Space in/within Embodying Surface(s): In search of perceptual indeterminacy in
the stereoscope of the nineteenth century.
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the impacts of recent technological innovations in
the conception of image–saturated architectural surfaces and form. In
particular, it instrumentally explores the potential of ‘perceptual
embodiment’ promoted by nineteenth-century image-artefacts such as
the stereoscope. It is an unapologetic attempt to promote the
kinaesthetic subject as the inheritor of a post-ocularcentric world. In
order to achieve this end, this paper focuses on Jonathan Crary's
historical analysis of the nineteenth century in Techniques of the
Observer (1993). Crary’s analysis is further tested through the author's
own constructions of a series of explorations into stereographic imageartefacts and surface compositors. Through the use of contemporary
computer technologies, these image-artefacts provide a means through
which to speculate on an emerging schism in the reigning scopic regime
of ocularcentricism and pictorialized surface effects in architecture today.
Fuelled by the emergence of new computer-mediated design and fabrication
technologies, the means of conceiving and constructing architectural form has
never before been so open to radical figurative and procedural transformation
(Kieran and Timberlake 2004). And yet, the reign of ocularcentricism continues
to pervasively effect all aspects of design today. The short-lived “return of the
body to dethrone the disinterested gaze of the disincarnated Cartesian
spectator”(Kieran and Timberlake 2004) was ecstatically celebrated in the art
and architecture of the baroque period. Since the Enlightenment, Architecture
has been fundamentally beholden to visual aesthetics: to privileging the eye
over all other human senses, questions of beauty and judgements of taste
perpetuating the role of vision as the primary human sense organ (Macarthur
2007). Whilst Modernism offered the tangible demonstrations of the
emancipation of human experience from perspectival constructions (Geidion
1967, 1vi), through examples such as Le Corbusier’s promenade architecturale
(Bois and Shepley 1984): “[M]odernity has been normally considered resolutely
ocularcentric…we confront again and again the ubiquity of vision as the master
sense of the modern era”(Jay 1988, 3). The facile image–making architectures
of the 1990s, exemplified by banal billboard buildings such as Cassandra
Fahey’s Pamela Anderson adorned Sam Newman House (1995), and the
procedural developments in architectural form making witnessed over the last
decade in particular, has continued to perpetuate the anti-humanist side-effects
of the post-modernist movements of the 1970s and 80s (Macarthur 1993),
with ”[t]he informational world takes the place of the observed world”(Serres
1989, 45). The figurative and procedural operations typical of these
architectural movements have transformed the role humans have to play in
experiencing the rich tapestry of space and material that architecture continues
1
to offer. The complexity of three-dimensional form is reduced to twodimensional imagistic structures.
This paper therefore is framed as an explorative speculation of the perceptual
embodiment of image-artefacts such as the nineteenth century stereoscope in
challenging how far we have been able to stretch the umbilical cord of our
ocularcentric heritage. It is an unapologetic attempt to promote the kinaesthetic
subject as the inheritor of a post-ocularcentric world. In order to achieve this
end, this paper focuses on Jonathan Crary’s historical analysis of the
nineteenth century and, in particular, the embodying affects of the stereoscope
(Crary 1990). This history is further tested through the author’s own
constructions of a series of explorations into stereographic image-artefacts.
Through the use of contemporary computer technologies, these image-artefacts
provide a means through which to speculate on an emerging schism in the
ocularcentric regime of pictorialized surface effects in architecture today.
The truth and authenticity of what differentiates space from its images is
becoming less clear. Images infiltrate our private homes through our televisions
and envelop every surface of the objects we consume. The ubiquitousness of
the image has lead to a built environment that appears to be increasingly
subservient to the power of the images infused into its architectural fabric. Sign
and symbol blur into a homogenous soup of lost meaning as our buildings,
streets, and cityscapes struggle to promote any tangible relationship with the
gaze of the spectator, or the history of the cities own cultural coming into being,
except on the level of the visual consumption of well-marketed brands, logos,
and catchphrases (Baudrillard 1994); or, as Martin Heidegger has observed,
“world becomes picture, and man is subjectum...[t]he fundamental event of the
modern age is the conquest of the world as picture”(Heidegger 1977, 139).
