Edward A. Shanken
Duke University
This paper was presented at the annual conference of the International Society for Electronic Art (ISEA)in Rotterdam, September, 1996. It was published in ISEA96 Proceedings, Seventh International Symposium on Electronic Art. Ed., Michael B. Roetto. (Rotterdam: ISEA96 Foundation, 1997): 57-63.
This paper proceeds from
three points: 1) seeing and being are intrinsically
interconnected; 2) the alteration of perceptual forms by artists
alters the forms of perception of viewers; and 3) points one and two
above have political ramifications. Using the history of
one-point perspective as a foil, I shall explore these three points by
examining sources from a variety of disciplines, including art history,
philosophy, and media criticism, supplemented by my own analyses of
works of art from various epochs. This foundation forms the
springboard for theorizing and problematizing how the use of emerging
technologies by contemporary artists are reconfiguring perception and
contributing to epistemological and ontological transformations that
are not only culturally significant, but politically charged.2
It is clear that the
development of one-point perspective by Bruneleschi and Massaccio in
the early 15th century marks the emergence of a system for envisioning
space that remains paradigmatic to this day. What may be less
evident is that perspective is a form of perceptual technology, a tool
for measuring and representing the visual world. The technology
of perspective has itself been adopted and further reified by another
visual technology: photography, and by the status of that medium
as a representational norm. The result is that perspective has
become such a powerful and pervasive paradigm that it is difficult to
imagine perceiving the world without it. At the same time, its
effects on human consciousness are so subtle and insidious that one is
rarely aware of it. Perspective is like part of an invisible
operating system running in the background of the brain's perceptual
program. My reason for referring to perspective as a technology
is because I want to emphasize its status as a tool, while at the same
time denaturalize it by pointing out its embeddedness in a genealogy of
human ideas.
As a common protocol by which
the visual world is conceived, perceived, and represented, the idea of
perspective as a technology serves as a port of entry into a more
general discussion of how changing visual forms alter seeing and
being. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan noted the dual aspects of
perspective as a visual system of spatial representation and as a
social system of monadic points of view. He suggested that the
mathematical relationships that represent perspectival space paralleled
changing social relationships in which the indisputable hierarchy of
divine right and indentured servitude was being replaced by a
self-serving sense of personal identity and entrepreneurship.
Together, these two aspects of perspective comprised a conceptual
paradigm of sweeping significance.
Artists throughout history
have consistently worked to envision alternative modes of visual
representation often at odds with the dominant conventions of the
time. By manipulating and altering form, artists transform human
consciousness.
participating in their creation, I shall consider the work of Miroslaw
Rogala and Roy Ascott.
These artists have used state-of-the-art
perspectival rendering, computer-controlled, interactive environments,
and advanced computer telecommunications to make important
contributions to theorizing and developing new artist-object-viewer
roles and relations. Their work may be seen as artistic
inventions/interventions,
consciousness, viewer-participators in their artworks
are challenged to change not only the way they perceive the world, but
to change the way they exist in the world, and, moreover, to change the
world itself.
Quadri Riportati Versus Quadratura:
How the Alteration of Form Alters the Form of
Perception
As an early example of a
politically charged visual reconfiguration of the viewer's relationship
to the world, and one which, incidentally, has important parallels in
the emerging field of virtual reality, I would like to compare the
different ways of depicting space, but represent substantially
different ways of configuring the viewer's relationship to the
world. The viewer of quadri riportati is on the outside looking
in, while the viewer of quadratura is an integral element participating
directly in the action. Phenomenologically, the experience of
space these visual techniques invoke in the viewer produces a different
sense of self, relation to others, the polis, and God.
the relationship between
consciousness and power, for those who possess perceptual technologies
have access to ways of configuring and manipulating their worlds that
those
- Miroslaw Rogala, in
collaboration with Joe MacGregory, 1994
Miroslaw Rogala's interactive
multi-media installation Lovers Leap
premiered at the ZKM's (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie)
Multimediale 4, in Karlsruhe, Germany in May, 1995. There is also
a CD-ROM version.4 When I first began conceiving this paper,
Lovers Leap immediately leapt to mind because it is not only a
technological conquest that manipulates perspective with breathtaking
virtuosity, but is also a strikingly beautiful and provocative work of
art that transforms the role of the viewer and the status of the image.5
in ordering our world we
order ourselves
in ordering ourselves we
order a world
alone and together
we mirror ourselves into
the world to find ourselves there
our personal space is the
site of our selfhood
our bodies the intimacy of
desire, need and fear
the world shaped by and
shaping
what we were
who we are
what we will be
The installation space is
flanked by 4 x 6 meter video screens on either end. A wireless
headset enables the system to track the position and motion of its
wearer, and to trigger video sequences stored on a laser disc. In
general, as you move towards either of the screens, black and white
images (of people walking across a bridge in downtown Chicago,
surrounded by skyscrapers) appear to zoom in with you; as you walk
away, the image zooms out. These images are complemented by audio
sequences of people discussing, among other things, someone dying of
cancer. Walking from one edge of the screen towards the other,
the image seems to scroll around with you as though this were not a
single image, but a distorted video. Standing in the center of
the piece, you'll see what Charlie White has referred to as an "eerie
fish-eye image that looks like a ball with buildings growing out of
it."6 Remain stationary and the image begins to modulate.
