The perspectival conventions are also subjective,
cognitive, social, political; we say that we have
viewpoints on a specific issues, or that someone
has an interesting perspective on the matter.
These visual conventions are never entirely
visual: they're intertwined with cognitive
forms, subject-object placements, code-
structures, and so on. They're not only modelled
on human vision, but they helped to model human
vision--they helped to model the type of
subjectivity and visionary capacity adequate to a
progressive culture. Jonathan Crary writes on
how the camera obscura was also a model for
cognition, bound up in a complex of forces,
technologies, and practices that helped to
produce a new type of viewer and viewing and
cognitive capacity. This is a process of
reorientation and co-acclimation, where bodies,
capacities, spaces, and forms are cross-formatted
and made adequate to each other in changing
realities.
Now if we are in the midst of a drastic change
--and this is probably one of the few things on
which everyone agrees--that alters subjectivity,
cognition, space, etc. through the mediations of
visualizing technologies, what artifacts and
struggles are registered on the surfaces or
interfaces of representational forms? Does
perspective, as it stands, operate as a kind of
readymade technique that helps to locate or "lock
on" to a viewer and to generate the illusion of a
space that no longer exists? So to look at
perspective in this way is to be embroiled in a
nexus of messy issues. It provides a marker-
point and a field of traversals and operations,
which can be articulated. Virilio recently said
that cyberspace is perspective (or a perspective,
I can't remember which), and in this suggestion
is embedded, through the scrim of visualization
and signifying technologies, the changing
materialities and faculties at work. It
indicates network-perspective, yes, but also
something more--a kind of imploded perspective
that opens out something else.
What do you mean when you indicate that the term
space implies something physical?