In the digitally mediated world of the twenty-first century, the concrete
understanding of ‘image’ and ‘space’ has become meta-physically opaque. The
tangible perception of an object from its pictorial representation has never
before been so open to radical transfiguration by contemporary imagetechnologies. The conceptual possibilities presented by the projection and
adhesion of highly immersive digital images onto the surfaces of the built
environment fundamentally challenge our ability to discern space from image;
real objects in space from pictorial illusions of space. Martin Jay observes: “In
the case of the art of describing, we might see another reification at work, that
which makes a fetish of the material surface instead of the three-dimensional
depths”(Jay 1988, 20). These same image-technologies are able to account for
the perceptual distortions that would normally result when viewing static or
moving images from either a stationary viewpoint or while on the move. More
recently, new advances in image-technology have allowed for the generation of
augmented realities whereby imaginary images are virtually collaged onto real
scenes (Azuma 1997). The technological capacity of computers in the
generation of digital images, image-technologies in the projection of digital
images, the fabrication systems used to transcribe images onto almost any
perceivable material, and the serialised large-scale LCD-display technologies
are continuing to rapidly evolve through the direct agency of Moore’s Law
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(Mann 2000). These image-technologies are advancing at a far greater rate
than culture is able to conceptually contemplate their broad implications on
society, the exterior surfaces of the city, or the material fabric of the interior.
The documentation of the History of Visuality—it is safe to say—has yet to be
achieved by any one author. Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer
(1993) none–the–less provides a sound starting point. It chronicles the birth of
spectatorship and the conception of modernity through a restructuring of the
conventional historiography of vision in the nineteenth century. At the crux of
Crary’s argument is an attempt to draw out and redefine the relationship
between a sociological and technological account of history, relative to how the
changing scientific knowledge of sight and vision (from the sixteenth–to–
nineteenth centuries) fundamentally changed the way that observers came to
understand their own visual apparatus and physiognomy. Crary proposes a
history of visuality that is not linear in its evolution, constructed by a series of
contested ‘scopic regimes’—each regime simultaneously attempting to achieve
its own hegemony (Kockelkoren 2003, 59). This paper can be simplistically
understood as an attempt to pluralistically account for a multi-faceted and
pluralistic history between architecture and its imaging.
The agency of this changing social structure on the observer is clearly evident
within the image-artefacts of the nineteenth century, but also in the mediatory
drawing aids of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Alberti’s veil,
Dürer’s grid, and the camera obscura and later the camera lucida. For Martin
Jay, these image-artefacts were welcomed as drawing and composition aids by
artists: “Disciplining and enhancing normal perception, they remedied what
Robert Hooke called the ‘infirmities’ of the senses and led to the ‘enlargement
of the[ir] domination’”(Jay 1993, 65). These image-artefacts directly contributed
to the birth of the subjective observer, and to what Crary believes is the
“sovereignty and autonomy of vision” of the empowered subject and the
“standardisation and regulation” of the disempowered subject (Crary 1990, 150).
These two primary characteristics of modernity redefined the method of
engagement between observer and image and directly affected the way we
understand the location of perception, as either a bodily process (active
participant in perception) or a non-bodily process (passive observer of
perception). Crary’s first category constitutes the grounds on which this paper
casts its scholarly gaze. Crary identified a number of devices that demonstrate
this category, in particular, the embodying effects of the stereoscope. The
theoretical concepts that underpin its construction and application are at the
heart of the textual argument presented by this paper and artistic work
composed by its author.
The stereoscope, developed by Charles Wheatstone in 1833—further
developed and improved by David Brewster—was conceptualised, along with
the majority of image-technologies of the nineteenth century, from an emerging
fascination with the demonstration of perceptual difference (Crary 1990, 120—
22). As Crary has observed, the stereoscope “presupposes perceptual
experience to be essentially an apprehension of difference”(Crary 1990, 120). It
highlighted differing realities made achievable through the manipulation of new
3
knowledge in the nineteenth century concerning binocular vision. Put simply,
perceiving the difference between observing a bowl of oranges and observing a
picture of a bowl of oranges is based on a presumption that the human brain
perceives object from picture through the visual perception of differences
inherent within the two images presented in the stereoscope apparatus. That is,
a viewer perceives an object from a picture because the image-pair
simultaneously witnessed through the left and right eye offer similarities, or
differences, that support, or subvert, the apprehension of the image’s spatial
authenticity. The perception of difference between the two images supports the
perception of the scene as a real bowl of oranges. However, any visual
singularity between the images would support a perception of the scene as that
of a picture. Thus perceptual difference becomes one of the fundamental
concepts that underpin the image-artefacts of the nineteenth century. It reveals
a different set of circumstances through which perception actually occurs and,
as such, where the framing and perceptual mediation of the image actually
occur.
