I stumbled upon this interesting person who happens to live in Riverside (I did a google map search on riverside, and a link to this guy's work came up). He is an artist and a professional chemist. that is cool enough. He does what he calls magic angle art whereby you can see different shapes in the shadows cast by objects as they turn.
I immediately thought of plato's cave when I saw the youtube demo of the art. Sure enough, on his website, he specifically speaks of plato's cave.