What do furniture do when we are not looking at it?

Warning: This film displays rapid flashing images which may disturb light-sensitive viewers.

What can prevent me from supposing that this table disappears or changes shape when no one notices it, and how, when someone looks at it again, it returns to its original form? But one might say 'who is going to suppose such a thing?'" said Ludwig Wittgenstein on the subject of Certainty, in 1969.

Inspired by these words which have seen the light of day after the death of the Austrian philosopher about the limits of human perception around the interpretation of the outside world, the British director Paul Bush made this experimental video which he called The Poetry of furniture (1999).

Bush's stop-motion animation brings to life a universe where fruit, furniture and tableware change color and shape when we humans aren't looking. The result is a simultaneously vivid and entertaining visual poem – a fun, crazy meditation on our uncertain reality and the limits of knowledge.