Digitally manipulated photography is generally a snooze. From skyscrapers turned into flowers to rivers flowing through living rooms, ubiquity has made special effects anything but special. Unlike the typical Photoshop surrealist, though, Jon Meyer is not arbitrarily flouting the laws of physics, but imposing his own set of parallel laws (and as the great theoretician Jerry Seinfeld once observed, "a game is fun because it has rules."). His images of interior spaces, created with a dreamlike and rigorously applied logic, look weird but plausible.

In fact, when I first saw Meyer’s pictures at "Germinate," a group exhibit last April organized by Meyer and the other artists who live and work in Georgetown's Bemis Building, it wasn’t clear if I was looking at real physical spaces or not. They appeared to be photographs of rooms that were themselves made of photographs. Or maybe not--some of the rooms’ planes didn't quite meet each other where expected, at times leaving an indeterminate black space between floor and wall. Meyer lit his studio dimly, making it even more difficult to puzzle out what was going on.

It turns out, as Meyer explains in a subsequent daylight visit to his Bemis Building studio, that the images, which he calls "Experiments with Light" (on view through June at ToST, a martini bar in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood), are digitally stitched together from ordinary photographs, using a program that he wrote himself. He begins by taking photographs of the walls, floors, and ceilings of a real room, usually from a flat, straight-on perspective. He then assembles the photos into a virtual recreation of the room, re-mapping each photo into the shape it would have if the room were seen as a kind of shoe box with one side missing. A rectangular photograph of a wall becomes, in the final image, a trapezoid, all of its outcropping features—shelves, clocks, dogs—flattened in the direction of a new, impossible horizon.

Meyer’s software can delineate a space so clearly that the eye immediately accepts it as a room, but is then disoriented by the flattened objects and other visual cues that can’t be accommodated by the "room" as it was conceived a moment before. And Meyer occasionally places a wall where a floor should be, or layers ghostly images on top of each other, so I find that his rooms never settle into a completely readable whole, even if I do manage to become acclimated to his non-Euclidean geometry. The images, poised between clarity and confusion, compel extended staring in search of a resolution that can never be found.

But the bafflement is a pleasing one. Meyer’s rooms, filled with ambient natural light and warm textures, are homey, welcoming places to feel lost in. Meyer has a particular affinity for domestic spaces, having been raised in England by American parents, and not feeling completely at ease in either place. He goes so far as to describe himself as "homeless." It’s appropriate, then, that his rooms should feel at once familiar and strange.

His images' multiple perspectives contain more information about a room than would be possible to observe at one time in the real world. "They show what is known rather than what is seen," Meyer says, placing his work in the tradition of Cubism. The work also engages one of the classic issues of modern art, the illusion of 3D space versus the reality of the flatness of the picture plane: That some parts of Meyer's images should be read as "flat" is a playful reminder that of course the entire picture is flat. But a more direct inspiration for "Experiments with Light" comes not from Picasso but from Roman Baroque artists like Andrea Pozzo, who painted enormous cathedral murals that combined many perspectives into a single, harmonious God’s-eye view. "I love pictures you can get lost in," he says, "where lots of stuff is going on."

The work has a superficial resemblance to the photo collages of David Hockney. "The difference," says Meyer, "is that [Hockney] takes a bunch of pictures standing primarily in one place, and I take images from wildly different viewpoints, then distort them to make them look like they’ve been taken from one viewpoint. And that’s what actually creates these weird things—you see, like this lamp squashed against the wall," he says, indicating a detail in one of the pictures.

Meyer originally created his virtual rooms in Photoshop, but each time he manipulated the original photos in any way, the quality would deteriorate. So he wrote his own program, in Java (with underlying code in another computer language called C), which he talks about in the odd way that programmers often do, as if the software were a person. "The program remembers what the original image looks like and applies it to whatever configuration I want. At the very end of the day I say ‘make me a final image,’ and it can do it one pass, rather than in lots and lots of passes like Photoshop."

Since receiving a degree in programming from the University of Sussex in 1990, Meyer has made his living working on things like "object-oriented databases" and "multimedia widgets" for clients that have included J.P. Morgan and NASA. He came to Seattle last September to take a job at Microsoft writing tech specs for the user interface of the next version of Windows.

Despite his top-level geek credentials, art for Meyer is not some recent hobby picked up on a whim. During the course of a six-year stint as a researcher at the New York University Research Laboratory, where he happened to be placed next door to NYU’s photography department, he made a systematic study of photography, and eventually achieved a professional level of technical skill.

From Meyer's "Mysore Men" series

He shows me some gorgeous silver gelatin prints of Indian villagers that could almost be mistaken for the work of Irving Penn, and a funny series of large-scale glossy color pictures of snack food, showing their sugary textures in repulsive detail. His excursions into digital manipulation would not have been possible, he says, without a foundation in the traditional craft of photography.

ToST turns out to be a good venue for "Experiments in Light." The bar’s lighting closely replicates the mysterious dimness of Meyer’s studio during the "Germinate" event, and the stiff drinks make good company with the pleasurable disorientation brought on by the pictures.

Check out more images at Jon Meyer's Web site

ToST is located in the heart of Seattle's Fremont neighborhood, at 513 N 36th St.

The first paragraph of this story originally appeared in the Seattle Weekly.