The intent of these devices was as much didactic as spectacular, effectively
demonstrating through deconstruction and re-representation the way human
vision operated. The stereoscope challenged the compositional privilege of the
singular perspectival viewpoint in Art, bringing into question the relation
between the “geometry of the world, and the mind’s eye”(Jay 1993, 152). It
exposed the falsehood of a monocular world presented by the prevailing
systems of Cartesian perspectivalism, undermining the fundamental theories of
Renaissance perspective that presumed the existence of a window-like portal
holding the virtual Cartesian world in constant tension with our own. Whilst
academically interesting today, they were also extremely popular as an English
parlour toy of the day. The rapid proliferation of these devices was in no small
part indebted to the device’s didactic function and its level of spatial
verisimilitude—it was as culturally popular then, as television is today
(Kockelkoren 2003, 71). The London Stereoscope Company’s grand aim in
1854 was to realise a “stereoscope for every home”(Kockelkoren 2003, 51).
Although many of the original stereoscopes used hand-drawn pictures or
paintings as their base imagery, as new image-technologies developed that
offered higher levels of verisimilitude, such as the daguerreotype (Barger and
White 2000), stereoscopes became entirely based on the inherent indexicality
of photography in order to provide a more convincing and photorealistic illusion
of ‘being-there-ness’.
The most renowned example of this use of image-technology was Warren de la
Rhue’s Stereography of the Moon (1858—9), which presented a stereographic
image created through the construction of two photographs of the moon, each
recorded from the same location but photographed several months apart. The
resulting stereograph described the moon’s surface with an effective relief not
achievable through any other representational medium (Kockelkoren 2003, 91).
The resulting effect of the stereoscopic image De la Rue associated with “the
vision of a giant whose eyes are thousands of miles apart”(Kockelkoren 2003,
93). De la Rhue’s example is critical here because it presents an image of the
world that could not be perceived as an everyday human experience. Not only
4
was human vision incapable of perceiving the level of detail that the image
contained with the naked eye, but the temporal aspects embedded within the
stereoscopic image’s means of production created an image that existed
external to the ‘natural world’. As Sir John Herschel has observed, the
stereoscope catalysed “a step out and beyond nature”(Hanks and Silverman
1995), in that the presented images were not capable of being experienced
through non-mediated perception.
The Stereography of the Moon example elucidates the process through which
perceptual differences are observed between two images of the same scene.
The image-pair achieves spatial depth not through the unified perceptual image
but through a temporal process of perceptual introspection between each of the
pictures that facilitates the resulting perception of the stereoscopic image.
Scenes of foreign exotic paradises, understood and communicated to the
general public previously through the grand nineteenth-century panoramas and
through text, found themselves the primary context of the stereoscope.
Ultimately, the device’s unsurpassed illusion, coupled with the intimate
engagement the device shared with the viewer, which was frequently
appropriated for the visual display and distribution of early mass-produced
pornography, resulted in the stereoscope’s fall from public favour. Interestingly,
the relationship between the stereoscope image-technology and erotica has reemerged today in magazines such as SOAK that idealise a ‘full colour 3D in
every issue’. As Charles Baudelaire observed, “[i]t was not long before
thousands of pairs of greedy eyes were glued to the peep-holes of the
stereoscope, as though they were the sky-lights of the infinite”(Baudelaire 1980,
87). Importantly, though, the stereoscope highlights a new form of vision that
was not evident prior to the nineteenth century, vision that was mediated
through autonomy. The image-artefacts of the nineteenth century were thus
products of an autonomous technological mediation through which visual
perception was engaged as a primary locus in bringing the virtual space of the
image into being.
