Seeing something that defies the rules of physics we've come to know and expect can be really unsettling. You think you know what you're supposed to be seeing, but it's somehow all wrong, and that's when things get weird.
So what's happening? Well, you're either dreaming, or you're looking at the digitally manipulated photos of Aydin Büyüktaş.
Aydin took the streets of his home city, Istanbul, and turned them into sweeping, mind-bending vistas that look like what might happen if the laws of physics just… stopped working.
Thanks to the way he bends his photos, we can see streets, rivers, buildings, and monuments from multiple vantage points, and they become suddenly fluid and bendable, at once understandable and completely alien.
The sudden realization that what you're looking at is not what you thought it was can be unsettling, like when these stone-seeming sculptures begin to stretch and twist, but it can also help us see the world differently, and reminds us not to take anything for granted.
And Aydin's knack for upsetting the status quo is a perfect way to see the world in a new way.
[H/T: BoredPanda]
Aydin's photos, which show strange, looping landscapes where words like "up" and "down" have no meaning, are part of a series called Flatland, although the land here is anything but flat.
Aydin started out in tourism management, but realized it wasn't what he really wanted out of life. He dropped out of his university program and made a career for himself in graphic design and advertising.
He went back to school in 2012 to formally study photography, and his unique, singular creations have gotten him international interest.
He thought of Flatland as a way to challenge how people saw the world around them, and to remind them that a simple change in perception can make a huge difference.
"We live in places that most of the time don't draw out attention," he says. And so he set out to capture a place familiar and meaningful to him — Istanbul — and learn how to see it in a surprising new way.
The name Flatland comes from a book by Edwin A. Abbott, about a completely two-dimensional world where the third dimension was considered dangerous magic.
Aydin describes his photos as at once ironic and romantic. The both poke fun at our inability to understand what's not familiar, but they also celebrate the new and different ways we can see something we know, and fall in love with it all over again.
Trying to imagine a world shaped like this is pretty hard. After all, we're used to something very different!
And sometimes, it's hard to tell exactly what you're looking at, but that's okay, too! You can appreciate the shapes, colors, and textures of the city, even if you're a little disoriented.
Another series, called Parallel Worlds, sees landscapes mirroring one another as though the world is folded up on itself.
