In her opening chapter on Marx, Kofman provides a reading of inversion as necessary to the ideological process. She then explores the metaphor of the camera obscura in Freud's description of the unconscious.

Artykuł zawiera prezentację najstarszych zachowanych świadectw w starożytnej Grecji zawierających opis camera obscura. Terminu używa się zamiennie na określenie zarówno zjawiska, jak i urządzenia optycznego wykorzystujacego wspomniany fenomen. Schemat działania jest prosty: promienie światła biegnące od przedmiotu i przechodzące przez niewielki otwór, padają na powierzchnię w zaciemnionej przestrzeni tworząc odwrócony obraz przedmiotu. Pierwsze opisy fenomenu camera obscura pojawiają się w starożytnych Chinach i Grecji. W kulturze greckiej i zarazem tradycji europejskiej, chronologicznie pierwszym zapisem jest tekst zawarty (...) w dziele pt. Zagadnienia przyrodnicze, w Księdze XV, rozdziale 11, a dopełnienie w Księdze XV, rozdziale 6. Wspomniane dzieło zostało napisane przez nieznanego nam bliżej autora lub autorów, ale wywodzącego się z tradycji dociekań przyrodniczych Liceum Arystotelesa. (shrink)

In his Paralipomena Johannes Kepler reported an experimentum that he had seen in the Dresden Kunstkammer. In one of the rooms there, which had been turned in its entirety into a camera obscura, he had witnessed the images formed by a lens. I discuss the role of this experiment in the development and foundation of his new theory of optical imagery, which made a distinction between two concepts of image, pictura and imago. My focus is on how Kepler (...) used his report of the experiment inside the camera obscura to criticize the account of image formation given in Giovanbattista Della Porta's Magia naturalis . I argue that this experiment allowed Kepler to sort out the confusion between images 'in the air'—referring to the geometrical locus of images in the perspectivist tradition of optics—and the experimentally produced 'projected images', which were empirically familiar but conceptually alien to perspectivist optics. (shrink)

In his Paralipomena Johannes Kepler reported an experimentum that he had seen in the Dresden Kunstkammer. In one of the rooms there, which had been turned in its entirety into a camera obscura, he had witnessed the images formed by a lens. I discuss the role of this experiment in the development and foundation of his new theory of optical imagery, which made a distinction between two concepts of image, pictura and imago. My focus is on how Kepler (...) used his report of the experiment inside the camera obscura to criticize the account of image formation given in Giovanbattista Della Porta's Magia naturalis. I argue that this experiment allowed Kepler to sort out the confusion between images 'in the air'—referring to the geometrical locus of images in the perspectivist tradition of optics—and the experimentally produced 'projected images', which were empirically familiar but conceptually alien to perspectivist optics. (shrink)

The following study examines the critical interplay between ideology, mediated reality, and the role that individuals’ perceptions, beliefs, and actions play in this process. In doing so, the study delves into the examination of the way power structures and dominant narratives proceed into influencing cultural expression and, consequently, impact social action. It is thus argued that in contemporary society, the Situationist notion of “the spectacle” has replaced any understanding of reality and created a reified social world dominated by commodities that (...) reinforce dominant ideologies and determine subjective perceptions. Furthermore, the paper addresses the impact of this mediated reality on personal subjectivity and agency. Drawing on Marx’s metaphor of the “camera obscura” as ideology, it argues for a transformative “reversal of perspective” that changes how individuals view and engage with their environment. Ultimately, this study underscores the profound impact of “the spectacle” on social relations, ideology, and perception. It argues for a transformative and creative approach that challenges individuals to resist the grasp of the spectacle, reclaim their agency, and develop new perspectives for interacting with the world. The extensions of the gaze subtly refer to the basis of economy manifested as “false consciousness” reflected by the camera obscura as an inverted image but readjusted with the tools of spectacles and mirrors within the reflective apparatus. (shrink)

Critics of the proposal that the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer used the camera obscura extensively in making his pictures of domestic scenes have argued that this cannot be the case, since his compositions are not 'photographic snapshots' but are very finely judged and balanced; his subject matter draws on the traditional motifs of Dutch genre painting; and the pictures are filled with complex allegorical and symbolic meaning. In this paper it is argued that all these are indeed characteristics (...) of Vermeer's oeuvre, but that the artist produced them through the transcription of optical images of tableaux, set up by arranging real furniture and other 'props' with extreme care, in an actual room in his mother-in-law's house. (shrink)

El presente ensayo analiza la obra de Augusto de Campos y su relación con la poesía visual. A partir del uso que hace el poeta brasileño de la página en negro para componer sus poemas, se propone una lectura de su obra en relación con el legado de Mallarmé y su idea de la escritura. Posteriormente, a partir de la idea de la materialidad de la lengua poética que está en el centro del proyecto poético de Augusto de Campos, se (...) plantea el pasaje hacia una dimensión háptica que se produce en sus poemas, sobre todo en “Anticéu” (“Anticielo”) de 1984. (shrink)