You feel like you're being sucked out of a wormhole and compressed
through an 8 mm fisheye lens as the skyscrapers fade off, leaving you
in hyperspace. Then you come plummeting down to earth, twisting
and reeling below.
The ethos of interactive art
is that the behavior of the viewer/participant contributes to, or
alters, the state of the work. A unique aspect of the
interactivity of Lovers Leap is that the viewer's behavior alters the
virtual perspective from which the image is generated, defying the
monadism of single-point perspective and affording multiple points of
view that transform the image and the viewer's relationship to
it. As you experiment with Lovers Leap, you become aware of the
flatness and limited purview of your own perspective - both optically,
and well as metaphorically. Because, as I have maintained, seeing
is being, this expanded visual awareness has important ramifications
for an expanded sense of self and one's place in the world. As
Timothy Druckrey has written,
The more I struggled with figuring out how the virtual environment
worked, the more my own perceptual awareness of multiple perspectival
possibilities grew, and the more I was able to accept and enjoy not
being able to claim an authoritative perspective, not being completely
in control. But that does not mean I was without power. I
became increasingly interested in seeing from other points of view, and
in allowing myself to make associative leaps - visual and narrative -
that I had not considered before. Such leaps allow for the
transcendence of limited perceptual schemes. In relinquishing a
certain kind of control, I gained another existential technique,
another way of being in the world. To refer back to an earlier
analogy, it permitted insights into how, for example, one might
As I have maintained throughout,
to transform visual form is to alter the form of vision, and in this
respect, to empower it.
Instant person to person contact [that] would support specialised creative work... An artist could be brought right into the working studio of other artists ... however far apart in the world...they may separately be located. By means of holography or a visual telex, instant transmission of facsimiles of their artwork could be effected... [D]istinguished minds in all fields of art and science could be contacted and linked.9
it is a medium which is essentially participatory; it
promotes associative thought and the development of richer and more
deeply layered language: it is integrative of cultures,
disciplines and the great diversity of ways of being and seeing.
In short, I am very optimistic about the potential for art of
networking media...11
a new
vocabulary for a new sense of community where power and consciousness
are shared through technology.12
Ascott has theorized that the
activity of distributed authorship enables the network to attain a form
of collaborative consciousness, a fusion of individual consciousnesses
into an integrated whole which exceeds the capacity of any particular
node. Such work cannot be experienced except by participating in
it, a process which demands that one conjoin one's consciousness with
those of others.
Cyberspace reproduces the
physical world, simultaneously intensifying and dematerializing
it. Along with exacerbating problems in new and unprecedented
ways, so telematic interaction also offers potential benefits that are
available nowhere else. On the constructive side of this
double-edge sword, Ascott's artistic experiments, beginning in 1960's
with interactive art systems, and since the 1980s, on the emergent
behavior of telematic art networks, can be seen as high-end, aesthetic
R&D. His early collaborative networking experiments heralded
a new paradigm for human interaction which is still in its infancy, and
the ramifications of which are as yet uncertain.
The disembodied sensation of
traveling and communicating telematically is open to the gamut of human
emotions.
For example, in Paul
Sermon's Telematic Vision (1994), I felt myself
personally rejected by a person at a remote location who sat next to me
virtually on the sofa. A few minutes later, another person wanted
to be a bit more intimate than what I had in mind, and I felt violated
to some degree by a phantom image. This is a difficult experience
to explain to the uninitiated. When I described this at an Art
History conference a couple years ago, a professor told me that I was
crazy.
Even amongst the cognoscente
in the field of art and technology, the jury is still out on Telematic
Art.
Symbolic forms of
verbal and visual languages are technologies so deeply embedded in
consciousness that it is difficult to think of thinking or envision
seeing without them.
Notes
5 For more information on Lovers Leap and Rogala's work in general, visit the artist's web site at http://www.mcs.net/~rogala/home.html