The convergent space - back to a wearable perception.

Paul Thomas

Department of Art, Curtin University of Technology, GPO Box U1987, Perth, Western Australia 6845. p.thomas@curtin.edu.au.

Abstract

To day the conceptual boundary of the space between can be explored metaphorically and perhaps literally through the human computer interface. Virtual realities are returning us to a wearable relationship with technology in an attempt to move away from the effects of Brunelleschi’s device. Brunelleschi’s perspectival space is like a container, whereby we are separated from that space and we witness rather than participate in the various narratives being played out within it.

The awareness of the body through wearable technologies brings the interface of fashion/textiles back to the forefront of a technological debate. We are attempting to discover new understandings of how we interface with cyberspace through concepts of wearing space.

In this paper I will discuss how new emergent technologies are discovering notions of embodied space to interface with the computer. This wearable embodied space will be discussed from a historical context exploring concepts of the space between..

Key works

Perspective, art, virtual reality, wearable space

The convergent space back to a wearable perception.

Introduction

This paper is based around a straw hat that, in the early Renaissance, symbolically represented a way of perceiving space. This perception of space was crucial to the concept of convergence in the space-between theme. The space I refer to was the one used by Filippo Brunelleschi to demonstrate perspective for the first time. I then want to take this moment of spatial transformation on a journey that will lead us back to a hat and therefore the body.

Fig (1) Baptistery of san Giovanni

Fig (2) Illustration of Filippo Brunelleschi peephole device

I will begin with a short description of the device which Brunelleschi used to demonstrate perspective. I will rely on Antonio Manetti, Brunelleschi’s biographer for much of the definitive description. Manetti states concerning the structure of the device that Brunelleschi has a ‘small panel about half a braccio square’ upon which was a painting of the Baptistery Fig (1), ‘painted with such care and delicacy and with such great precision’. (Manetti 1970 p 44)

The second part of the device was a ‘flat mirror’, which was to be held in the other hand to that of the painting. The third ingredient to this device was the small hole cut into the painted panel itself: ‘he had made a hole in the painted panel at that point in the temple of san Giovanni which is directly opposite the eye of anyone stationed in the central portal of Santa Maria del Fiore’. (Manetti 1970 p 44) Manetti goes on to state that the hole in the painted panel was shaped ‘like a woman’s straw hat’. (Manetti 1970 p 44)

There was one other feature to the device; burnished silver was used on the painted panel to create a reflective surface. Manetti states of the burnished silver ‘where the sky had to be represented, that is to say, where the buildings of the painting were free thus the clouds seen in the silver are carried along by the wind as it blows’. (Manetti 1970 p 44)

As shown in the illustration the painting was held in one hand whilst the mirror was held in the other Fig (2). As the seer looked through the hole the shape of a woman’s straw hat in the back of the painted panel they saw the actual baptistery. The mirror was then lifted to cover the view of the baptistery only to reveal the painting; an exact copy in true perspective reflected in the mirror.

(Fig 3) The procession of the banners of San Giovanni, cassone panel, Florence, dated first half of the fifteenth century

In the above painting (Fig 3) the scene depicted is one of the space between the cathedral where (Brunelleschi stood) and the baptistery (the subject of his gaze). This illustration was cited by Hurbert Damisch in his book ‘The Origin of Perspective’, without making much use of it apart from a reference to its ‘longitudinal profile view, the very scene of Brunelleschi’s experiment’. (Damisch 1994 p 112)

The space portrayed is one that any person in the early 1400’s, when looking at the baptistery through Brunelleschi’s device, would have seen indirectly. This panel takes the physical space between observer and the observed and places it on its side so we see the space of the seer’s gaze. This space represents exactly the experiment, it is clearly marked out almost as though it was measured by the banners in the background and the lances of men on horseback.

Fig 4 Still from David Hockneys The secret knowledge 2003

Fig 5 Still from David Hockneys The secret knowledge 2003

This painting represents the physical space of the gaze, the space-between. The space as depicted (fig 4) is full of life and movement. which must have made a stark contrast to the sense of loss when the mirror was lifted up to view the painted panel (fig 5). I have used stills taken form David Hockneys video documentary re-enactment of part of Brunelleschi’s experiments with perspective The Secret knowledge to demonstrate this idea of loss. The space seen through the device would have been devoid of any person or thing that moved apart from the real time display of clouds in the sky reflected in the burnished silver.

The mirror, when held at arm’s length to reflect the painting, created the virtual space that had a transformative power to make us see physical space perspectively.

