[-empyre-] eugenie's first post

[eugenie <eugenies@onetel.net.uk>]

hi all,

big thank you to christina, melinda, michael and jim for inviting me to
participate in this month¹s discussion.

I¹ve just read troy¹s first post and it looks ­ interestingly ­ as though
we¹re approaching the issue of anamorphism from two distinct angles ­ the
discursive (troy) and the material (myself). my interest in anamorphosis is
historically based ­ I arrived in the digital realm by the somewhat
roundabout route of c18th landscape aesthetics ­ so I¹m going to begin by
giving a bit of historical background.

anamorphosis, for me, is a way of approaching the issue of ?embodied
vision¹. the argument is simple and probably highly self evident to most of
you posting to this list ­ vision and thought issue from an active body
rather than a disembodied eye ­ but it¹s also one that western philosophy
has traditionally had a great deal of trouble accepting.

Hans Holbein¹s Ambassadors (1533) is a well-known example of an anamorphic
picture and an excellent demonstration of the way that so called ?rational
perception¹ has always involved more than just the perspectival eye/I.  The
vanishing point and ?correct¹ viewing position in Holbein¹s picture are
clearly indicated by the precise rendering of the various perspectival
objects in the image. Looking from this position, the anamorphic skull in
the foreground appears as nothing more than a meaningless shape. In order to
see it properly, the viewer has to approach the painting and look obliquely,
from a position on the right, about halfway up the frame.

Viewing Holbein¹s picture was a sort of play in two acts. Holbein was quite
specific about the manner in which the picture should be hung: in a room
with two doors, each one corresponding to one of the picture¹s two viewing
positions. In the first act, the viewer enters the room and sees the picture
from the ?correct¹ point of view. Captivated by the realism of the painted
scene, the viewer is also perplexed by the indecipherable object at the
bottom of the picture. Leaving by the second door, the disconcerted viewer
casts a brief backward glance at the painting, and it is at this point that
the strange object resolves itself into an image.

Traditional theories of representation have paid a lot of attention to the
way the viewer is constructed as/at the ?correct¹ point of view ­ i.e. as a
distanced, disembodied, monocular eye. they have had much less to say about
the transient state(s) between points of view ­ what I¹m calling the
?anamorphic moment¹. Holbein¹s picture calls attention to those moments in
the event of seeing where the viewer exceeds the Cartesianesque
configuration of the disembodied eye. It foregrounds the subject in its
environmental sense: a mobile, embodied agent that acts in the real world of
objects. As a concept of transformation, then, anamorphosis allows us to
understand subjectivity as a ?dynamic¹ condition, a matter of a constantly
changing body schema rather than a fixed body image. Holbein¹s little
theatre of representation, in other words, has a lot to tell us about the
way we interface with virtual environments in the present day? and this is
where it links up to my current interest in videogames, and affect, and the
way that we traditionally understand the history of virtuality.

wow, I¹ve run on and on. I¹ll leave it there for now.

bests
eugenie