This article opens with a distinction between David Hockney's strong and weak theses. According to the strong thesis, in the period 1430-1860, optical tools were used in the production of paintings; according to the weak thesis, mirrors and lenses merely inspired their naturalistic look. It will be argued that while for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there is little evidence in favor of the strong thesis, the case is different for the seventeenth century, for which the use of optical instruments (...) by painters is a documented fact. In this article, an early case is examined. The extant preparatory drawings of Gaspare Vanvitelli suggest that this cityscape painter relied on a camera obscura. But even here, the strong thesis must be tempered. The fact that several stages of artistic transformation separate the camera obscura projection from the finished painting undermines Hockney's analogy between optically assisted painting and 'naturalistic' photography. (shrink)

This article examines the concept of “perspective” as an embodied metaphor with ontological and epistemological implications for the modeling of historical understanding of contested pasts. The metaphors employed in modeling past reality shape how we make sense of the controversial past. In particular, I explore how perspectival metaphorical models conjure the notions of presence/proximity/engagement and absence/distance/detachment. To open this up, the paper juxtaposes two distinct models of seeing and knowing as sources of embodied metaphor: 1) static and distancing optical metaphors (...) of cognition, and 2) a “post-cognitive” process of interaction. I argue that the shift towards the affective, experiential and immersive forms of engagement in historical representation is indicative of the growing importance of dynamic, embodied and interactive features in mediated models of the past. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of virtual reality as an emergent medium that offers a new way of modeling the past. Despite its novelty, however, virtual reality raises age-old questions about the dynamics of engagement and detachment in historical understanding. (shrink)

RESUMEN Este artículo explora si hay algún fundamento sólido para atribuir a Leonardo da Vinci prioridad en la formulación del símil que lleva a concebir el ojo como una cámara obscura. Aquí, se defiende una posición pesimista. No obstante, el artículo resalta algunos aportes del pintor renacentista que pueden considerarse contribuciones a la consolidación del símil. ABSTRACT The article explores whether there is any solid basis for attributing to Leonardo da Vinci the priority in formulating the simile that leads (...) to conceiving the eye as a camera obscura. Here, a pessimistic position is defended, however, the article highlights some of Leonardo's contributions to the consolidation of the simile. (shrink)

A relatively unknown woman named Maria Theresa Short opened a popular observatory in 1835 in Ed inburgh - a time and place where men of science and property had long failed to make a viable space for astronomy. She exhibited scientific instruments to a general public, along with a great telescope and a walk-in camera obscura that projected live views of the city and continues to delight audiences to this day. To better understand Short's accomplishments, achieved as scientific (...) and public life became increasingly closed to women, this study explores her largely untold story, and maps some of the places of science around it. Finding local contingencies, multiple sites and practices by diverse groups, it proposes that tensions within the connections between science and spectacle and the use of popularization to promote its professionalization produced gaps that even a marginal figure like Maria Short could inhabit and exploit. (shrink)

In this paper I endeavour to bridge the gap between the history of material culture and the history of ideas. I do this by focussing on the intersection between metaphysics and technology—what I call ‘applied metaphysics’—in the oeuvre of the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher. By scrutinising the interplay between texts, objects and images in Kircher’s work, it becomes possible to describe the multiplicity of meanings related to his artefacts. I unearth as yet overlooked metaphysical and religious meanings of the (...) class='Hi'>camera obscura, for instance, as well as of various other optical and magnetic devices. Today, instruments and artefacts are almost exclusively seen in the light of a narrow economic and technical concept. Historically, the ‘use’ of artefacts is much more diverse, however, and I argue that it is time to historicize the concept of ‘utility’.Keywords: Jesuit science; Utility; Material culture; History of ideas; Magnetic theology; Light metaphysics; Camera obscura; Technological expressionism; Philosophy of artefacts. (shrink)

One of us coined the notion of an “epistemology engine.” The idea is that some particular technology in its workings and use is seen suggestively as a metaphor for the human subject and often for the production of knowledge itself. In this essay, we further develop the conceptand claim that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological commitments, although suggestive, did not lead him to appreciate the epistemological value of materiality. We also take steps towards establishing how an understanding of this topic can provide the (...) basis for reinterpreting the history of phenomenology. (shrink)

A pioneer in the field, Christian Metz applies insights of structural linguistics to the language of film. "The semiology of film . . . can be held to date from the publication in 1964 of the famous essay by Christian Metz, 'Le cinema: langue ou langage?'"--Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Times Literary Supplement "Modern film theory begins with Metz."--Constance Penley, coeditor of Camera Obscura "Any consideration of semiology in relation to the particular field signifying practice of film passes inevitably through a (...) reference to the work of Christian Metz. . . . The first book to be written in this field, [ Film Language ] is important not merely because of this primacy but also because of the issues it raises . . . issues that have become crucial to the contemporary argument."--Stephen Heath, Screen. (shrink)