To explore the space described in the (chest) panel I want to use one of Henri Lefebvre’s concepts of abstract space. This abstract space can be found by looking through Brunelleschi’s peephole device, in which the space between becomes ‘a container ready to receive fragmentary contents’. (Lefebvre 1994 p. 308) The social space illustrated in the panel is one, which Brunelleschi chose for his experiment can be seen as unchartered, a new area into ‘which disjointed things, people and habits might be introduced’. (Lefebvre 1994 p. 308) The undifferentiated space of the space-between when viewed through the device portrayed the world with a new psychological content that distanced the seer from the world around them. This world is described as the culmination of a number of events which maintained its integrity as an epoch. The device had made this perspectival space which is ‘the space-between’ vacant to be owned by the gaze of a new emergent bourgeois social order of private property and individualism.. The seer, perceiving this new space for the first time through Brunelleschi’s device, could place his or her ownership on it, thereby creating, like a land rush claim, an area in which to develop a new emergent social order.

The space between became a metaphoric space, the space where autonomous disciplines would begin to develop. The distance from the Baptistery door and the Cathedral is the abstract space, the space demonstrated by the device which today we are surveying to explore its effects on our spatial interactions. This space was in reality the equivalent to an arm’s length, is the space of converging disciplines. The device developed a perspectival spatial understanding that has become a part of our consciousness. The consciousness of a space between could be understood and then colonised by this new social order. In Lefebvre’s words: “Not that this space ‘expresses’ them in any sense; it is simply the space assigned them by the grand plan: these classes find what they seek – namely, a mirror of their ‘reality’, tranquillizing ideas, and the image of a social world in which they have their own specially labelled, guaranteed place”.

(Lefebvre 1994 p. 309)

As Victor Burgin has commented

"Modern space (inaugurated in the Renaissance) is Euclidean, horizontal, infinitely extensible, and therefore, in principle, boundless. In the early modern period it is the space of the humanist subject in its mercantile entrepreneurial incarnation. In the late modern period it is the space of industrial capitalism, the space of an exponentially increased pace of dispersal, displacement and dissemination, of people and things. In the 'postmodern' period it is the space of financial capitalism". (Burgin 1991 p. 15)

The peephole device, with its various parts was put together to demonstrate perspective. What can be drawn from the cassone (chest) panel is that this image of the social space-between, is the space where the device over a long period of time transformed our gaze. It turned us from people who experienced the world around them phenomenologically, to a perspectival view, which from that point of view only allows us to see the world in sections. Jean Gebser points out “As the whole cannot be approached from a perspectival attitude to the world, we merely superimpose the character of wholeness on to the sector, the result being the familiar ‘totality’’. (Gebser 1985 p 18)This totality is where through new emergent technologies and telecommunications we are witnessing a further collapse of this arms length space which is not as yet not really understood.

In 1997 Don Foresta wrote "It would probably be at least another generation or two before we have consensus on the shape of that space, but if we are to believe what art and science have been saying, it is probable that that space would exist in time, be an interactive process and organised horizontally with a geometry quite different from the Euclidean geometry of renaissance perspective". (Foresta)

To this wearable space

According to Michael Heim “Besides function, another aspect of the formal definition of ‘world” is that it is a context or weaving-together of things. World makes a web-like totality. The web gives context to anything that happens within it. World is a total environment or surround space.” (Heim 1998 p 91)

Manetti compared the peephole in Brunelleschi’s device to ‘a woman’s’ straw hat’. (cappello di paglia da donna) – much like that depicted in (fig 6). A similar reference to the straw hat is made in Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, where he describes the rays of light in perspective making a pyramid from the surface seen, Filarete stated that “full of rays and enclosing within them the thing seen as in a bird cage made of very fine reeds. Better, [it is] like a hat (come uno cappello) made of rushes, as young girls do when they bring all the rushes to one point exactly like a pyramid”. (Filarete's 1965 p. 301) However in both cases the hat is not worn. It is looked through.

Interestingly, Owen Barfield describes space in pre-renaissance terms as being like a worn garment.

“We must not forget that in this time perspective had not yet been discovered, nor underrate the significance of this. True, it is no more than a device for pictorially representing depth and separateness, in space. But how comes it that the device had never been discovered before – or, if discovered, never adopted? There were plenty of skilled artists, and they would certainly have hit upon it soon enough if depth in space had characterized the collective representations they wish to reproduce, as it characterizes ours. They did not need it. Before the scientific revolution the world was more like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved”. (Barfield 1957 p. 94)

Fig 6 Roger Van Der Weyden’s Portrait of a Lady c.1460

This concept of space being like a garment a person entered is illustrated through the hat in this painting (fig 6) where the veil acts as a perspectival translucent membrane around the hat, almost denoting rays of light as though emitted from one point.

