By Charis Tsevis
The moment before seeing
There exists a peculiar threshold in human consciousness—that infinitesimal pause between looking and seeing, between the raw data flooding your retinas and the moment your mind assembles meaning from chaos. It's in this liminal space that the true magic of visual perception unfolds, where the mechanics of sight transform into the poetry of understanding.
Consider the last time you stood before a painting that stopped you mid-stride. Not the polite pause of cultural obligation, but that involuntary arrest of movement when something in the arrangement of pigment and light spoke directly to a part of your brain that has no words. What happened in that moment? What conspiracy of neurons and ancient pattern-recognition systems collaborated to create that sudden, wordless recognition of beauty?
As someone who has spent the better part of my life attempting to understand this mystery—first as a curious observer, then as a digital mosaic artist working with companies whose names you'd recognize but whose visual challenges you might not—I've come to believe that the answer lies not in what we see, but in how our minds choose to organize the seeing.
The constellation of Orion has never moved. Those three stars we call Orion's Belt have maintained their celestial positions for millennia, yet every human culture that has looked up at them has seen something different. The Greeks saw a hunter. The Egyptians, the soul of Osiris. The Lakota, a hand. Same stars, same relationships, yet entirely different stories. This is the fundamental paradox of perception: we don't see what's there—we see what our minds are prepared to find.
We speak of the 'color impression' we get. But this expression is misleading: we don't have an impression of color—we see color... The language-game of reporting can be given such a turn that a report is not meant to inform the hearer about its subject, but about the person making the report.
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Remarks on Colour (1950)
The Queen's Gambit (2020): A series of mosaic portraits of Beth Harmon, aka Anya Taylor-Joy, made out of chess symbols. A self-initiated project honoring a good book, an interesting mini-series, and of course, a fantastic game.
I incorporate halftone and dithering-inspired lighting to enhance the rhythm and structure of the composition, giving it a sense of visual cadence.
When patterns become language
In the 1920s, while Europe was still dusting itself off from one world war and careening toward another, a group of German psychologists were making a discovery that would fundamentally change how we understand the human mind. Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler weren't trying to revolutionize art or design—they were simply trying to understand why a series of flashing lights could trick the brain into seeing movement where none existed.
Their insight, which would later be called Gestalt psychology, was elegantly simple: the whole is other than the sum of its parts. Not greater than—other than. This small distinction contains multitudes.
When I work on a photomosaic design—whether it's interpreting the determined focus of an Olympic athlete or capturing the innovative spirit of a tech company's founder—I'm essentially engaging in this same fundamental act of meaning-making. Each tiny tessellation is a discrete data point, no more meaningful in isolation than a single pixel on your screen. But arrange them with intention, vary their sizes with purpose, orchestrate their relationships with care, and something emerges that transcends the sum of individual elements.
This is where Nino Di Salvatore's revolutionary "Theory of Space" becomes not just relevant, but essential. Di Salvatore understood that space itself—the relationship between elements—carries information. In his formulation, emptiness is never empty; proximity is never accidental; scale is never neutral. Every spatial relationship whispers secrets about importance, about time, about the emotional weight of what we're seeing.
Yet most digital mosaic artists, if we're being honest, treat their medium like a grid to be filled rather than a stage to be choreographed. They democratize attention, giving every pixel equal voice in the visual conversation. The result is often technically proficient but emotionally inert—like listening to an orchestra where every instrument plays at the same volume, in the same rhythm, with identical phrasing.
But what if we thought of tessellation not as a technical constraint, but as a form of visual music?
Tammy Russell, PhD 2024, NOAA Dr. Nancy Foster Scholar, Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Made for University of California San Diego "UCSD: The non other" campaign.
In this variable-sized, multilayered composition, I’m confronting one of mosaic art’s classic dilemmas: how to generate a rich range of tones and colors using base symbols that offer limited chromatic or tonal contrast. My solution involves working with both positive and negative versions of the icons, while also breaking them free from a rigid grid. This added flexibility allows the composition to breathe — creating depth, variation, and rhythm without sacrificing coherence.
