Cyborgian Images E-Book

• Herausgeber: Büchner-Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (YoMIS)
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 355

Beschreibung

One of the big myths and metaphors of the postmodern age is the Cyborg, which includes a large amount of different meanings. The Cyborg often expresses the transformation and extension of the body and exemplifies a postmodern range of technical determinism and human comprehension. In this perspective the Cyborg is no longer a concept of science fiction, technical apocalypse or cyberpunk, but more a construct that highlights the relation of modern media technologies within our every day culture; as well as the body and mind of spectators and users of these media systems. We are connected with a variety of poly-sensual media systems, and we use its potential for communication, multiplying knowledge, spatial and temporal orientation or aesthetic experience. Therefore we are a kind of Cyborgs, connected to media by complex multimodal interfaces. This volume monitors and discusses the relation of postmodern humans and media technologies and therefore refers to Cyborgs, interfaces and apparatuses within the perspective of an autonomous image science.

Leseprobe

Lars C. Grabbe, Patrick Rupert-Kruse, Norbert M. Schmitz (eds.)

Yearbook of Moving Image Studies 2015

Cyborgian Images: The Moving Image between Apparatus and Body

Büchner-Verlag

About the Yearbook of Moving Image Studies

The Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (YoMIS) reflects and discusses the academic, intellectual, and artistic dimensions of the moving image with an international perspective. The publication will be enriched by contributions from disciplines like media and film studies, image science, (film) philosophy, perception studies, art history, game studies, neuroaesthetics, phenomenology, semiotics and other research areas related to the moving image in general. 

YoMIS is a double-blind peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary publication aimed at an international academic readership; and therefore an innovative quality publication with a high level of international expertise. It is supported by an interdisciplinary editorial board and will be published annually as epub and pdf. 

YoMIS is a premium publication planned and managed by the founders and administration board of the Research Group Moving Image Science (www.movingimacescience.com).

About this Volume

One of the big myths and metaphors of the postmodern age is the Cyborg, which includes a large amount of different meanings. The Cyborg often expresses the transformation and extension of the body and exemplifies a postmodern range of technical determinism and human comprehension. In this perspective the Cyborg is no longer a concept of science fiction, technical apocalypse or cyberpunk, but more a construct that highlights the relation of modern media technologies within our every day culture; as well as the body and mind of spectators and users of these media systems.

We are connected with a variety of poly-sensual media systems, and we use its potential for communication, multiplying knowledge, spatial and temporal orientation or aesthetic experience. Therefore we are a kind of Cyborgs, connected to media by complex multimodal interfaces. 

This volume monitors and discusses the relation of postmodern humans and media technologies and therefore refers to Cyborgs, interfaces and apparatuses within the perspective of an autonomous image science.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Lars C. Grabbe, Patrick Rupert-Kruse & Norbert M. Schmitz: Introduction

Norbert M. Schmitz: The »Biology of the Apparatus of Perception«: The Evolution-Theoretical Conditions of Illusion Media

Phillip McReynolds: Cyborg Cinema: A Womb with a View

Lars C. Grabbe: Cyborgian Contact with Content? The Phenosemiotics of Interactive Media Systems

Marco Cesario & Lena Hopsch: The Body in Digital Space

Katharina Gsöllpointner: Digital Synesthesia: The Merge of Perceiving and Conceiving

Phylis Johnson: Mirror, Mirror in the Computer Screen: Virtual Bodies and Virtual Worlds as »Becoming« Authentic

Gregory Minissale: Becoming-Cyborg

Jacobus Bracker: Game of Thrones – Game of Meanings: Transmedia Construction of Narrative Meaning and the Life of the Moving Image

Robert Belton: Critical Cyborgs? Hitchcock and the Hermeneutic Spiral

Authors

Acknowledgements

This publication is based on the special scientific cooperation of the University of Applied Sciences in Kiel and the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel (Germany).

The idea of the international concept of the Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (YoMIS) was systematically developed by the editors Dr. Lars C. Grabbe, Prof. Dr. Patrick Rupert-Kruse and Prof. Dr. Norbert M. Schmitz.

A special thanks goes to the University of Applied Sciences in Kiel and the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel for funding and support.

