3rd eye.
this is surely important to the attraction to 3D?
Many artists are thinking about this at this juncture in history. I think
the point that Simon was trying to make (and correct me if i'm wrong), is
that ultimately even the so-called 3D space that is the subject of this
month's discussion is the product of the last few hundred years of
single-point perspective (a feedback loop with arrogant expansionary
European culture and worldview) and therefore the rendering device
(including the screen and the vrml, or whatever, browser/rendering
mechanism and indeed even the idea of computer graphics) is trapped within
a cartesian space view.
You are right, though, in intuiting that 3D spaces *seem* to offer a
greater chance to escape this paradigm. In actuality, they don't - it is up
to artists to conceptualise a non-cartesian single-point perspective
(multi-viewpointed?) paradigm, after which the software for realising it
can quickly be built. Having said that, though, it seems to be scientists
(rather than artists) who are really grooving on ideas of parallel
universes and so on that may provide paths to this kind of state - in the
May issue of Scientific American there is a long article about parallel
universes that includes sections on the 9 dimensions, and how space+time
didn't separate for at least 50,000 years after the big bang. Of course
this is a very western-flavoured view to take, as evidently other cultures
have been comfortable with multiple perspectives for a long time.
Unfortunately I know little of this, though I suspect that Kali Tal's ideas
would come into play here, and is something I am very very interested in
finding out more about.
Simon has evidently researched alternative world view mechanisms: "the
cultural hegemony of Western notions of space and how this echoes and
sustains our paradigms of self relative to collective", I would be very
keen to hear more about what you have found and your thinking on this
subject, Simon...