The convergent space - back to a wearable perception.
Paul Thomas
Department of
Art, Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia
6845. p.thomas@curtin.edu.au.
Abstract
To day the
conceptual boundary of the space between can be explored metaphorically and
perhaps literally through the human computer interface. Virtual realities are
returning us to a wearable relationship with technology in an attempt to move
away from the effects of Brunelleschis device. Brunelleschis perspectival
space is like a container, whereby we are separated from that space and we
witness rather than participate in the various narratives being played out
within it.
The awareness of
the body through wearable technologies brings the interface of fashion/textiles
back to the forefront of a technological debate. We are attempting to discover
new understandings of how we interface with cyberspace through concepts of
wearing space.
In
this paper I will discuss how new emergent technologies are discovering notions
of embodied space to interface with the computer. This wearable embodied space
will be discussed from a historical context exploring concepts of the space
between..
Key works
Perspective, art, virtual reality, wearable space
The
space-between
The
convergent space back to a wearable perception.
Introduction
This paper is
based around a straw hat that, in the early Renaissance, symbolically
represented a way of perceiving space. This perception of space was crucial to
the concept of convergence in the space-between theme. The space I refer to was
the one used by Filippo Brunelleschi to demonstrate perspective for the first
time. I then want to take this moment of spatial transformation on a journey
that will lead us back to a hat and therefore the body.
Fig (1) Baptistery of san
Giovanni
Fig (2) Illustration of Filippo
Brunelleschi peephole device
I will begin
with a short description of the device which Brunelleschi used to demonstrate
perspective. I will rely on Antonio Manetti,
Brunelleschis biographer for much of the definitive description. Manetti
states concerning the structure of the device that Brunelleschi has a small
panel about half a braccio square upon which was a painting of the Baptistery
Fig (1), painted with such care and delicacy and with such great precision. (Manetti 1970 p 44)
The second part
of the device was a flat mirror, which was to be held in the other hand to
that of the painting. The third ingredient to this device was the small hole
cut into the painted panel itself: he had made a hole in the painted panel at
that point in the temple of san Giovanni which is directly opposite the eye of
anyone stationed in the central portal of Santa Maria del Fiore. (Manetti 1970 p 44) Manetti goes on to state that the hole
in the painted panel was shaped like a womans straw hat. (Manetti 1970 p 44)
There was one
other feature to the device; burnished silver was used on the painted panel to
create a reflective surface. Manetti states of the burnished silver where the
sky had to be represented, that is to say, where the buildings of the painting
were free thus the clouds seen in the silver are carried along by the wind as
it blows. (Manetti 1970 p 44)
As shown in the
illustration the painting was held in one hand whilst the mirror was held in
the other Fig (2). As the seer looked through the hole the shape of a
womans straw hat in the
back of the painted panel they saw the actual baptistery. The mirror was then
lifted to cover the view of the baptistery only to reveal the painting; an
exact copy in true perspective reflected in the mirror.
(Fig 3) The
procession of the banners of San Giovanni, cassone panel, Florence, dated first
half of the fifteenth century
In
the above painting (Fig 3) the scene depicted is one of the space between the
cathedral where (Brunelleschi stood) and the baptistery (the subject of his
gaze). This illustration was cited by Hurbert Damisch in his book The Origin
of Perspective, without making much use of it apart from a reference to
its longitudinal profile view,
the very scene of Brunelleschis experiment. (Damisch 1994 p 112)
The
space portrayed is one that any person in the early 1400s, when looking at the
baptistery through Brunelleschis device, would have seen indirectly. This panel
takes the physical space between observer and the observed and places it on its
side so we see the space of the seers gaze. This space represents exactly the
experiment, it is clearly marked out almost as though it was measured by the
banners in the background and the lances of men on horseback.
Fig 4 Still from David Hockneys
The secret knowledge 2003
Fig 5 Still from David Hockneys
The secret knowledge 2003
This
painting represents the physical space of the gaze, the space-between. The
space as depicted (fig 4) is full of life and movement. which must have made a
stark contrast to the sense of loss when the mirror was lifted up to view the
painted panel (fig 5). I have used stills taken form David Hockneys video
documentary re-enactment of part of Brunelleschis experiments with perspective
The Secret knowledge to demonstrate this idea of loss. The space seen through
the device would have been devoid of any person or thing that moved apart from
the real time display of clouds in the sky reflected in the burnished silver.
The
mirror, when held at arms length to reflect the painting, created the virtual
space that had a transformative power to make us see physical space
perspectively.
