Chop Cup by Anton Groves

Pay attention to Michael Jackson poster!

This project was initially conceived after having noticed the classic tourist perspective tricks that people were taking while on holiday; it is a normal thing to see people trying to ‘hold’ the Eiffel tower in the palm of their hands or ‘squeezing’ the moon between their fingers. This got us thinking about illusion in general, and about how a fundamental attraction to a successful magic trick exists, because a good audience always enjoys being tested. People seem to like to raise the classic question – “how was that done?” Combining these two trains of thought, we wanted to create a magic number of our own. It helped us to think of the trick within the context of an interactive ‘game show’ because this allowed us to present it in an entertaining, aesthetically specific way, and lead the audience to believe in a pre-fabricated, controlled environment. This would make it all the more fun we thought, when not only having diverged and tricked the audience with our magic number, we also reveal that this environment is an illusion, and in fact nothing was how it initially seemed to be.

Anton Groves