The rhythm of seeing
Picture a master pianist approaching a Chopin nocturne. The notes on the page are fixed, immutable, but the music lives in the spaces between them—in the subtle accelerations and hesitations, in the way certain phrases bloom while others whisper, in the architectural use of silence itself. The musician doesn't just play the notes; they compose time.
This is precisely what happens when I vary the tessellation algorithms across a single image. In areas where I want to suggest flowing movement—the extended stride of a runner, the graceful arc of a dancer's arm, the confident gesture of a leader addressing their team—I employ what I think of as "legato algorithms." These prioritize visual continuity, creating smooth passages where the eye can glide effortlessly from element to element, where similar colors and textures create an unbroken visual melody.
But music without contrast is not music—it's wallpaper. So in moments that demand attention—the point where the athlete's foot meets the track, the instant of creative breakthrough in an inventor's expression, the decisive moment when a CEO makes the choice that will define their legacy—I introduce what could only be called "staccato algorithms." These deliberately break continuity, creating rhythmic punctuations that make the eye pause, consider, feel the weight of significance.
The interplay between these approaches creates what psychologists call "perceptual movement"—the sense that a static image is somehow breathing, pulsing with life. Viewers often report that these images seem to move when they're not looking directly at them, as if caught in peripheral vision. This isn't a technical error; it's a feature of how our brains process visual rhythm.
Recent neuroscience research using fMRI imaging has revealed why this works so powerfully. When we look at sophisticated pattern arrangements like variable tessellation, our brains don't just activate the visual cortex—they light up regions associated with musical processing, spatial reasoning, and most intriguingly, the default mode network associated with creativity and introspection. We're not just seeing these images; we're experiencing them as complex, multisensory events.
"The human mind operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain."
Vannevar Bush - As We May Think (1945)
Corporate Art for SoftBank: Custom portrait of Masayoshi Son (2022).
Staccato algorithms deliberately break visual continuity, creating rhythmic punctuations that compel the eye to pause, reflect, and feel the weight of significance.
The archaeology of attention
But why does this matter? Why should we care about the psychology of pattern and rhythm when there are more pressing concerns—climate change, political upheaval, the endless scroll of digital distraction that threatens to fragment what remains of our collective attention span?
Perhaps because in a world increasingly dominated by algorithmic curation and artificial intelligence, the ability to consciously shape human attention has become one of the last truly human arts. When I create a commemorative illustration for a retiring CEO—someone who has spent decades building something meaningful, whose story deserves to be told with nuance and respect—I'm not just arranging pixels. I'm choreographing an experience of recognition and appreciation.
The challenge is that we live in a culture that has largely forgotten how to look. We scan, we swipe, we consume visual information at rates that would have been incomprehensible to previous generations. But genuine seeing—the kind that changes something inside us—requires time, attention, and most importantly, the willingness to be surprised by what we discover in the looking.
This is where cultural differences in visual perception become fascinating rather than merely academic. Eastern and Western traditions of seeing have evolved along remarkably different paths. Eastern aesthetic philosophy, deeply influenced by concepts like the Japanese principle of ma (meaningful emptiness) and the Chinese understanding of visual harmony, tends toward holistic processing. The eye learns to see relationships first, patterns of connection and flow that create meaning through interaction rather than isolation.
Western visual traditions, shaped by Renaissance perspective and Enlightenment rationalism, have evolved more analytical approaches. We're trained to identify focal points, to organize visual hierarchies, to construct meaning through systematic examination of individual elements. Neither approach is superior—they're simply different ways of organizing the act of seeing.
When creating visual work for global audiences, this becomes more than academic theory. A corporate tribute piecehonoring a Japanese executive might emphasize flowing, interconnected passages that speak to aesthetic principles of harmony and relationship. The same conceptual approach applied to a German engineering company might use more structured, systematic rhythms that honor precision and methodical excellence.
The goal isn't to pander to cultural stereotypes, but to acknowledge that visual languages, like spoken languages, carry deep cultural resonances that affect how meaning is received and interpreted.
三十輻，共一轂，當其無，有車之用。
老子, (公元前4世纪)
Thirty spokes join at a single hub,
but the empty space (between them) makes the wheel useful.
but the empty space (between them) makes the wheel useful.
Laozi, 6th century BC
The Chines AI Dragon mosaic (2025) for Fortune magazine.
