Artist Devorah Sperber plays with pixels. She renders an image at a low resolution and then replaces each element with a mass-produced object such as a spool of thread or a pipe cleaner. The results demonstrate how adeptly our brains recognize familiar images, even when given very little information.

She says, “As a visual artist, I cannot think of a topic more stimulating and yet so basic than the act of seeing — how the human brain makes sense of the visual world.”

There’s a gallery at her website.