An entrancing short film by designer and artist Rus Khasanov fuses multiple optical tricks into a single work. Splashes of glittery, inky liquids crawl across the screen, resulting in a series of bubbles that mimic magnified shots of human eyes. The hypnotic footage utilizes pareidolia—the inclination to see an object where it physically doesn’t exist—while referencing heterochromia iridum, a fairly common condition in which a person’s irises are multi-colored, sometimes in the forms of spikes radiating around the pupil or swirls that split the tissue with different hues. Khasanov’s rendition mimics that phenomenon through saturated droplets and innumerable veins that plume outward.