Finally the editors wish to thank the authors and the members of the editorial board for excellent work, global thinking and inspiration.

Lars C. Grabbe, Patrick Rupert-Kruse & Norbert M. SchmitzAugust 2015

Introduction

Lars C. Grabbe, Patrick Rupert-Kruse & Norbert M. Schmitz

The interdisciplinary perspective of an autonomous image science is not only influenced by the inflation and power of digital images, but also by the fact, that modern images are often moving images. The Yearbook of Moving Image Studies (YoMIS) wants to provide an international discussion forum for the representatives that are working on the topic of images and visual culture.

The basic idea of the Yearbook reaches back to 2011 and is closely connected with the founding of the Research Group Moving Image Science (RGMIS) in Kiel (Germany). Founded at the Christian-Albrechts-University as a doctoral seminar, the RGMIS worked on all topics of modern media theory, focussing on the essential role of the visual contents and structures of media in a multimodal context. The interdisciplinary research of the group includes media and film studies, image science, philosophy of media and mind, art history, aesthetics, game studies, theories of perception and psychology and other research areas related to the moving image. The academic engagement lead to a series of conferences termed »Moving Images,« which intend to discuss the static concept of images used in traditional image sciences (in terms of static pictures or images), in a modern perspective according to new media technologies and their moving images. The fundamental consideration of founding YoMIS is the connection of German, European and international research to improve the academic exchange of ideas. Therefore YoMIS is conducted as electronic publication to enhance the range of impact and to facilitate the production process. The Yearbook is based on an extraordinary scientific cooperation of the University of Applied Sciences Kiel and the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel and is published by Dr. Lars C. Grabbe, Prof. Dr. Patrick Rupert-Kruse and Prof. Dr. Norbert M. Schmitz.

The first issue of the double-blind peer-reviewed Yearbook explores Cyborgian Images: The Moving Image between Apparatus and Body. The focus lies on modern and interdisciplinary perspectives on the structure of moving images. Modern images (movies, TV, displays etc.) are often depending on multifaceted media systems and poly-sensual apparatuses, which exemplify multimodal and intermodal mechanisms. These multimodal media systems interact in specific ways with the sensory system of the recipient and generate various levels of perceptual states with different intensities of comprehension and bodily experience. In this perspective neither media systems (systems of the moving image) nor the subjective states of reception are passive processes: it is instead a highly interactive and inter-systemic media relation.

Movement, temporal dynamics, spatiality and additional modalities (speech, sound, music, colour, font, scripture, texture etc.) interact with the sense modalities, memories and process of mental anticipation and create a complex and hybrid structure of medium, recipient and sensory stimulus processing. This refers to the fact, that on the one hand the technological structure of displays and interfaces are relevant, and that on the other hand the role of the lived-body and mind is crucial for an understanding of the effects of the moving image. It is the interaction of image, apparatus and recipient that activates the images and their specific pictorial (and often multimodal) representation and unfolds its semantic and semiotic content. This remarks are clear in the context of proto-cinematographic art and cinematographic apparatuses but become more obvious in the context of recent evolution in media technologies and digital art: new displays, interfaces and poly-sensual media systems like Oculus Rift (OculusVR), Kinect (Microsoft), Second Life (Linden Lab) or Aireal and 3D Tactile Rendering (Disney) promote the progressive embodiment of the recipient or user, and, in doing so, they force the amalgamation of the recipient with the materiality and content of moving images.

Therefore Cyborgian Images addresses the broad field of the relationship between the technological dimension of the medium, its aesthetic and structural impact on the representational or mental status of the moving image and the effect on the body of the recipient, including affective and somatic reactions. With the term Cyborg we want to address the feedback processes between the recipient and the medium as technology as well as content or image. Additionally we want to shine a light on the fusion of mind, body and media, on extension through and incorporation of images, and how this melting affects our bodily reactions and mental processes. So, the concept of the Cyborg in connection to the concept of modern images increases the range of analytical data and, hopefully, will compile a useful interdisciplinary focus of modern moving image studies.