To explore the
space described in the (chest)
panel I want to use one of Henri Lefebvres concepts of abstract space. This
abstract space can be found by looking through Brunelleschis peephole device,
in which the space between becomes a container ready to receive fragmentary
contents. (Lefebvre 1994 p. 308) The social space illustrated in the
panel is one, which Brunelleschi chose for his experiment can be seen as
unchartered, a new area into which disjointed things, people and habits might
be introduced. (Lefebvre 1994 p. 308) The undifferentiated space of the
space-between when viewed through the device portrayed the world with a new
psychological content that distanced the seer from the world around them. This
world is described as the culmination of a number of events which maintained
its integrity as an epoch. The device had made this perspectival space which is
the space-between vacant to be owned by the gaze of a new emergent bourgeois
social order of private property and individualism.. The seer, perceiving this
new space for the first time through Brunelleschis device, could place his or
her ownership on it, thereby creating, like a land rush claim, an area in which
to develop a new emergent social order.
The space
between became a metaphoric space, the space where autonomous disciplines would
begin to develop. The distance from the Baptistery door and the Cathedral is
the abstract space, the space demonstrated by the device which today we are
surveying to explore its effects on our spatial interactions. This space was in
reality the equivalent to an arms length, is the space of converging
disciplines. The device developed a perspectival spatial understanding that has
become a part of our consciousness. The consciousness of a space between could be
understood and then colonised by this new social order. In Lefebvres words:
Not that this space expresses them in any sense; it is simply the space
assigned them by the grand plan: these classes find what they seek –
namely, a mirror of their reality, tranquillizing ideas, and the image of a
social world in which they have their own specially labelled, guaranteed
place.
(Lefebvre 1994 p. 309)
As Victor Burgin has commented
"Modern space (inaugurated in the
Renaissance) is Euclidean, horizontal, infinitely extensible, and therefore, in
principle, boundless. In the early modern period it is the space of the
humanist subject in its mercantile entrepreneurial incarnation. In the late
modern period it is the space of industrial capitalism, the space of an
exponentially increased pace of dispersal, displacement and dissemination, of
people and things. In the 'postmodern' period it is the space of financial
capitalism". (Burgin 1991 p. 15)
The peephole
device, with its various parts was put together to demonstrate perspective.
What can be drawn from the cassone
(chest) panel is that this image of the social space-between, is the space
where the device over a long period of time transformed our gaze. It turned us
from people who experienced the world around them phenomenologically, to a
perspectival view, which from that point of view only allows us to see the
world in sections. Jean Gebser points out As the whole cannot be
approached from a perspectival attitude to the world, we merely superimpose the
character of wholeness on to the sector, the result being the familiar
totality. (Gebser 1985 p 18)This totality is where through new
emergent technologies and telecommunications we are witnessing a further
collapse of this arms length space which is not as yet not really understood.
In 1997 Don Foresta wrote "It would probably be
at least another generation or two before we have consensus on the shape of
that space, but if we are to believe what art and science have been saying, it
is probable that that space would exist in time, be an interactive process and
organised horizontally with a geometry quite different from the Euclidean
geometry of renaissance perspective". (Foresta)
To this
wearable space
According to
Michael Heim Besides function, another aspect of the formal definition of
world is that it is a context or weaving-together of things. World makes a
web-like totality. The web gives context to anything that happens within it.
World is a total environment or surround space. (Heim
1998 p 91)
Manetti compared
the peephole in Brunelleschis device to
a womans straw hat. (cappello di paglia da donna) – much like
that depicted in (fig 6). A similar reference to the straw hat is made in Filaretes
Treatise on Architecture, where he describes the rays of light in perspective
making a pyramid from the surface seen, Filarete stated that full of rays and
enclosing within them the thing seen as in a bird cage made of very fine reeds.
Better, [it is] like a hat (come uno cappello) made of rushes, as young girls
do when they bring all the rushes to one point exactly like a pyramid. (Filarete's 1965 p. 301) However in both cases the hat is not
worn. It is looked through.
Interestingly,
Owen Barfield describes space in pre-renaissance terms as being like a worn
garment.
We must not
forget that in this time perspective had not yet been discovered, nor underrate
the significance of this. True, it is no more than a device for pictorially
representing depth and separateness, in space. But how comes it that the device
had never been discovered before – or, if discovered, never adopted?