Composed in a restrained palette of red, gold, and black, this mosaic draws on the Chinese tradition of visual harmony — where meaning emerges not from isolated parts, but from the rhythm of relationships. Staccato structures and tonal interplay guide the eye through a dance of contrast and continuity, evoking balance through deliberate disruption.
What the masters knew
Long before we had neuroscience to explain why certain visual approaches work, artists understood these principles through pure observation and intuition. Leonardo da Vinci's sfumato technique—those subtle gradations of tone and color that make his subjects seem to emerge from mysterious depths—functions exactly like visual legato, creating continuous passages where the eye can flow without interruption.
Caravaggio's dramatic chiaroscuro lighting creates visual staccato—sharp contrasts between light and shadow that punctuate his compositions with rhythmic intensity. These weren't arbitrary stylistic choices; they were sophisticated applications of visual psychology, developed through years of careful observation of how images affect the human nervous system.
Even the Persian carpet weavers of the 16th century, working within highly traditional pattern vocabularies, understood how to use size variation and rhythmic repetition to create perceptual movement and emotional response. Their masterpieces achieve the same kind of visual music that we now create through algorithmic tessellation—proof that certain visual principles are hard-wired into human consciousness, waiting to be discovered and refined by each generation of visual artists.
What strikes me as remarkable is that these historical masters achieved their effects through pure artistic intuition, developing their understanding through decades of careful observation and experimentation. Today, we have the advantage of both artistic tradition and scientific understanding, allowing us to create even more sophisticated approaches to visual communication.
I'd find that if I had some creative obstacle in the music that I was working on, I would often revert to drawing it out or painting it out. Somehow the act of trying to recreate the structure of the music in paint or in drawing would produce a breakthrough.
David Bowie, 1998
Detail from "Mohamed Salah: An Arabesque Portrait" (2021). From my experimental project QATAR2022, a Study in Football and Arabesque.
Three exhibitions in the mind
When variable-size tessellation is applied with both technical skill and artistic sensitivity, it opens up three distinct but related dimensions of experience:
The temporal exhibition: By varying tessellation sizes across an image, we can suggest not just spatial relationships, but the passage of time itself. Small, precisely detailed elements become moments of intense focus—freeze-frames of critical action or decision. Larger, more flowing elements suggest the broader temporal context—the buildup and aftermath that give meaning to crucial moments. A single image begins to contain multiple timeframes, like a visual symphony that moves between intimate solos and full orchestral passages.
The emotional exhibition: Gestalt principles demonstrate that pattern and rhythm directly influence emotional response, often below the threshold of conscious awareness. Chaotic size variations can create tension and excitement; gradual, organic transitions promote contemplation and calm. The visual artist becomes a composer of emotional states, orchestrating feeling through the careful modulation of visual rhythm.
The narrative exhibition: Perhaps most powerfully, sophisticated tessellation can tell stories. The eye's journey through size variations becomes a narrative path, leading viewers through visual episodes that unfold over time. This is why corporations increasingly choose custom visual work over stock photography—not just for uniqueness, but for the ability to control not only what people see, but how they experience the act of seeing itself.
Not all illusions are visual. There are illusions of thought, which we call cognitive illusions.
Daniel Kahneman, 2011
Corporate Art: Irini Rohrbach a Greek-German eye doctor.
In this portrait of my sister Irini, I’ve used an unexpected motif — eyebrows in varying sizes — as both structure and provocation. They challenge the gaze, pushing against the viewer’s perception of her. But in the end, she prevails — poised, unshaken, and luminously present.
The education of the eye
Here's what I've learned after decades of this work: developing visual perception isn't just about becoming a better observer of art—it's about awakening to dimensions of beauty and meaning that surround us constantly, mostly unnoticed.
Most of us move through the world as visual illiterates, consuming images without understanding their grammar, affected by visual rhythms we never learned to recognize consciously. But once you begin to understand how patterns create meaning, how size variations generate emotional response, how tessellation can suggest movement and time, you start to see these principles everywhere.
Natural scenes use size variation to create depth and guide attention. Watch how light filtering through leaves creates natural tessellation patterns, varying from tiny, precise highlights to broader, flowing areas of illumination. Observe how master painters throughout history intuitively understood principles that psychology would later codify into law.