Norbert M. Schmitz (Germany) understands perception as a bodily structure and result of the human evolution. Against the traditional concept of a body-mind-dichotomy he analyses the different forms of images with regards to its anthropologic precondition as a function of the human body. He argues against an ontological viewpoint of media and conceptualises the development of visual artefacts (between central perspective and cyberspace) as a capacity of adaption to nature by culture. In this media-anthropological perspective it is less about objectivity of representation, which still influences art- and media theory, but more about functional capacity of image media in the perspective of an image science. The history of art and media art is then a considerable special case of the common image culture and Schmitz methodically connects iconology with the biological constructivism.

Phillip McReynolds (USA) addresses the concept of a Cyborg approach to the moving image and tries to clarify the status of the phrase »between apparatus and body« of the subtitle of this volume. He argues, that the Cyborgian view suggests that images suture or stitch together apparatus and body into Cyborg, but this is different from traditional approaches to cinema where the image is viewed alternately as a window upon reality or a screen between the viewer and the world. Cyborgian images are active entities that functions as a field of production that forms a hybrid kind of creature: the Cyborg image is more a matter of poiesis (bringing forth) than one of (an)alethia (revealing/concealing).

Marco Cesario (France) and Lena Hopsch (Sweden) are investigating the perception of space in the context of digital architecture. Within a phenomenological perspective they argue with the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh which is the common background of the dialogue between the body and the world and the bodily intertwining of perception and the perceived world. They contrast architectural and urban structures that are designed for the experience of the body’s motor faculties, with the potential of digital design. They try to answer the question if the modification of space-time categories the body and brain’s treatment of spatial perceptions open new ways of experience.

Katharina Gsöllpointner (Austria) introduces the arts-based-research project Digital Synesthesia that gives evidence for providing synesthetic experiences for non-synesthetes. In this perspective synesthesia is a special case of perception and can serve as an evident example for the research of perception in general. She explains, that digital art can serve as an aesthetic analogy to synesthesia and is therefore useful to explore its aesthetic components. Furthermore she argues, that research findings indicate that perception is not only a process of mere sensory-based stimuli but also influenced by semantic and conceptual inducers. With two exemplary digital artworks she describes structural (syn)aesthetic correlations between synesthesia and digital art.

Phylis Johnson (USA) examines the process of identity construction within the virtual world Second Life. She focuses on the visually embodied avatar as a participant in the virtual community amidst technological convergence. The avatar cannot be defined in isolation and is perceived as a real world extension, reflecting the human form and/or spirit at least partially; either consciously or subconsciously, in attempts to create (or escape) meaning in both reality and virtuality. The author creates a model for understanding how virtual worlds might be conceptualized as authentic transformative agents during identity construction. The author has been a long time active member of Second Life as an educator, content creator, and journalist, and that offers her a unique perspective and perhaps bias toward new technologies and online communication and interaction.

Gregory Minissale (New Zealand) examines a perspective on the topic of understanding movies by a clarification of the relationship of technology and psychology. In this process of film experience the author finds evidence for a so-called process of becoming-cyborg. Herein lies not the rationale of order, but a-semiotic, chaotic and contingent exchange between matter and mind. It is Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) that is useful for exemplify the details of how multisensory, kinaesthetic, abstract, conceptual, technological, material and neurological entanglements sustain becoming-cyborg.

Jacobus Bracker (Germany) argues for an embodied view on the understanding of the moving image. In combination with the theory of transmedia storytelling he develops a concept of double-dynamic images in the context of the television series Game of Thrones (2011–), which can be described as a mode of cyborgian images: by the dynamic material moving image and the images embodied through perception of other media. The cyborgian image is therefore composed of fragments of the material image and of images and knowledge stored in the living body.

Robert Belton (Canada) refers to the importance to use a cognitive approach towards understanding the moving image. His arguments integrate cognitive science and psychologically inspired approaches to the analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Of particular importance are the concepts of the hermeneutic spiral, priming and confirmation bias, which together explain why reinterpretation happens as often as it does. The role of the recipient is being transformed into a metaphorical or critical Cyborg, which is actively participating and interacting with the moving image.

The Cyborg metaphor has its own history and impact but it seems still important to (re)think it under the condition of moving images or poly-sensual media systems, because it is a concept to refocus the problem of the interface and the connectivity of medium, body and mind. Probably the term Cyborg refers to a kind of apocalyptic Science Fiction scenario, but on the other hand, it denotes explicitly the potential of extensions of the human body and new dimension of the intertwining of body and mind. In this perspective Cyborgian Images could only be the starting point of a new range of interdisciplinary media theory in which all aspects of the body-mind dynamic will play a very important role in the future.