The image that is witnessed through a stereoscope is not perceived as an
instantaneous cognitive reality. The observer does not look into a stereoscope
and instantaneously believe that what they see is a spatial reality, as their own
physiognomy interrogates the differences and similarities in the stereo-image
pair. The durée or protracted viewing of the stereoscopic image occurs as a
consequence of and in time (Bryson 1983b, 87-183). The observer’s fixation on
the image splits perception into temporal registers mediated by the corporeal
autonomy of the image-artefact. The instantaneousness of perception
experienced in artworks composed through the application of perspective,
according to Norman Bryson, “followed the logic of the Gaze rather than the
Glance, thus producing a visual take that was externalised, reduced to one
‘point of view’ and disembodied”(Bryson 1983b). For Bryson, the Gaze
presupposes an atemporal and immobile viewer who “contemplates the visual
field from a vantage point outside the mobility of duration”(Manovich 2001, 105).
The Gaze thus presumes a ‘presentness’ that exists outside of any temporal
engagement with the work by the subject, whether through physical movement
around the pictorial work or through the durée of perception itself (Fried 1967).
5
In the stereoscope, however, we see a reversal in this concept. Although the
observer’s vision is mediated by the device, their perception can no longer be
placed outside of duration. As Roger Shattuck has observed: “The stereoscope
principle abandons the portrayal of motion in order to establish a form of arrest
which resists time. It selects a few images or impressions sufficiently different
from one another not to give the effect of continuous motion, and sufficiently
related to be linked in a discernable pattern”(Shattuck 1983, 51). As such, the
movement that is perceived is not the result of the real physical movement in/on
the surfaces of the image-pair. The stereoscope “highlighted the ways in which
the concomitant denigration of other senses brings with it certain cultural losses
that warrant redress…it has posed the vital question, how open is our sensual
interaction with the world to radical change?”(Jay 1993, 590)
To further understand how these image-technologies might be conceptually and
technically constructed, the author created a series of speculative stereoscopic
image–pairs and anaglyphic image–objects. These demonstrations allowed for
the speculative exploration of the perceptual possibilities of the embodying
image medium, acting to formulate evidence on which to construct a robust
foundation for debate and discussion in this paper. A series of basic image
studies were initially recorded that explored the representation of time and the
durée of the image’s own production and reception through the medium of the
author’s own body, initially mediated through stereoscopic image pairs. These
studies were then expanded to explore the anaglyphic image medium
(Jakubowicz 2000).
The Me, Myself, and I (2003–4) series attempted to transform the initial flat
pictures used to compose the image, each with their own inherent viewpoints,
into a series of stereoscopic images that offer unfamiliar spatial and perceptual
effects. In the subsequent anaglyphic image series, the scopic effect presented
by the stereoscope is replicated and transformed into a single temporally and
spatially indeterminate image. The beholder’s glance is further sequestered
through the image’s compositional structure. That is, the visual content
deployed within the image’s composition is not spatially unifying, or, for the
matter, temporarily consistent. There is an inherent theatricality built into the
image’s construction that suppresses any definitive sense of ‘presentness’ in
the work (Fried 1967).
Each image in the series is technically constructed through the separation of
the different aspects of each image in the stereoscopic pair, separated into a
series of colour registers that are recombined, layered over one another to
create the new anaglyphic image type. In order to perceive the threedimensional effect offered by the image-technology, however, the beholder is
required to gaze on the image through the mediation of a pair of chromatically
bipolar glasses. These glasses facilitate a psychology and physiological
reaction in the perceptual faculties of the beholder, fusing together the different
colour registers (usually red and cyan) to form the cognitive perception of a
three-dimensional object or scene. Interestingly, this image medium has
received newfound popularity in the re-emergence of 3D cinema today, 3D
plasma and LCD television technologies, and in the emergence of augmented
6
reality image-technologies, proliferating through mobile image-technology
devices such as smartphones.