To move to a more contemporary hat which is used in confronting a psychological understanding of space I want to look at the work of Char Davies Osmose and Ephémèr. In this work we have a virtual reality environment where the person being immersed has to put on a vest which tracks each breath and movement of the upper body. They also have to wear a hat; a head mounted display (HMD) which presents a constructed visual and sonic world to the viewer. The effects of breathing and turning the head sends the data to a computer which allows you to move through the virtual environment via the HMD (fig 7) in real time.

Fig 7 Head mounted display used in Char Davies Osmose and Ephémèr, 2003

Davies work links ideas of space being worn like a garment to new emergent technologies and virtual realities. The environment that is seen through the hat is like looking at the world through a translucent veil. These technologies through a need for human interaction are now bringing us back to the body through wearable interfaces. The move back to the body is an attempt to shift away from perspective that distanced the seer from the space around them. The hat is the symbolic device for seeing the container in which we are separated from and witness various narratives being played out. With the Head Mounted Display (HMD) we have the hat and the container as one, collapsing the space between with in a few centimetres of our eye.

Martin Jay describes that “space was robbed of its substantive meaningfulness to become an ordered, uniform system of abstract liner coordinates. As such it was less the stage for a narrative to be developed over time than the eternal container of objective processes”. (Jay 1994 p. 52-53)

The eternal container that Jay speaks of is one where life’s everyday objects have been made to fit. The container in this context is the metaphor for the hat that links us back to the body; the container becomes the garment. No matter how strange the narratives being played out in the container they are never going to be seen outside of a perspectival restrictions. Hence the dilemma of the space between was that, once we had made perspective part of our consciousness, we could no longer see outside of this container.

Conclusion

The spatial container in the context of the body is what we want to transform. It is not to see the container and it’s narrative through the perspectival gaze but more about the phenomenological understanding of that space .The container in this context is like the garment it is not something which we look at but rather a space we enter and wrap around us. Cyberspace will be defined via a psychological rupture though the work of artists like Char Davies who via a wearable interface reconfigures the way we understand the space-between.

Fig 8 Pablo Picasso: Woman with Straw Hat on flowered Background 1938

As we have seen, Manetti’s and Filarettes use by choice of the straw hat metaphor to act as the symbol to recall the pre-renaissance way of experiencing or wearing space. The straw hat (fig 8) is directly or phenomenologically connected to the body and its spatialisation. The straw hat also recalls those modern devices of virtuality: the glove, the body suit, the sensory detectors and the HMD. These garments all bring us back to the senses and then to the body as a way of experiencing the space-between. The garment is the key when looking for a starting point to reconfiguring our concept of space. Perhaps the spatial distancing caused by the Brunelleschi’s device needs, like the straw hat, to be worn again, to be turned vertical again.

Postscript

Fig 9 Paul Thomas Waiting for Nothing 1979

I wanted to now make my own connection to the idea of wearing space with this illustration from my early documentary research exploring the space between. The subject and object relationship to the gaze is demonstrated by the string (fig 9). This parallels conceptually the panel painting referred to earlier where Brunelleschi’s gaze is turned side on. Here as a recent migrant to Australia I am turning my gaze on it side to see the space between as the development of a different cultural and spatial awareness.

This is expanded upon in my current work which explores not the physical space of a colonialist but rather concepts of understanding virtual space. These concepts have been illustrated by myself through the use of a laparoscopy camera to explore the spaces between the body and the clothes. These unconscious residual spaces are the first point of contact to the concept of recognising the space between as a significant signifier. The space between the skin and an outer garment is one where the senses need to be turned back on the body to feel the point of contact of the clothes. These spaces, which are revealed, are a reconfiguration of our sense of being within the world. Transparency is used in my work to allow the residual spaces to be layered and merge together to create hybrid spaces.

In the writings from The Zohar, which is a compendium of mysticism, myth and esoteric teaching; one of the teachings refers in part to this concept of the garment. Every good deed you do becomes one strand, these strands when woven together become a garment which you enter when you die. To move into another level of consciousness we need to enter into a spatial garment.

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Damisch, H. (1994). The Origin of Perpective . Cambirdge Massachusetts, The MIT Pess.

Filarete's (1965). Treatise on Architecture . New Haven and London, Yale University Press.

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http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/articles/souillac/malvy.html

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Jay, M. (1994). Down Cast Eyes The Denigration of vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought . Los Angeles, University of Calafornia Press.

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