The »Biology of the Apparatus of Perception«: The Evolution-Theoretical Conditions of Illusion Media

Norbert M. Schmitz

Abstract

With the question – what is an image? – the modern art theory tried to capture the specifity and autonomy of images to support an independent perspective beyond the technical access by iconography, semiotics or cultural theory. But this question also implies an ontological point of view that state images as self-contained artefacts far from its natural historic and cultural historic conditionality.

This article argues against this ontological viewpoint of media and conceptualises the development of visual artefacts (between central perspective and cyberspace) as a capacity of adaption to nature by culture. In this media-anthropological perspective it is less about objectivity of representation, which still influences art- and media theory, but more about functional capacity of image media in the perspective of an image science. The history of art and media art is then a considerable special case of the common image culture and the article methodically connects iconology with the biological constructivism.

Keywords

illusionism, realism, perceptual psychology, perceptual anthropology, Gombrich, biological constructivism, biological objectivity.

1.Body versus Mind – Nature versus Culture

When the moving images between apparatus and body are juxtaposed in the field of illusion media, then it apparently implies an antithesis: ›Authentic body experience‹, in German ›Leiblichkeit‹ in the tradition of phenomenology (e.g. Zur Lippe 1988), versus ›estranged machine bodies‹ or more fundamentally, the contrast of body and mind. To contradict this opposition deeply rooted in Western intellectual history today is almost a commonplace in discourses equally in both image and media studies. However, in my view, a consciousness of how much intellectual structures and in particular those of our perception are also themselves physical, functional structures incurred through evolution has not yet established completely itself in our ›theoretical daily lives‹. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the question of the representation status of the static and dynamic illusionary image, which is still understood as being an extrinsic factor of human nature. Especially in an image theory determined by the art of classical modernism it is necessary to free ›the eye‹ from the traditions of external representationalism. In fact, our ability to perceive an objective, external world and to orientate ourselves in it is the result of our special evolutionary adaptation to the environment and thus part of our physical structure. This fact is determinative for the particular nature of hominids as an essential ›engine‹ of the formation of the neo-cortex. Thus, the apparatus of simulation are only possible and comprehensible in their correspondence – I would like to say equivalence – to just this physical structure. This applies equally to the simple perception of forms in Palaeolithic cave paintings as it does to those ›optical illusions‹ from Renaissance painting to dynamic cyberspace. The question of the ›objectivity‹ of representation, which has long been central to the image sciences, should be reversed, namely towards the constitutive conditions and forms with which Homo sapiens as a species has attempted to represent certain sections of its environment in the course of its evolutionary development. This biological selection of environmental characteristics is the criterion of the ›objectivity‹ of human perception and not an ›ontological truth‹. Accordingly, the apparatus for the creation of static and dynamic images corresponds functionally to these physical structures. We are thus concerned with the biological-functional fundamentals of a visual turn in our culture (Mitchell 1995).

The argument of the physicality of our perception in the following is limited to a classical perspective for the sake of brevity. However, the same biological-functional statements can be applied to moving images, whether analogue or digital.

In the invitation to this Yearbook of Moving Image Studies, the editors determine that:

Modern perspectives on the structure of moving images exemplify a complex multimodal mechanism that interacts in specific ways with the recipient and various levels of the perception of images. In this case, neither moving images nor the subjective reception are passive processes. Movement, time, space and different modalities interact with senses, memories and anticipation and create a complex hybrid structure of medium, recipient and sensory stimulus processing.

And it is exactly this which can only be completed within a given anthropologically determined framework. The apparatus in turn simulates certain functions of these physical structures of perception incurred via evolution. Of course, this is only partially possible, given the complexity of the human body. However, the technological developments are extraordinary particularly regarding the potential illusions of moving as well as still images. Since the rash utopias of AI research into the possibilities of artificial simulation of homo sapiens have been fulfilled as little as the promise of complete illusion in the sense of total immersion, it seems to me to urgently suggest the drama of changes not only in our visual everyday culture to re-shift the perspective towards the biological conditions of our perception, in order to then put them back into a relation to the cultural genesis of simulation technologies. We are thus concerned with the integration of cultural and natural history.