La théorie lockienne de la perception a été lue tantôt comme une forme de représentationnalisme, tantôt comme relevant d'un réalisme direct n'impliquant pas d'entité intermédiaire entre l'esprit et les choses. Cet article entreprend de clarifier cette question à partir des analyses de l'Essai sur la distinction et la confusion des idées. Celles-ci interrogent à la fois la nature de l'idée comme image et le fait qu'elle n'est déterminée que lorsque l'esprit lui donne un nom. Pour faire comprendre ce dernier point, (...) Locke utilise la métaphore de l'anamorphose en peinture, et plus particulièrement de l'anamorphose cylindrique. En reliant cette métaphore aux théories de la perspective du XVIIe siècle, à la camera obscura de l'esprit, et enfin à l'optique du XVIIe siècle, l'article parvient à plusieurs conclusions. Faire de l'idée une image ne conduit jamais Locke à voir en elle un objet qui s'interpose entre l'esprit et les choses. Une idée comme celle de sense data est étrangère à sa pensée. Si Locke ne met jamais en doute la réalité du monde extérieur, c'est que pour lui l'idée nous donne d'emblée accès à une extériorité, qu'il s'agit de déterminer. Enfin, la perception lockienne ne relève pas d'un modèle sémantique dont l'origine serait à trouver dans Descartes et qui préparerait celui de l'empirisme du XVIIIe siècle, faisant de l'idée un signe. Elle se rapprocherait plutôt, paradoxalement, de l'idée austinienne du silence des sens. (shrink)

첨예하고 중대한 사안으로 떠오른 디지털 성범죄 사진 · 영상파일의 불법적 생산과 유포 · 무한공유 시스템은 현실세계의 여성들의 일상 속 시공간을 얽어매고 재구축하는 조건으로 강력히 작동하고 있다. 필자는 이러한 디지털성범죄 시스템을 남성 시선-주체의 특권적 인식 좌표계의 창출로 분석해내고자 하며 이 시스템의 메커니즘을 떠받히고 있는 형이상학적 기반들을 분쇄하고자 한다. 필자는 여성의 위치와 이동반경, 일거수일투족을 파악, 포착해내는 이러한 인식지표 틀의 초월성을 다음과 같은 두가지 측면에서 분석해내고자 한다. 첫째, 수직적 초월성(transcendent)의 측면에서 여성의 몸이 구획되고 차등적으로 배치되는 기원을 데카르트의 『성찰』을 통해 고찰할 것이다. 둘째, 칸트적 (...) 의미에서의 초월론적(transcendental) 측면에 입각하여 여기저기 파인 남근 다발체들의 시선-구멍이 일으키는 시공간의 왜곡과 변형에 대해 논의하겠다. 더 나아가 필자는 환상의 일상화된 무대로서 기능하게 된 현실에 대한 분석으로서 판타지가 작동하는 방식에 대한 지젝의 논의를 분석할 것이다. 판타지의 재현물들이 어떠한 방식으로 위계적으로 욕망의 대상들을 배치하고 있으며 현실 속으로 난입하고 있는지를 고찰할 것이다. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;Metaphor and analogy are the scaffolding of science. Kepler's theory of the retinal picture could not have been built without the analogy between an eye and a camera obscura, and, two hundred and fifty years later, Charles Darwin devoted most of the first chapter of The origin of Species to discussion of pigeon fanciers. Unlike Darwin, Kepler was bewitched by his own imagination and was led to (...) wonder "how this image or picture is joined to the visual faculty, which is situated in the retina and in the nerve, and whether it is placed within the hollows of the brain, before the soul or tribunal of the visual faculty, or whether the visual faculty, like a magistrate sent by the soul from the administrative chamber of the brain, descends into the optic nerve or retina to meet this image, as though to a lower court" . ;The theory of the retinal image answered the crucial question of medieval optics: the scaffolding had served its purpose and should have been dismantled. Instead, Kepler mistook it for a part of the building: what he construed as a scientific problem was nothing more than the extension of a metaphor. As a result, and in spite of his remarkable achievement, he left the theory of vision in a state of confusion. ;I intend to show that Descartes revolutionized visual theory by manipulating the pair of analogies which had dominated visual theory since its inception and by advancing a theory of depiction which has since become orthodox. Advocates of the first analogy suggest that seeing the world is rather like seeing pictures of it; Kepler's analogy between the eye and a camera obscura, which was anticipated by Leonardo de Vinci, was a variation on this theme. Advocates of the second analogy compare vision to the use of a walking-stick: the air transmits an impression of a visible object to the eye rather as a walking-stick enables us to find our way around in the dark by transmitting pressures to the hand. As I shall show, Descartes' rejection of the pictorial analogy in favour of the walking-stick analogy and his theory of depiction were designed to salvage Kepler's theory of the retinal picture, a pearl of great price, from its murky setting. ;Descartes aimed to show that whilst Kepler's theory of the retinal picture correctly described the optics of the eye, the pictorial analogy was misleading and stood in the way of a mechanistic theory of perception. ;Current visual theory is Cartesian in some respects and un-Cartesian in others. The walking-stick analogy is no longer used, but the explanatory pattern that it served to illustrate is adhered to closely where the perception of brightness and colour are concerned, and the causal theory of depiction commands widespread support. At the same time, the pictorial analogy has not lost its appeal. (shrink)

