Google Warming
Environmental Panoptical Regimes and the Machinima of the Visible
Visual Regimes 1. The Development of Perspective. 2. The Panopticon.
The Development of Perspective
Theorists from Erwin Panofsky and William Ivins to Lev Manovich have argued that the emergence of Renaissance perspective structured a new relationship between the image and the object: contributing to the initiation of industrialisation and science. Manovich argues that the emergence of perspective marked the rise of visual nominalism: ‘The use of vision to capture the identity of individual objects and spaces by recording distances and shapes’. Manovich argues that this had a fundamental impact upon western renaissance culture, kick starting (he argues) the industrial revolution and modern empirical science. While Manovich describes the impacts of Renaissance perspective in terms of its effect upon scientific and industrial structures, Jean Louis Comolli has argued that its advent was both a cause and a consequence of a shift in the theistic social regime of the renaissance. In replicating the optics of the human eye, Comolli asserted that Renaissance perspective did two things: it placed the viewer at the centre of the visual universe and it demonstrated to them that this universe was subject to laws of physics which could be investigated and understood.
Humanism: The tendency to emphasise man and his status, importance, powers, achievements, interests, or authority. Humanism has many different connotations, which depend largely on what it is being contrasted with. As well as denoting particular claims about man it can also denote the tendency to study man at all…Humanism is also associated with the Renaissance, when it denoted a move away from God to man as the centre of interest...God still remained as creator and supreme authority – the renaissance humanists were far from being atheists – but his activity was seen as less immediate, more as general control than as day‐to‐day interference, and this enabled a scientific outlook to arise which saw the universe as governed by general laws.
Pre‐Humanist Art
Byzantine Two‐Sided Icon with the Virgin, Feast Scenes and the Crucifixion and Prophets, Constantinople, 1350s
Giotto, The Lamentation, Fresco, Arena Chapel, Padua, 1305
Humanist Art
Holy Trinity , Tommaso Masaccio, 1425‐27
Marriage of the Virgin, Raphael, 1504
The First Systematic Use of Linear Perspective
Development of Linear Perspective
The human eye is at the centre of the system of representation, with that centrality at once excluding any other representative system, assuring the eye’s domination over any other organ of the senses and putting the eye in a strictly divine place. Jean‐Louis Comolli, Machines of the Visible
Diagrams in Favour of a Heliocentric Universe From the Workbooks of Galileo Galilei 1600 – 1640s
The development of perspective Erwin Panofsky pointed out that perspective could only be fabricated by hand until the invention of the photograph. With the invention of the mechanically reproduced photograph perspective became far easier to recreate. But Panovsky (and later William Ivins) draw a distinction between hand drawn perspective and mechanically reproduced perspective. For Ivins, the rationalisation of perspectival sight proceeded in two directions. 1. Perspective became the foundation for the development descriptive and perspective geometry (used by engineers and architects). 2. Photographic technologies automated the creation of perspectival images. Hand drawn perspective is and non indexical, while mechanically reproduced perspective is a recorded indexical perspective.
With the emergence of the computer generated perspective it becomes possible for the first time to blend aspects of mechanical reproduction and hand drawn fabrication of perspective simultaneously.
The Mechanical Creation of Perspective, by Albrecht Durer 1600 – 1640s
Current theory has stated that the development of perspective was crucial to our visual culture and our society. But these theories were written before the development of computer generated design. If we look at current practices of CG design we see a visual form that forces us to rethink the relationship between ourselves and perspectival space. The spaces of our visual culture are now designed in the same manner as the industrial products of contemporary society. This designed space marks a new process of visual communication with the viewer that tells them we live in an ever more engineered world. The impact of CG fabricated perspective is analogous to the impact of perspective during the renaissance but with many, so far unexplored, implications.
So what does any of this have to do with the Panopticon?
Perspectival Globe of the Earth, by Albrecht Durer and Johannes Stabius 1515 (Shortly before Magellan's expedition)
Pan = all Optic = see/observe
The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptomatic movement that strives to meet in infinity. Michel Foucault
In the longer term we have to understand that however benign a technological solution may seem it [geoenginearing] has the potential to set humanity on a path to the ultimate form of slavery. The more we meddle with the earth’s composition and try to fix its climate, the more we take on the responsibility for keeping the Earth a fit place for life, until eventually our whole lives may be spent in drudgery doing the tasks that previously Gaia had freely done for over three billion years. This would be the worst of fates for us and reduce us to a truely miserable state, where we were forever wondering whether anyone, any nation or any international body could be trusted to regulate the climate and the atmospheric composition. James Lovelock