Of course, this cannot be done here in its entirety, rather the biological preconditions of world recognition as a building block or – from the point of view of the image sciences – the reasons why we make images should be explained from a position of biological constructivism. It is precisely this perspective by Riedl (1980), but also principally by Maturana and Varela (1983) which allows us to understand how much our world, i.e. the possibility of simulating it using apparatus, is the result of the constructive power of our brains and thus our bodies, without having to slip into any form of culturalism or even into the radical, idealistic tradition of the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

But first, the biological argument in the following is made strongly in order to refute the fashionable adaptation of biological research in the humanities of the present in certain aspects, namely inasmuch as it is to be shown that a human being can certainly only be understood from the perspective of its unique adaptation and thus ultimately, albeit surprisingly, remains the epitome of creation, or at least the one we know. It would be really interesting to attempt some discourse-historical considerations. In the face of the brevity offered above however I wish to take a different and ultimately friendlier path by attempting to make modern evolution-theory thinking simply fruitful for particular problems in the humanities. The astonishing thing is an inner-biological perspective change. While older biology initially stressed man’s relationship with animals in the sense that they rightly showed us phylogenetic conditions, i.e. they concretely showed us how primate behaviour remains effective behind idealistically excessive cultural reshaping, a newer, namely neurobiological viewpoint is characterised by the fact that it emphasises the specifics of mankind as a result of evolutionary-biological thought (see McGinn 2001, Paun 2001, and Hoffman 2000).

This is to be discussed in the following based on the question of the objectivity of perception. To what extent this is fundamental for the current media-theoretical debate on simulation needs no discussion. In the sense of the long tradition of debate in the image sciences, but also from the perspective of the issue itself, I shall begin with the discussion of the central perspective as the most important, modern, illusionary technique not only of the old but also the new digital media. While their relative objectivity is initially represented as the simulation of particular, natural adaptations to the environment, in the second part and based on this I shall at least touch on the evolutionary conditions of the natural history of a vertebrate’s eye. In doing so, we are naturally not concerned with a concrete phylogenetic demolition, moreover the decisive factor is the evolutionary perspective whose understanding, in my opinion, is the condition of the discussion on the most sophisticated cultural techniques of image generation. In a reversal of the evolutionary process, the argument proceeds as it were from above, i.e. from the most complex and the youngest down to the oldest and original. This is partly due to the brevity offered, but corresponds however to the purely humanistic interest in knowledge. For, in the following, we are concerned with the relevance of evolutionary biology for some of the currently much debated questions on the status of human perception. My aim is a pronounced departure from the biologistic reductionism of the past, which has been hawked in humanistic literature to date, in order to create understanding for the cultural-historical relevance of evolutionary biology for the image sciences (see Lepenies 1976). For some, it may come as a surprise to learn how much these emphasise the uniqueness of our nature and especially our sight (see Jahn 1990).

The following comes from the pen of a humanities’ scholar and – if it does not wish to lapse into amateurism – can hardly develop an actual biology of sight at the current state of research. Here, the state of research is still too open and currently fashionable references of many a humanities’ scholars to one or other neurophysiological theory can most likely be subsumed under the heading of decorative biologism. One must however not tread on the moving floor of the current debate in neurobiology: it is sufficient to make the methodology and general perspective of evolutionary biology fruitful for arts and media studies. Only such parts of the biology of perception or rather the evolutionary biology based on it need be presented, the validity of which is consensual among biologists. Questioning these fundamentals themselves would be like viewing the earth as a disc – and this would be nothing less than a final line-up to reverse by suppression the narcissistic insult, which once dethroned us all.