In 2003 Japanese folk horror game Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly directed by Makoto Shibata, the protagonist bears witness to an ancient tradition of a community linked to the ritual sacrifice of twins, which results in the female victim becoming a malevolent spirit. Gradually the player, as Mio, equipped with the Camera Obscura, transitions from observer to participant in the cycle of events that results in sacrificing their own twin sister. This article focuses on establishing the game within (...) the folk horror subgenre, before examining three female characters: Mio, the protagonist, who shifts from witness/voyeur to participant; Mayu, their twin, who transitions from unwilling to willing sacrifice; and Sae, the victim of the original ritual and antagonist. In Fatal Frame II, the Camera Obscura, which captures the supernatural world, is the lens through which past and present blur as the player is confronted by the twisted beliefs of the village. Through analysis of the game’s narrative, ludic elements, and visual aesthetics, I examine how these roles fit within the context of folk horror, gender and Japanese folklore. (shrink)

Kepler's Somnium is a fantastical story about the world on the moon. It presents a heliocentric world-picture established through a total conversion of the meaning and place of observation in the hierarchy of knowledge. This epistemological program is construed through a critical adaptation of Lucian's "True Story," and Plutarch's "The Face on the Moon." Utilizing his new optics, embodied in the Camera obscura, Kepler inverts the meaning of these classical texts together with the reader's point of view. Astronomical (...) knowledge is vindicated and scientific observation is the only way out of an obscure and mannerist dream. (shrink)

Within the framework of this study, the transformation of anthropomorphic images in Medieval and Renaissance painting is analyzed. The visual art of this period is considered as a specific space of "conversation about man", which existed in parallel with discourses about God-man and Man-god. As a means of communication between man and God, the icon, using anthropomorphism in the image of the archetype, represented to the medieval man a certain path and a guide to his own salvation. Along with individual (...) anthropomorphic and naturalistic features, areal ones were also used in iconography, for example, reverse perspective, halo, "twisting of figures" and a number of others that set the symbolic content of the religious image. В В According to the author, the transformation of the icon into a painting in the XIII-XIV centuries was associated not only with the technical development of fine art (the widespread use of direct perspective, the use of camera obscura and oil paints), but also with significant changes that occurred in the intellectual space of Europe. The narcissistic turn in Renaissance art, expressed in the dissolution of the boundaries between the human and the divine, the maximum naturalization of religious content, as well as in the development of self-portraits, is, first of all, a turn from the discourse about God-man to the discourse about Man-God. Relying on philosophical sources, two independent positions (Ficino and da Vinci) on the nature of metamorphosis and the place of pictorial images in the description and definition of man are considered. (shrink)

In developing a new theory of vision in Ad Vitellionem paralipomena Kepler introduced a new optical concept, pictura, which is an image projected on to a screen by a camera obscura. He distinguished this pictura from an imago, the traditional image of medieval optics that existed only in the imagination. By the 1670s a new theory of optical imagery had been developed, and Kepler's pictura and imago became real and virtual images, two aspects of a unified concept of (...) image. The new concept of image developed out of a synthesis of Kepler's determination of the geometrical location of a pictura as the limit, or focus, of refracted pencils of rays and the triangulation used by a single eye to determine the perceived location of an imago. The distinction between real and imaginary images was largely developed by Gilles Personne de Roberval and the Jesuits Francesco Eschinardi and Claude François Milliet Dechales. (shrink)

RESUMEN Este artículo explora si hay algún fundamento sólido para atribuir a Leonardo da Vinci prioridad en la formulación del símil que lleva a concebir el ojo como una cámara obscura. Aquí, se defiende una posición pesimista. No obstante, el artículo resalta algunos aportes del pintor renacentista que pueden considerarse contribuciones a la consolidación del símil. ABSTRACT The article explores whether there is any solid basis for attributing to Leonardo da Vinci the priority in formulating the simile that leads (...) to conceiving the eye as a camera obscura. Here, a pessimistic position is defended, however, the article highlights some of Leonardo's contributions to the consolidation of the simile. (shrink)

