifications of Caltrans, which were sign to be built to the exact specifications of Caltrans which were designed to be read by motorists traveling at high speeds. The shield with a five on it is three feet roughly high and wide. It's less than an eighth of an inch, barely an eighth of an inch thick aluminum. It's still pretty strong. And above that I put the word North and that was oh about 14 inches by five feet. And again I used the same typeface that was there and the same signs. I tried to match everything as close as I could so it wouldn't be obvious Calfrans didn't do it. Richard's brand new additions had to blend in perfectly with the existing

signage which had been collecting dirt and smog for decades. They sprayed the whole thing with a really thin glaze of gray. They knocked down the shine. After he finished it, Richard signed his name on the back of it with a black marker, like a painter signing a canvas. Then came the next phase of the project, the installation, which he planned with the precision of a bank heist. He bought a disguise, a white hard hat and an orange vest, so he'd look like a Caltrans worker.

Basically looked the part as best I could. And he made a decal for his pickup truck, meant to look vaguely official that said, aesthetic deconstruction. The night before the installation, Richard drove out to the site and hid some of his supplies so they'd be easy to get to the next morning.

When I interviewed him, he took me to the spot and showed me where he'd stashed his stuff. Basically here, and right now the ivy isn't that thick, but it was a lot thicker, and I had, well basically behind that tree it stashed the ladder and the signs and stuff. After he hid his things, he climbed a tree and just sat there, going through everything in his head.

I just sort of calmed myself down by being there and hanging around with it the night before. Richard was worried that he might drop the sign or one of his tools onto the road below. Drivers going 60 plus miles an hour would have no time to react if something landed on the road in front of them or worse onto their car. That was the scariest thing of the whole project

is if somebody got hurt, you know, I'd have to live with that. And then the project I'd have to sh-t can it because it would have defeated the whole idea of it. But despite some reservations, Richard was pretty confident he could pull the whole thing off. And he'd gone too far to turn back. And that brings us back to the morning of August 5th, 2001. Richard did not act alone. He asked several friends to film the installation from different vantage points. Amy Inoa was one of the friends he enlisted to film.

We did it at 6am or 7am on a Sunday morning. It was tense because we all thought we were going to get into trouble. Richard had chosen a Sunday morning to put up the sign, knowing that there would be little traffic and the morning light rising above the skyscrapers would be just right for filming. What he hadn't anticipated was that Caltrans had also picked that morning to do work on the same stretch of highway. Yes, they happened to be doing some other work on the freeway just south of that sign. When they saw the Caltrans workers, they thought about turning back.

But I had surmised, after all this is a pretty large city, there'd be more than one sign crew. My assumption was they'd think the other guy was doing it. Richard parked his truck, and when everyone was in position with their cameras, he went to work. The hardest part really was getting over the razor wire with the ladder. Once he was up on the catwalk, nearly 30 feet above the highway, he started screwing in the new sign, careful not to drop any screws on the cars below. Halfway into it, we just felt like, okay, he's gonna get away with it. Look at that. Is that amazing or what? Oh, look, he's folding up his stuff. He's got it up. The whole thing took less than 30 minutes. As soon

as it was up, Richard packed up his ladder, rushed back to his truck and blended back into the city. Wow. Oh my God. Awesome. I think we all went out to breakfast together afterwards and we were super relieved and really happy. Only a small group of people knew that the Interstate 5 shield with the word North hanging above the 110 freeway was a forgery. He didn't say to us, don't tell anyone.

So our friends all knew about it and we would drive by it and we would just all feel really happy about it. But it never sort of managed to leak out past that small group. For a while. For a while. For a while. For nine months, the secret stayed within a small community. And then Richard's friend, Gary, leaked the story. Oh, what the hell, Gary?

Why can't you be cool? Just be cool, Gary. Richard's secret was out to Caltrans and to the press. From the fake magnetic sign on his beat up blue truck to a work order proclaiming rush. What he did is against the law, but Caltrans says it has no plans at all to file charges against him.

After they found out what had happened, apparently they sent a crew out there to inspect it. Richard was hoping to get his sign back from Caltrans after they took it down. He was thinking he would hang it in an art gallery, but Caltrans didn't take the sign down. It passed the Caltrans inspection because that's really the final test of how good the artwork is. It stayed up for eight years, nine months, and 14 days, I believe. It's not exactly accurate,

but it's pretty close to that. In interviews about the incident with other news organizations, Caltrans didn't exactly condone Richard's handiwork, but they were pretty kind about it. Here's the Caltrans spokesperson at the time. He did a good job, but we don't want him to do it again. And in fact, he did such a good job that I'd like to offer him a job application. More than eight years after Richard's sign went up, he got a call from a friend who noticed some workers taking it down.

Richard contacted Caltrans to ask if he could have his sign back. By the time I tracked him down, it had already been crushed into a bale going for China. And who knows what it turned into? It could be a waffle iron by now. After Caltrans took down Richard's sign, they replaced it with a brand new one. But this time they incorporated his ideas into the new design. They added the

Five North and the Shield not only to that sign but to two additional ones up the road. A little epilogue. Richard's Highway Sign is a happily ever after story. The sign worked. People appreciated it. No one got hurt, thankfully. Even Caltrans was really pretty nice about the whole thing. There's another Gorilla Sign story out of New York City.

A group that calls itself the Efficient Passenger Project has been hanging signs in New York's subway stations to tell people where they can board the train to make the most efficient transfers. The project is not at all affiliated with the Metropolitan Transit Authority, but the signs look just like MTA signs, black with white Helvetica lettering. They say things like, board here for best transfer to the four, five, and six trains, or board here for best transfer to F and M trains. It's the kind of knowledge that you build up over time as a regular subway rider and this gorilla sign maker is offering it to everyone. And though some have applauded

the signs not all New Yorkers are pleased. These are secrets some say that people should have to earn. They will unbalance the cars they say leave signage to the experts. The MTA, for their part, is taking down the signs as fast as they go up. MTA spokesman, Kevin Ortiz, told us in an email that, quote, posting of the signs is considered an act of vandalism.

Point being, if you decide to undertake an act of guerrilla public service, just know, it may not be received as such. That episode, Guerrilla Public Service, first aired in 2014. This episode was remixed by Martín González and scored by Swan Real. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstad is the digital director, Delaney Hall is the senior editor. Taylor Shedrick is our intern. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon,

Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Bosch Madone, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Nina Potuck, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. Home of the Oakland Roots Soccer Club, of which I'm a proud community owner. Other teams may come and go, but the Roots are Oakland first. Always.

You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord server where we are dropping our hot takes about Megalopolis and how the movie relates to the power broker. It's good stuff. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99i.org.