However, in order to immediately clear up certain well-founded reservations of the reader, a note in advance: there is the sorry saga of Darwinism, which as Social Darwinism was able to celebrate sad triumphs even in the humanities and arts. One only has to think of the role of the gloomy hereditary ideas in the international nationalism of the 19th century. It is also not so long ago that National Socialism in its crude beliefs and even in its visual aesthetics invoked racially pure heroes and the brazen blood laws of nature and thus wanted to put back into history the ›Struggle for Existence‹. All this does not need to be put into perspective in the manner of ideological criticism, it is simply biological nonsense. It will not be discussed further here either. It seems more important to me that a biologism not always unrelated to this distortion formed our ideas of ›naturalness‹ in the 1960s and 70s – one can think of a simplistic ethology – and invited us to romantically escape from such hard truths (see Lorenz 1965, and a review of historical discourse in Bagemihl 2000). Only all this is not modern evolutionary biological thinking, and it seems essential to me to make this clear in the introduction that this ideologically determined trench warfare between certain pre-scientific worldviews can be biologism, but never biology and certainly not evolutionary biology. The complex nature of man was reduced to its relationship with the primates in the sense that nothing remained of Titian than a painting monkey in Venetian costume (see Morris 1988). The special thing about the unique species human beings, i.e. the biological characteristics of its astonishing evolutionary success, remains disregarded. The humanists often react one-sidedly: the classical anthropologies of Plessner and Gehlen – although the latter in his deliberations did try to include the contemporary status of biological knowledge as broadly as possible – are still tarnished by the idea of a fundamental opposition between man and nature, which acknowledges natural human conditioning but sees it only as a copy of its uniqueness (see Schultz). Either it suppressed the uniqueness of the human species or it was developed out of an opposition to nature. Today, however, it is necessary to grasp particularly the speciality and the uniqueness of the human species as its nature in nature (see Brock 1996).

I would like in advance to call this view a biological humanism which distances itself from old humanism as from new biologism alike, or to modify an apercu of Gerald Edelman, Nobel laureate for medicine: we are concerned with Darwinian humanism (see Edelman 1992). The old man from Down, who frightened himself in one of his recently published secret diaries and denounced himself suspiciously as the devil’s advocate, would not be a little surprised (see Desmond and Moore 1991).

If I now begin with the problem of the central perspective as a condition of the illusionary techniques of modern technical media from photography to cyberspace, it is consciously at a point, which has long been considered as settled. The assertion that objectivity would be added to the central perspective seems to be refuted by the simple fact that illusionist mimesis developed at a relatively late date only within a particular culture – and within the history of art as a whole. Taking into account the diversity of traditional artefacts seems to refute the claim of hegemony of the Western central perspective. In fact, the recourse to pre-modern and non-European ›non-illusionistic‹ image cultures was one of the key legitimisation strategies of classical modernism, which paralleled the scholarly appreciation of these image cultures denounced by Hegel as primitive. While the positivism of the 19th century understood the development of the central perspective as a linear progression to an objective representation technique, not only different visual forms were to be recognised as equivalents but also as an expression of alternative possibilities of human sight itself (c.f. Clausberg 1996). Or to formulate it in a more contemporary form and from the perspective of cultural anthropological relativism: the central perspective is a product and component of a particular historical figuration, of a dispositive of power, whose representation as natural implications should conceal its ideological ones (see Foucault 1971). The fact that the international triumphant parade of the central perspective image, which almost completely dominates the worlds of the media between East and West, merged with the spread of European colonialism and imperialism, seems to support such considerations. Thus, we are concerned with sight or seeing as a construction of dominion or rather as a basic social figuration. These and other arguments are likely to be well known. Although in the following I shall not expand this very complex discussion on cultural reshaping, I wish to have brought them to mind to illustrate the relevance and justify further research questions, which can be linked to my considerations.

However, there is a fallacy in all these relativisations of the central perspective order of sight. They accuse historicity not only of the cultural objectification of visual culture but also of human sight itself. This is indeed problematic since as obvious as the art-historical evolution of image arrangement is, the less the modern biology of perception gives us any hint of a change in human sight within the comparably short biological history of homo sapiens – this has been well documented by an impressive abundance of paleontological knowledge and the physiological and evolution-historical knowledge based on it. Sight is thus at the same time a piece of natural history, i.e. a history of the evolution of sight calculable in millions of years, the beginnings of which lie way before the first appearance of hominoids. The cultural history of sight and its artefacts can only be understood as the second history on the basis of the first.

Or more precisely: how do the historicity of media history and a determined constancy of the biological conditions of sight remain non-referential to one another? To answer this – to be reasoned in the following – requires further cultural-historical models, which somehow have to start from certain anthropological conditions.