The next time you encounter any sophisticated visual design—whether it's a commemorative illustration, an architectural space, or even the patterns of light and shadow in your own living room—pause for a moment. Ask yourself: What is my eye drawn to first? How does this visual arrangement make me feel? Can I sense the rhythm, the visual breathing, the interplay between continuity and contrast that creates emotional resonance?
Η όραση, κατά τη γνώμη μου, είναι η αιτία του μεγαλύτερου οφέλους για εμάς, αφού κανένας από τους λογαριασμούς που δίνονται τώρα για το Σύμπαν δεν θα είχε δοθεί ποτέ αν οι άνθρωποι δεν είχαν δει τα άστρα ή τον ήλιο ή τον ουρανό. Αλλά όπως είναι, η όραση της ημέρας και της νύχτας και των μηνών και των κυκλικών ετών έχει δημιουργήσει την τέχνη του αριθμού και μας έχει δώσει όχι μόνο την έννοια του Χρόνου αλλά και μέσα έρευνας στη φύση του Σύμπαντος. Από αυτά έχουμε αποκτήσει τη Φιλοσοφία σε όλο το εύρος της, από την οποία κανένα μεγαλύτερο αγαθό δεν ήρθε ή θα έρθει ποτέ, μέσω θείας παροχής, στη φυλή των θνητών.
Πλατών, π.360 π.Χ.
Vision, in my view, is the cause of the greatest benefit to us, inasmuch as none of the accounts now given concerning the Universe would ever have been given if men had not seen the stars or the sun or the heavens. But as it is, the vision of day and night and of months and circling years has created the art of number and has given us not only the notion of Time but also means of research into the nature of the Universe. From these we have procured Philosophy in all its range, than which no greater boon ever has come or will come, by divine bestowal, unto the race of mortals.
Plato c. 360 BC
This 2023 mosaic portrait of Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis is constructed from architectural icons and landmark symbols sourced from across Greece. Though the composition adheres to a strict rectilinear grid of columns and rows, it challenges visual expectations through Gestalt principles — particularly the figura-sfondo (positive-negative) dynamic. The result is a portrait that invites active perception, prompting the viewer to reconstruct meaning through the interplay of form, absence, and cultural memory.
The democracy of wonder
In the end, understanding the psychology behind visual perception isn't about developing rarefied aesthetic sensibilities for their own sake. It's about recognizing that in a world increasingly dominated by algorithmic mediocrity and mass-produced visual content, the ability to create and appreciate sophisticated visual experiences becomes a form of cultural resistance.
Every time we choose to look deeply rather than scan quickly, every time we allow ourselves to be genuinely surprised by the complex beauty of how images speak to consciousness, we're practicing a form of attention that the digital age systematically discourages. We're training ourselves to see more fully, to appreciate the incredible complexity and subtlety of how visual information shapes thought and feeling.
In that sense, learning to perceive the subtle orchestration within images is like learning a secret language—one that speaks directly to parts of consciousness that exist before and beyond words. Once you begin to fluently read this visual language, the world reveals itself as infinitely more alive, more meaningful, and more beautiful than you ever suspected was possible.
The art of tessellation psychology, finally, is not just about creating more effective visual communication. It's about awakening to the profound mystery of consciousness itself—the way minds make meaning from the endless flux of sensory information, the way attention can be guided and shaped, the way beauty emerges from the collaborative dance between perception and reality.
In a world that often feels fragmented and chaotic, there's something deeply encouraging about discovering that beneath the surface confusion, certain principles of harmony and relationship remain constant. The same visual laws that govern how we perceive a digital mosaic artwork also govern how we make sense of faces, landscapes, and the countless visual puzzles that consciousness solves moment by moment, mostly without our awareness.
Perhaps this is the deepest gift of understanding visual perception: not just better design or more effective communication, but renewed appreciation for the extraordinary elegance of the human mind's capacity to find meaning, beauty, and connection in the endless dance of light and pattern that constitutes our shared visual world.
By 'augmenting human intellect' we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems.
