Hito Steyerl
"Los condenados de la pantalla" (2012)
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/
Chapter 1.: "En caída libre. un experimento mental sobre la perspectiva vertical"
-- brief history of the horizon (in relation to image-composition)
- Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (965-1040) (aka Alhazen): Kitab al-Manair: "the book of optics"
- tradition of serveral fugue points:"l'ultima cena", Buoninsegna
- modern "1-fugue point": "Miracolo de l'ostia profanata" [love this name!!!] --> virtual horizon defined by the eye / single eye, still viewer
- linear perspective is based in serveral decisive negations: 1) negates the curve of earth, and hence ABSTRACTING the HORIZON, 2) implies a non-mobile spectator, one-eyed (Erwin Panofsky explained), so called "neutral, objective", etc., and 3) is based on abstraction: athematical space, plane, infinite and continuous ---> this creates "reality"
- from latin, "perspectiva" means "seeing through": prececibility of the future --> introduces the notion of a LINEAR TIME.
- W. Benjamin: "time can becomo homogenous and emptied as space"
--> this paradigm centralized the observer // observer and fugue point configure mutually ***
-> point of view gives the spectator 1) a body and 2) a position***
-> linear perspective functioned/functions as a PROPAGANDA MATRIX, racial and religious.
-> in JMW Turner's "The Slave Ship", 1840 -> experiment with moving perspectives // does not reject totally the existence of the horizon, but presents it as unaccessible to the observer's perception
-> acceleration on XX century: mountage, fragmentation, different temporal perspectives -> time and space re-imagined by quantum mechanics
-> 3D = construction of imaginary vertical worlds
FURTHER READING-> Thomas Elsaesser: "The Dimension of Depth..." / 3D as a standard perception medium for delegating and/or externalising what we used to call intro-spection, self-conscience and personal responsibility
FURTHER READING -> Eyal Weizman: "The politics of verticality"
CONCEPT: 3D VERTICAL SOVEREIGNITY --> different strata of world and comminities are divided in a Y-axis.
FURTHER READING: Achile Mbembe: "Occupation of the sky" / on holography...
-- there is not a portrayed stable basis but the preassumption of a "virtual floor" existing, which produces retroactively a perspective for a FLOATING SPECTATOR // it could be understood as a radicalization of the visual-linear perspective paradigm --> the difference object-subject exacerbates top-bottom.
--> politics of verticality --> "a delegated perspective that projects illusions of stability, security and extreme domain over a background of EXPANDED 3D SOVEREIGNITY"
-> "if we accept the multiplication and de-linearisation of horizons and perspectives, new tools of vision may also serve to express or even alter contemporary conditions of perturbation and disorientation" <-potential
-> if tyranny of photographic lenses has to leave space to hyperreal representations and not of space as we know it, but as space as we can realize/render/actualize ir?
-> observer is distorted, disoriented, recluted for producing/making sense.
-> these [3d] spaces convoke a multiple spectator that must fall and re-create by the always renewed articulations of multitude.
-> may this [falling in the abbyss] bring a new representational freedom?
--> Adorno_ "INDEX VERI": the shock of the open: a deterritorializing freedo, [link to Calafou's Decaentism]
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We are falling? If there is no ground, you might not know you are falling
But where is the non-visual 3D -- movement, volume, ... haptic ...
visual machinery: how to recognise volume through the optical
perspective means: seeing through
"This space defined by linear perspective is calculable, navigable, and predictable. It allows the calculation of future risk, which can be anticipated, and therefore, managed. As a consequence, linear perspective not only transforms space, but also introduces the notion of a linear time, which allows mathematical prediction and, with it, linear progress. This is the second, temporal meaning of perspective: a view onto a calculable future." -> MOVEMENT, MOTION
The poor image ... politics of cultural artefacts