Premise:

To research and contextualise strategies, which renegotiate perspectival constraints and develop new forms of representing the visual world. The ability to renegotiate perspectival constraints is vital research at this point in time.

 

 

"In a sense, perspective transforms psychophysiological space into mathematical space. It negates the differences between front and back, between right and left, between bodies and intervening space ("empty" space), so that the sum of all the parts of space and all its contents are absorbed into a single "quantum continuum". It forgets that we see not with a single fixed eye but with two constantly moving eyes, resulting in spheroidal field of vision. It takes no account of the enormous difference between the psychologically conditioned "visual image" through which the visible world is brought to our consciousness, and the mechanically conditioned "retinal image" which paints itself upon our physical eye".

(Erwin Panofsky)

"A duplication of sensible reality, into reality and virtuality, is in the making. A stereo-reality of sorts threatens. A total loss of the bearings of the individual looms large. To exist, is to exist in situ, here and now, hic et nunc. This is precisely what is being threatened by cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information flows".

(Paul Virlio)

 

 

I will investigate the relationship between spatial paradigms and their effects on culture and power, from the invention of renaissance perspective to the radical critiques of its limits in the twentieth century and the emergent technologies of today.

 

The investigation will be in three parts:

1. An historical and theoretical analysis of renaissance perspective as a spatial paradigm of identity and power in the modern era, and its deconstruction in the twentieth century.

2. An historical and theoretical analysis of the effects of new technologies on the imagination of space and subjectivities (identity and place)

"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".

(Don Foresta)

While new technology paradigms of space are still in the making, its effects can already be seen in emerging arts' practices and theories. I will document these developments and investigate their possible effects on new subjectivities

 

"What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion and this outcome ought to interest us. why? because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects. the specific negative aspect of these information superhighways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding alterity (the other), this disturbance in the relationship with the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this non-situation, is going to usher a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy". (Virillo)

 

3. The offering of speculative possibilities for future spatial paradigms based on an investigation of new strategies for creating a social re-evaluation of space. This investigation will evaluate the work of new digital based arts practices against recent spatial theorisations derived from Virillo and Deleuze and Guatarri, as well as earlier more phenomenological notions of Henri Levebvre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel de Certeau.