Whilst stereoscopy has been used by artists in work such as Bruno Braquehais’
application of the daguerreotype–based Reclining Female Nude (ca. 1855—
6)(Daguerre et al. 2003), there has been widespread opposition to the use of
the science of optics in Art, exemplified by the widespread criticism of 1960s Op
art, such as The Responsive Eye exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in
1965 and Bridget Riley’s work more specifically (Zanker and Walker 2004). This
same critical fervor exists in opposition to the conceptual adoption of
stereoscopy today. Its primary application today restricted to its verisimilitude
and not affect. The sensation and affect of such optically-based works is “less
as an abstraction than as a woozy sense of gravity visited on the body…the eye
is enervated while the body feels something else: nausea, perhaps, or even a
blinding headache”(Lee 2001, 26). Few artists or designers (including
architects) have acknowledged the paradoxical claims for a near indexical
three-dimensional simulacra: in actuality, according to Jean Baudrillard, “it has
the opposite effect:…The closer one gets to the perfection of the
simulacrum…the more evident it becomes…how everything escapes
representation”(Baudrillard 1994, 107). It is this very rendering of the ‘hidden
truth’ of the image-artifact that is at the heart of the author’s own
demonstrations: to deploy the revelatory capacity of the image’s construction as
a means through which to introspectively expose the indeterminacy of its own
operation and perceptual reception.
It is not the contention of this paper to suggest that architects are not interested
in how their buildings might be received, rather that the tools and prevailing
architectural discourse predisposes the monocular pictorial-ness of buildings
over all else. The anti–humanist and wilful architectural form making of the new
millennium continues to privilege instrumentalised theory, generating an
architectural language of operation over occupation, ideation over experienced
space. I have attempted in this paper to elucidate a potentially powerful
alternative scopic regime that employs affects such as spatial indeterminacy to
protract a beholder’s engagement with the work. This was achieved through
‘cognitive surface disturbance’ effects that sensorially embodied the beholder
as an engaged actor in the process of spatial perception. It is important to
remember that there is no real movement in the surface of the work. Further,
the relative fastness or slowness of an artwork, what Bridget Riley has identified
as the visual tempi of the work (Riley 1999, 51), is played out to great effect in
the author’s anaglyphic demonstrations. The conventional use of generic
geometric shapes that are organised in a repetitive pattern, appears to
gradually distort and change in a predetermined rhythm or periodic structure.
The work, therefore, can be understood as being in constant flux between
multiple states of motion. The durée of viewing (Bryson 1983a, 121), combined
with the necessitated movement of the beholder, effectively embodies the
spectator as an active participant in the reception and cognition of the
anaglyph’s optical effect. As a result, the kinetic affects deployed within
anaglyphic images offer different perceptual experiences to conventional
pictorialised architectural surfaces than the prevailing approaches to façade
7
from composition ocular effects in architecture today. Such image-artefacts
directly engage the binocular physiognomy of the viewer, challenging the
prevailing monocular traditions of architectural representation and the
prescribed viewpoint regimes it consequently entails.
This paper has attempted to instrumentally demonstrate how the cognitive effects
and affects inherent within the stereoscopic image-technology could radically
transform how surfaces are composed; not just within Art, but also within the
domain of Architecture. ‘Perceptual difference’ thus becomes a didactic tool in the
generation of the image–artefact’s own autonomy and, ultimately, the
transfiguration of the image’s surface. In attending to bring this paper to a
conclusion—to reach an intellectual climax, as it were—I find myself returning to
Martin Jay’s closing comments in “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” (1993): “we
may learn to wean ourselves from the fiction of a “true” vision and reveal instead
in the possibilities opened up by the scopic regimes we have already invented
and the ones, now so hard to envision, that are doubtless to come”(Jay 1988, 20).
We are thus perhaps at the beginning of a new and exciting era of embodying
surface effects that are made possible by pervasive image–technologies
proactively deployed to engender the haptic, synesthetic body of the beholder in
ways that, whilst grounded within history, are applied in wholly new and exciting
ways.
8
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Figures:
Fig.1
Sam Newman House (1995)
Architect: Cassandra Fahey
Photographer: Anonymous
Fig.2
Company of ladies watching stereoscopic photographs (c. 1850)
Artist: Jacob Spoel
Fig.3
Stereography of the Moon (1958—9)
Artist: Warren de la Rhue
Fig.4
Me, Myself, and I #7 (2003–4)
Artist: Chris Brisbin
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