Be Dazzled

I recently posted a video featuring people with faces painted like the band KISS. The clip hgihlighted three forms of figurative blindness: one mentioned in the song, one perpetrated by the fans, and third as a quasi-hallucination created by the makeup. While one person done up in that signature black-and-white face paint may look iconic (and even ironic), another effect occurs when entire crowds do it together: the individual disappears into the group, and the group participates in a visual effect called disruptive camouflage.

Disruptive camouflage occurs in nature, famously in zebra herds whose converging stripes throw off predators as to their number, individual identity, and direction they're facing. The Brits have taken two important cues from the zebra: the crosswalk (which they call a "zebra crossing') and a practice of painting ships that came about in World War I when they hired painters to decorate both war and commercial vessels with striped patterns. This was also an attempt to throw off predators—in this case German submarines, whose crew had to estimate a ship's distance and course before firing a torpedo at it. This "dazzle camouflage" could fool the enemy into thinking that a ship was turning or moving in a direction that it wasn't, throwing off torpedo calculations by as much as 55°.

A person with a retinal condition might see many things as if they were decorated by a dazzle camoufleur, only the cause of disruption is not tactical, it's the consequence of retinal cells being interrupted. The result is gaps in vision that the brain fills in with made-up stuff, including the whos, whats, how-manys, how-fars and where's-this-goings of people and things of every stripe.

The brilliant podcast 99% Invisible has an episode on dazzle camouflage. Listen to it here.