There were plenty of skilled artists, and they would certainly have hit upon it
soon enough if depth in space had characterized the collective representations
they wish to reproduce, as it characterizes ours. They did not need it. Before
the scientific revolution the world was more like a garment men wore about them
than a stage on which they moved. (Barfield 1957 p. 94)
Fig 6 Roger Van Der Weydens
Portrait of a Lady c.1460
This concept of
space being like a garment a person entered is illustrated through the hat in
this painting (fig 6) where the veil acts as a perspectival translucent
membrane around the hat, almost denoting rays of light as though emitted from
one point.
To move to a more contemporary hat which is used in
confronting a psychological understanding of space I want to look at the work
of Char Davies Osmose and Ephmr. In this work we
have a virtual reality environment where the person being immersed has to put
on a vest which tracks each breath and movement of the upper body. They also
have to wear a hat; a head mounted display (HMD) which presents a constructed
visual and sonic world to the viewer. The effects of breathing and turning the
head sends the data to a computer which allows you to move through the virtual
environment via the HMD (fig 7) in real time.
Fig 7 Head mounted display used
in Char Davies Osmose and Ephmr, 2003
Davies work
links ideas of space being worn like a garment to new emergent technologies and
virtual realities. The environment that is seen through the hat is like looking
at the world through a translucent veil. These technologies through a need for
human interaction are now bringing us back to the body through wearable
interfaces. The move back to the body is an attempt to shift away from
perspective that distanced the seer from the space around them. The hat is the
symbolic device for seeing the container in which we are separated from and
witness various narratives being played out. With the Head Mounted Display
(HMD) we have the hat and the container as one, collapsing the space between
with in a few centimetres of our eye.
Martin Jay
describes that space was robbed of its substantive meaningfulness to become an
ordered, uniform system of abstract liner coordinates. As such it was less the
stage for a narrative to be developed over time than the eternal container of
objective processes. (Jay 1994 p. 52-53)
The eternal
container that Jay speaks of is one where lifes everyday objects have been
made to fit. The container in this context is the metaphor for the hat that
links us back to the body; the container becomes the garment. No matter how
strange the narratives being played out in the container they are never going
to be seen outside of a perspectival restrictions. Hence the dilemma of the
space between was that, once we had made perspective part of our consciousness,
we could no longer see outside of this container.
Conclusion
The
spatial container in the context of the body is what we want to transform. It
is not to see the container and its narrative through the perspectival gaze
but more about the phenomenological understanding of that space .The container
in this context is like the garment it is not something which we look at but
rather a space we enter and wrap around us. Cyberspace will be defined via a
psychological rupture though the work of artists like Char Davies who via a
wearable interface reconfigures the way we understand the space-between.
Fig 8 Pablo Picasso: Woman
with Straw Hat on flowered Background 1938
As we have seen,
Manettis and Filarettes use by choice of the straw hat metaphor to act as the
symbol to recall the pre-renaissance way of experiencing or wearing space. The
straw hat (fig 8) is directly or phenomenologically connected to the body and
its spatialisation. The straw hat also recalls those modern devices of
virtuality: the glove, the body suit, the sensory detectors and the HMD. These
garments all bring us back to the senses and then to the body as a way of
experiencing the space-between. The garment is the key when looking for a
starting point to reconfiguring our concept of space. Perhaps the spatial
distancing caused by the Brunelleschis device needs, like the straw hat, to be
worn again, to be turned vertical again.
Postscript
Fig 9 Paul Thomas Waiting for
Nothing 1979
I wanted to now
make my own connection to the idea of wearing space with this illustration from
my early documentary research exploring the space between. The subject and
object relationship to the gaze is demonstrated by the string (fig 9). This
parallels conceptually the panel painting referred to earlier where Brunelleschis
gaze is turned side on. Here as a recent migrant to Australia I am turning my
gaze on it side to see the space between as the development of a different
cultural and spatial awareness.
This is expanded
upon in my current work which explores not the physical space of a colonialist
but rather concepts of understanding virtual space. These concepts have been
illustrated by myself through the use of a laparoscopy camera to explore the
spaces between the body and the clothes. These unconscious residual spaces are
the first point of contact to the concept of recognising the space between as a
significant signifier. The space between the skin and an outer garment is one
where the senses need to be turned back on the body to feel the point of
contact of the clothes. These spaces, which are revealed, are a reconfiguration
of our sense of being within the world. Transparency is
used in my work to allow the residual spaces to be layered and merge together
to create hybrid spaces.
In the writings from The Zohar,
which is a compendium of mysticism, myth and esoteric teaching; one of the teachings refers in part to
this concept of the garment. Every good deed you do becomes one strand, these
strands when woven together become a garment which you enter when you die. To
move into another level of consciousness we need to enter into a spatial
garment.
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