Douglas Engelbart - Augmenting Human Intellect (1962)
A mosaic to be used by the Save the Children international organisation for their campaign for the refugee crisis in Greece. (Based on a photo by Sacha Myers and many small photos by Anna Pantelia)
References
Foundational Texts in Visual Perception and Design Theory
Kepes, György. The Language of Vision. Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944.
Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954.
Di Salvatore, Nino. Teoria dello Spazio. Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1952.
Kanizsa, Gaetano. Grammatica del Vedere: Saggi su percezione e Gestalt. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980
Munari, Bruno. Fantasia. Bari: Laterza, 1977.
Munari, Bruno. Design e Comunicazione Visiva. Bari: Laterza, 1968.
Visual communication theory and commercial applications
Garau, Augusto. Le Armonie dei Colori. Milan: Hoepli, 1993.
Hachen, Massimo. Scienza della visione. Spazio e Gestalt, design e comunicazione. Milano: Apogeo, 2007.
Heller, Steven. Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design. New York: Allworth Press, 1994.
Link to: Contemporary design criticism and visual analysis
Biesele, Igildo G. Experimental Design. Editions ABC Zurich, 1971.
Gestalt Psychology and Pattern Recognition
Wagemans, Johan, et al. A Century of Gestalt Psychology in Visual Perception: I. Perceptual Grouping and Figure–Ground Organization. Psychological Bulletin 138, no. 6 (2012): 1172-1217.
Spillmann, Lothar, et al. Gestalt neurons and emergent properties in visual perception: A novel concept for the transformation from local to global processing. Journal of Vision 23, no. 14 (2023): 4.
Carbon, C.-C. Αbout the Role of Perceptual Psychology in Art History. Visual Cognition Research (2024).
Mauri, M. Un'idea di astrazione tra Concretismo e Gestaltpsychologie: Nino Di Salvatore e la Teoria dello Spazio. Journal of Visual Culture (2024).
Neuroscience and Consciousness Studies
Sacks, Oliver. The River of Consciousness. New York: Knopf, 2017.
Sacks, Oliver. The Mind's Eye. New York: Knopf, 2010.
DiCarlo, James J., Davide Zoccolan, and Nicole C. Rust. How does the brain solve visual object recognition? Neuron 73, no. 3 (2012): 415-434.
Pamir, Zahide, et al., Visuospatial processing in early brain-based visual impairment is associated with differential recruitment of dorsal and ventral visual streams. Cerebral Cortex 34, no. 5 (2024): bhae203.
Mattson, Mark P., Superior pattern processing is the essence of the evolved human brain. Frontiers in Neuroscience 8 (2014): 265.
Visual Culture and Aesthetic Theory
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
Sontag, Susan. As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980. Edited by David Rieff. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Peters, John Durham. Witnessing. Media, Culture & Society 23, no. 6 (2001): 707-723.
Art History and Depth Perception
Brooks, Kevin R. Depth Perception and the History of Three-Dimensional Art: Who Produced the First Stereoscopic Images? i-Perception 8, no. 1 (2017): 1-29.
Berlyne, Daniel E. Aesthetics and Psychobiology. East Norwalk, CT: Appleton Century Crofts, 1971.
Contemporary Research in Visual Pattern Processing
Langner, Robert, et al. A network view on brain regions involved in experts' object and pattern recognition. Brain and Cognition 131 (2019): 74-86.
Bar, Moshe, and Maital Neta. Humans prefer curved visual objects. Psychological Science 17, no. 8 (2006): 645-648.
Taylor, Richard, and Branka Spehar. Fractal Fluency: An Intimate Relationship Between the Brain and Processing of Fractal Stimuli. In The Fractal Geometry of the Brain, edited by A. Di Ieva, 485-496. New York: Springer, 2016.
Digital Art and Tessellation Technology
Amunts, Katrin, et al. The coming decade of digital brain research: A vision for neuroscience at the intersection of technology and computing. Imaging Neuroscience 2 (2024): 1-35.
Brielmann, Aenne A., and Denis G. Pelli. Beauty requires thought. Current Biology 28, no. 10 (2018): 1506-1513.
Charis Tsevis is a digital mosaic artist and visual designer whose exploration of tessellation psychology has influenced contemporary understanding of visual perception and communication.