We compare William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1835 photographic negative 'Latticed Window (with the Camera Obscura) August 1835' with Richard Beaudoin’s 2009 solo piano work 'Étude d’un Prélude VII -- Latticed Window'. We claim that the score of Beaudoin’s work is a musical photograph of a performance of another musical work, and support the claim by describing their respective photographic and compositional processes, emphasizing the uniqueness of this score in being mechanically counterfactually dependent on its target (a recording of (...) a Chopin prelude performed by Martha Argerich). We then compare Beaudoin’s score with other possible musical photographs, including musical recordings, sonic spectrographs, ordinary musical transcriptions, and typical musical scores. Finally, we consider an argument based on the transparency of photographs. (shrink)

Ideology is an extremely comprehensive, yet ambigous concept. Several aspects of the ideological thought are made obvious through discussing Marx’s first view on ideology, which is the one elaborated in The German Ideology. Here, ideology is understood as an imaginary construction that can be sugestively described as a dis- torted image in camera obscura. Despite the objectivity and scientifity claimed by Marx’s vision (and especialy by the subsequent Marxism-Leninism), various interpretative perspectives brought into discussion argue that, in order (...) to gain in persuasion and to mobilize masses conscience, Marxist discourse uses, in its very heart, mythological and imaginary structures. In this way, Marxist discourse is proved to be much more closer to the fictional dis- course and to the forms of religiosity, than to the sci- ence, in spite of Marx’s belief that the critique of religion is the model of any other critique. (shrink)

La théorie lockienne de la perception a été lue tantôt comme une forme de représentationnalisme, tantôt comme relevant d'un réalisme direct n'impliquant pas d'entité intermédiaire entre l'esprit et les choses. Cet article entreprend de clarifier cette question à partir des analyses de l'Essai sur la distinction et la confusion des idées. Celles-ci interrogent à la fois la nature de l'idée comme image et le fait qu'elle n'est déterminée que lorsque l'esprit lui donne un nom. Pour faire comprendre ce dernier point, (...) Locke utilise la métaphore de l'anamorphose en peinture, et plus particulièrement de l'anamorphose cylindrique. En reliant cette métaphore aux théories de la perspective du XVIIe siècle, à la camera obscura de l'esprit, et enfin à l'optique du XVIIe siècle, l'article parvient à plusieurs conclusions. Faire de l'idée une image ne conduit jamais Locke à voir en elle un objet qui s'interpose entre l'esprit et les choses. Une idée comme celle de sense data est étrangère à sa pensée. Si Locke ne met jamais en doute la réalité du monde extérieur, c'est que pour lui l'idée nous donne d'emblée accès à une extériorité, qu'il s'agit de déterminer. Enfin, la perception lockienne ne relève pas d'un modèle sémantique dont l'origine serait à trouver dans Descartes et qui préparerait celui de l'empirisme du XVIIIe siècle, faisant de l'idée un signe. Elle se rapprocherait plutôt, paradoxalement, de l'idée austinienne du silence des sens. (shrink)

Though photography reaches as far back as the sixteenth-century’s camera obscura projects, it wasn’t until the British colonial period that amateur photographers introduced their technology to the Indian subcontinent. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, India was at the center of a representational revolution. Was photography in India simply a void, waiting to be filled by pre-existing cultural and historical practice? Or was it disruptive, throwing up new opportunities, prophesying new social formations, and bringing anxieties about (...) formerly secluded events and practices into a newly visible sphere? The Coming of Photography in India transcends traditional cultural and technological narratives in order to present a subtle and compelling account of the limits, possibilities, and consequences of photography. Examining technology in order to explain the dynamic incarnation of photographic practice as cure, poison, and prophecy, Christopher Pinney presents a bold account that will reward anyone with an interest in India, photography, or the history of the book. Accompanied by beautiful illustrations and a large number of previously unpublished images, this volume presents a sophisticated account of the “disturbance” that photography has brought to all of our lives. (shrink)

