Re: [-empyre-] rejection of visual semblance

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

hi all...

some thoughts on christina's recent post...
> 
> here is an interesting take on anamorphism from
> photonics.com............
> Definition:
> 
> A term used to denote a difference in magnification
> along mutually perpendicular meridians. Anamorphic
> systems are basically image-distorting systems, such
> as those used in motion pictures, that compress a
> scene laterally in the camera and expand it again on
> projection. 
> 
> so it appears that the anamorphic organizes the
> perception of a dissolve and shift from one spatial
> coordination to another within the body of the viewer.

this is a really interesting way of thinking about it, and one which,
importantly, leads us out of the cinema metaphor, which i don't think is a
particularly  useful one, because it confines the problematic of
anamorphosis to the visual register - keeps it 'in-camera', as it were.

the reason i keep coming back to holbein, and avoiding cinematic metaphors,
is because holbein's ideas about how the picture should be seen were more
architectural or theatrical than they were cinematic. the 'perception of a
dissolve and shift' from one spatial system to another was sited in the body
of the viewer as a whole, rather than confined to the visual register. for
me, this is the reason his picture is so interesting: it links anamorphosis
with affect, and implies perception as both discursive (the two visual
systems engaged in seeing the image and the skull) and extradiscursive (the
interval 'between' systems, as it were ... the time and space of the mobile
body).

>> A term used to denote a difference in magnification
> along mutually perpendicular meridians.
> 
>can we say then
> that somehow Rez goes outside the 3d imaging graphic
> restrictions imposed by the usual spatial rhetoric of
> the software ? could we say that it is similar to the
> outward 'projecting' of cinema......as Dalia implies
> in terms that could be applied to teh  cinematic
> widescreen.....

again, i'm trying to steer clear of the cinema metaphor ... if Rez goes
outside of the restrictions imposed by the software, it does this on a plane
other than the visual. those who have played it will recall that the game is
relentlessly perspectival. in terms of 'design', in other words, it actually
conforms very tightly to the restrictions of 3d cartesian mapping. what sets
the game apart, for me, is the extent to which the designers have left space
for 'undesigned' experience in the game ... they've created a rather simple
set of circumstances (a shoot-'em-up combined with a sound-generated
feedback loop) which totally exceeds the sum of its parts.... it invites
emergent behaviour not just within the system itself (i.e. as happens in
environments like technosphere) but OUTSIDE of the system. unlike most first
person shooters - and, as far as i'm aware, unlike most mainstream
videogames in general - Rez looks beyond the semiotic web of the game itself
towards the combined entity of game AND player.... i.e. it actualizes a
phenomenological, rather than a cartesian (or cartesianesque) subject

eugenie