Brain imaging technologies are increasingly used to find networks and brain regions that are specific to the functional realization of particular aspects of the self. In this paper, we aim to show how neuroscientific research and techniques could be used in the context of self-formation without treating them as representations of an inner realm. To do so, we show first how a Cartesian framework underlies the interpretation and usage of brain imaging technologies as functional evidence. To illustrate how material-technological inventions (...) and developments can have a significant and lasting impact on views of the self, we show how this framework was influenced by another technology: the camera obscura. Subsequently, we show that brain imaging technologies challenge the idea that privileged access to the self can be obtained merely through introspection, indicating a strong discontinuity between the Cartesian and the current neuroscientific framework. Building on these insights, we reframe the self in terms of self-formation. This view neither regards the brain as an independent realizer of aspects of the self, nor assumes that self-knowledge can be obtained through introspection. From this perspective, self-formation is realized throughcritical self-identification: instead of offering representational knowledge of an ‘inner self,’ the potential use of brain imaging technologies within this framework lies in their capacity to offer what we call ‘extrospective knowledge’ that pragmatically can contribute to self-formation. Brain imaging technologies contribute to this process because they foreground our neurophysiology, which helps to critically integrate biological aspects into self-formation. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 286—310. This mad play of writing —Stéphane Mallarmé Somewhere in between mathematics and theory, light and dark, physicality and projection, oscillates the poetry of Alessandro De Francesco. The texts hold no periods or commas, not even a capital letter for reference. Each piece stands as an individual construction, and yet the poetry flows in and out of the frame. Images resurface from one poem to the next, haunting the reader with reincarnations of an object lost in the (...) grass or a representation of a pear in a Dutch still life, embedded in cycles of cinematic close ups and multiple dimensions. As a whole, De Francesco’s oeuvre suggests, to use the title of one of his works, a redefinition —linguistic, epistemological, personal. The poem The End (un’agenda) (The End (an agenda)) opens with a quote by literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, which may be translated as follows: Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from this optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated out approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence.[1] In writing, De Francesco seeks to redefine our approach to things. His poems, like Blanchot’s writings, speak to both illuminate and to obscure. The reader hangs in an absence of reality within language that necessitates an attempt at interpretation, yet renders such a search ultimately futile. De Francesco draws the anonymous images that appear in this poem from the city of Paris, his current home. The fragmented narrative depicts an inner doubt of realness, calling for a confirmation of a physical existence beyond verbalization and cogitation. Cyclical references to film throw into question the reliability of the reality he creates. The light, sometimes red and safe, other times absent and murky, cannot necessarily be trusted as a guaranteed means of illumination. Blanchot’s distinction between language and visualization, and the relationship of each to reality, though linked specifically to The End (un’agenda) , can be a lens through which to read any of the three works that follow. assente obliqua (absent oblique) is composed of descriptions of six still life paintings, ranging from Dutch masterpieces of the seventeenth century to 1960s minimalism. The actual images of the paintings are absent, and the text is the sole source and object of a virtual reality created around the artwork. “Absent oblique” refers to the light source placed outside of the frame, which both informs and distracts viewing of the scene. Although mere description can be unreliable and unsatisfying in its necessary limitation, the representational act of description is shown as more than just a human want. It is a need, a means by which to grapple with an unsure reality. As the illustrations progress, they descend into abstraction and chaos. The precariously placed plate triggers the movement: the bottle bursts and the objects collapse into the movement of a tracking film camera. corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale (foreign body in ascending motion) is prose poetry in action. Its objective tone of description is skewed by the subjectivity of the narrative as horrific images are relayed in fragmented but matter-of-fact manner. A “foreign body” is both a mass of cancerous cells, and a corporeal description, and the poem takes the reader on a journey back and forth between the two, destination unclear. Beyond a questioning of the real, corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale is an examination of the possible. De Francesco’s poetry becomes a camera obscura through which to observe the constant flux of light and dark that blurs our reality. His work is colored by the idea of apo koinou , a Greek term meaning “from the common” that involves a construction of two clauses with a shared word or phrase. Through such melting of meaning, De Francesco creates a fluid ambiguity that is nonetheless grounded in bodily concepts. In assente obliqua , the reader is confronted with a description of a still life that rapidly transforms into a more chilling scene: the membrane of the mushroom in the basket emerges behind the white cloth a body could hide itself that asks for help In the realm of pure description, there is a mushroom that peeks out from behind a white cloth in a basket. Behind the white cloth, too, there could be a body, hiding, asking for help. Such an elision elicits disorienting mistrust in temporality, but also expands the planar possibilities of syntactical meaning. A white cloth is not merely a construct in still life painting, but veil that both shields and reveals potential mysteries. It is a proposed alternative to a traditional Western binary of subjectivity and objectivity. The apo koinou construction is rare in modern English, having slipped out of use after its resurgence in Old English poetry. De Francesco reintroduces this blur of object and subject relations into a modern light. He draws inspiration from a device used by Gruppo 63 founder and avant-garde poet Antonio Porta tended toward repetition of phrases in third person perspective. In Italian, it is perfectly grammatically correct to omit the subject, including only a verb conjugation. Gender, even humanity unknown, the subject dissolves into the action, thus giving to the poetry the power to change the reader’s perception of who or what is actually acting. To further push the relative boundaries of experience, De Francesco expands his written poetry into what he calls “reading environments.” In these sound experiments, De Francesco’s voice reading his poetry is manipulated by real time digital voice processing. The written is transformed to the spoken, and then injected with currents of electric sound. “At each activation of word in the darkness,” (from The End (un’agenda) ) language is permutated into a nonphysical yet all-encompassing being. In these projects, realized all over Europe, De Francesco continues his examination of the word’s potency beyond the page and into an “n-dimensional space,” where the lines between nature and affect are intertwined. To publish excerpts of De Francesco’s oeuvre is to show screen shots of full-length film, to read pull quotes from a philosophy treatise. In these poems, there are questions, not to be answered, but to be questioned again. The words will oscillate in and out of the square construction found in his poems, out of the borders of the page, out of the rectangle of the laptop screen. NOTES (1) Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation . Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 27. EDITORS' NOTE The .pdf above contains about twenty pages of translation and the original Italian poetry. Below we provide only a brief account. The End (an agenda) Parler, ce n’est pas voir. Parler libère la pensée de cette exigence optique qui, dans la tradition occidentale, soumet depuis des millénaires notre approche des choses et nous invite à penser sous la garantie de la lumière ou sous la menace de l’absence de lumière. —Maurice Blanchot in this n-dimensional space i could spy on myself from the cracks while going back and forth from the summer to the wardrobe from the night to the parking lot but something filters in through the half-closed shutters becomes an event enunciation we stay without explanation like parallel curves on the back of a solid growing older she enters the garden always repeats certain phrases the elevator to be redone the neighbor’s music the steps the pavement furls like the leaves of a fern when touched she is framed from behind while she moves rocking she covers distances slowly a bag overflows from the wardrobe something stirs inside but then the suitcase comes open not even by my hand it’s the objects that are starting to filter out the little red haired monster watches idling the appointments written on one of your agendas two years old still seem urgent each letter holds itself upright on the page with flourishes and arabesques each angle has its own geography i’m trying to describe the path the fingers trace on the carpet the zipper takes the opposite route we are suspended on the stairs above the water in the center is the summer seen from above the darkness of the city passes from one headlight to the next the surfaces of our arms cohere and are shiny underneath the blinking of a sign each pore is an open expanse the body dreams the hair gives form to the possible some daring swimmers were throwing themselves into the seine they swam upstream up to the first quay look there could exist behind the screen a room where even when the lamp is out and the curtains drawn even when the suitcase wasn’t closed everything seemed red everything calm construction of a four-dimensional tetrahedron by R. Courant – H. Robbins, What is Mathematics? Oxford University Press, 1941  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Out of an Old Toy ChestMarina Warner (bio)The Soul of the ToyIn Baudelaire’s essay “La Morale du joujou,” written in l853, he remembers how the toyshop owner Madame Pancoucke, all wrapped in velvet and furs, beckoned the young Charles to choose something from her “treasure store for children.” Looking back down the years, the poet still sees in his mind’s eye the magic room overflowing with toys from floor (...) to ceiling that this “Fée du joujou” (Toy Fairy) opened to him. Without a second thought, he picked out “the most beautiful, the most expensive, the most garish, the freshest and the most bizarre of the playthings.” But his horrified mother insisted he choose another, less extravagant present, and the little Baudelaire had to resign himself and relinquish his toy.The word joujou (not jouet, the usual word for toy) is almost a pet name with a nursery ring like a “teddy” or a “dolly”; its repetition hints at baby talk and hence at playing, as when a child exchanges endearments and questions with a toy in imaginary conversations and elaborate scenarios. The toy in so many children’s games becomes part of an ongoing story and in this way initiates the first invented narratives in the child’s life.That scene of seduction, pleasure, and frustration with Mme. Pancoucke and his own mother catches Baudelaire’s lasting affection and reasoned admiration for toys. He called them “cette statuaire singulière” (this singular statuary); he was first a poet and then an art critic rather than a novelist, and as a flâneur of the boulevards and the galleries, he adopted a language of aesthetics, treating toys as an unusual form of sculpture. He recalls in pleasurable detail the miniature worlds conjured by Victorian nursery games and child’s play—from tiny “diligences” or mail coaches to detailed model furniture. But above all he muses in wonder at children’s ability to play without props or models, creating narratives, dialogue, and dramas [End Page 3] through fantasy alone: “All children talk to their toys; toys become actors in the great drama of life, reduced by the camera obscura of their small brains. Children bear witness through their games to their great faculty of abstraction and their high imaginative power. They play without playthings.”1Significantly, Baudelaire goes on to make the connection to creativity in general: “[The child’s] facility to satisfy the imagination shows the spirituality of childhood in its artistic conceptions. The plaything is the first initiation of a child to art.” Nothing will ever attain again, he says, the same degree of liveliness, or, crucially, the same intensity of presence or belief. For Baudelaire, the realization of childish make-believe cannot be regained: “Isn’t all of life found there in miniature, and much more vivid in colour, cleaner and shinier than real life?”2Yet Baudelaire’s essay lingers on the frustration that dims these vivid, shiny colors, for children, he says, also want to see the soul of a toy. He describes how they will turn about their playthings and shake them, hurl them to the ground, and often break them in their bafflement and even rage at their stubborn refusal to awaken into life. His meditation hints that at the point when make-believe fails, the vitality of toys vanishes and produces a primal encounter with mortality: “But where is the soul? It’s here that bewilderment and sadness begin.”3 The beginning of imagining stories brings with it frustration that the story is not powerful enough—it is not the real thing. In a connected prose poem entitled “Le Joujou du pauvre,” published nine years later, Baudelaire pursues this thought, as he observes an exchange between a beautiful, pampered child inside the exclusive railed park of a chateau. He has “a splendid toy, as fresh as its master, varnished, gilded, clothed in a purple dress and covered with plumes and glitter.”4 But the rich child is not interested in his doll, for on the other side of the railings a ragged street urchin shows him, in a little cage which he shakes about, a living rat—”drawn... (shrink)

According to common sense cultural history is propelled by grand ideas. Contrary to this view a material history will be defended. Artists have always taken the lead in the exploration of new technologies that mediate human perception. The modern worldview has been instigated by the artistic domestication of the camera obscura and its successors: the photocamera and tv. These technologies produced the spectator who was enthroned by Descartes as the modern autonomous subject. Contemporary digital technologies call for the (...) overthrow of the obsolete paradigm of autonomy. Art paves the way for new subject-productions. (shrink)

The use of instruments for drawing from life is documented since the fifteenth century in a variety of books, drawings and actual devices. Almost all of the instruments invented for this purpose belong to the linear perspective tradition, being conceived as mechanical expressions of a geometric principle, namely the intersection of the visual pyramid. On the basis of a close but controversial analysis of some important paintings of the early Renaissance, David Hockney and Charles Falco have concluded to a widespread (...) use of optical devices in painters' workshops, such as concave mirrors, convex lenses and camera obscuras. Devices of this kind were generally used by optics scholars in their experiments with light and the multiplication of species. However, except for some isolated references to the camera obscura and flat mirrors,1 the documentary history of art is completely silent about the use of these optical tools by painters. Written evidence, in this sense, can be found only in the late sixteenth century but related to map-making more than to painting. Moreover, growing interest in such devices is only evident in connection with the invention of the telescope and its interpretation as an "artificial eye."2. (shrink)

In this collection of essays, Richard Lichtman critically analyzes and applies Marx's theory of ideology to a range of philosophical, social, political and cultural issues. Tracing the changes in Marx's theory from an early «camera obscura» view to a later «constituitive» position, Lichtman shows how the mature theory can be used to understand the function of liberal political theory, equal protection and reverse discrimination, social theory, and finally, in a concluding essay, the nature of contemporary welfare capitalism and (...) a socialist alternative. (shrink)

Barbara Maria Stafford's Body Criticism is analyzed for its reliance upon monstrous bodies as the source of an alternative to the art history of the Enlightenment. A counterculture of the flesh caught in its own vision of skin diseases, bumps, and medical pathologies is painstakingly reproduced as the official opposition to reason's body. The art establishment is required to admit engravers, cartoonists, kaleidoscopists, and phrenologists. Critical questions are raised regarding Stafford's use of iconology and genealogy, as well as a critical (...) difference over the question of the revolutionary status of the postmodern aesthetic traced from the camera obscura to virtual reality perception. (shrink)

RESUMEN Este artículo explora si hay algún fundamento sólido para atribuir a Leonardo da Vinci prioridad en la formulación del símil que lleva a concebir el ojo como una cámara obscura. Aquí, se defiende una posición pesimista. No obstante, el artículo resalta algunos aportes del pintor renacentista que pueden considerarse contribuciones a la consolidación del símil. ABSTRACT The article explores whether there is any solid basis for attributing to Leonardo da Vinci the priority in formulating the simile that leads (...) to conceiving the eye as a camera obscura. Here, a pessimistic position is defended, however, the article highlights some of Leonardo's contributions to the consolidation of the simile. (shrink)

RESUMEN Este artículo explora si hay algún fundamento sólido para atribuir a Leonardo da Vinci prioridad en la formulación del símil que lleva a concebir el ojo como una cámara obscura. Aquí, se defiende una posición pesimista. No obstante, el artículo resalta algunos aportes del pintor renacentista que pueden considerarse contribuciones a la consolidación del símil. ABSTRACT The article explores whether there is any solid basis for attributing to Leonardo da Vinci the priority in formulating the simile that leads (...) to conceiving the eye as a camera obscura. Here, a pessimistic position is defended, however, the article highlights some of Leonardo's contributions to the consolidation of the simile. (shrink)