2.The Biology of the Central Perspective

In the 1950s, Ernst Gombrich in his apology of mimesis Art and Illusion (Gombrich 1960, 200) sought to refute the relativism of modernity with reference to the irrelevant question of the degree of perfection of illusionistic art. He rehabilitated, in a sense, the aesthetics of the Renaissance, when he took seriously its struggle with the art of perspective as artistic content.

Such considerations appeared at the time of writing against a then-dominant avant-garde aesthetics more like a rearguard action of old mimetic theories whereas today they gain new relevance not only in face of a new realism of digital simulations, but above all via their relation to the biology of knowledge. For Gombrich, sight is inextricably linked to that objective knowledge whose optical conditions were simulated by a trick of light by the central perspective construction of the Renaissance. One must recall the opposition to the positions of the avant-garde in order to assess the provocation of these theses for the aesthetics of modern art studies. For, the avant-garde – at least its radical representatives – understood emphatically a recourse to original and immediate sight as an emancipation of the purely visible, as a liberation of the eye. In the Supremacist manifesto writings, Malevich proclaimed a Non-Objective World and explicitly called for the renunciation of all earthly things – pragmatically speaking of the structures of the perceptual apparatus (see Malevich 1927 and 1962, 43f). Reflected, artistically demanding sight in a perfectly moral sense should explain the delusion that for example we can recognise a Renaissance interior in a mixture of oil colours in the Stanze. Bazon Brock decidedly contradicted the alleged right of artists and performers to a non-objective world beyond anthropological bondage on the basis of the Black Square:

No observer of the work … can fail to ask the question of why this work was produced by Malevich, since we are forced to accept from the workings of our natural, naive perception that everything happens for a reason and that the utterances of a human being can never be so arbitrary that there is no connection between him and his utterances [as a sensory-specific natural being] (Brock 1990, 312).

It was precisely this Malevich who in the stage sets for Chlebnikow’s Victory over the sun celebrated the triumph of a new ›supreme being‹ over old ›natural‹ sight by abolishing the rule of the celestial body, on whose light the structure of the eye’s perception is based.

Gombrich’s position however within the aesthetics discourse of classical modernism is provisionally put on hold. First, I would like to recall some particularly relevant elements of the complex argumentation of the critical rationalists and then discuss its subtle concept of realism in terms of its natural-scientific implications.

Figure 1: Ames`Chairs (Gombrich 2002, 210).

The central theses can be well demonstrated by an amazing experiment by the artist Adelbert Ames, Jr., which Gombrich uses again and again for his argument (figure 1):

Most of these demonstrations are arranged in the form of peep shows. One of them which can be fairly successfully illustrated makes use of three peepholes through which we can look with one eye at each of three objects displayed in the distance. Each time the object looks like a tubular chair. But when we go round and look at the three objects from another angle, we discover that only one of them is a chair of normal shape. The right-hand one is really a distorted, screwy object which only assumes the appearance of a chair from the one angle at which we first looked at it; the middle one presents an even greater surprise: it is not even one coherent object but a variety of wires extended in front of a backdrop on which is painted what we took to be the seat of the chair. One of the three chairs we saw was real, the other two illusions. So much is easy to infer from the photograph. What is hard to imagine is the tenacity of the illusion, the hold it maintains on us even after we have been undeceived. We return to the three peepholes and, whether we want it or not, the illusion is there (Gombrich 1960 and 2000, 248f.).

The distinctive tenacity with which this illusion maintains itself is essential for the evolutionary interpretation of mimesis and one should bear it in mind. But first the experiment seems to rather confirm the criticism of the Western central perspective by the avant-garde, as well as of post-history and of deconstructionism, i.e. the accusation of a lack of objectivity and the deceptiveness of illusion. In fact, comparable experiments of classical Gestalt-psychology were and are still popular arguments for the deconstruction of mimesis. Even Gombrich, who studied also Popper, clearly distances himself from the naive representational realism of the earlier positivist aesthetics, which had basically become obsolete due to Kant’s transcendental criticism (see Popper 1974). He refutes any ontological relationship between the image and the object pictured, only to rehabilitate them at the same time on a more limited level. He assumes instead a relative objectivity of modern illusionary techniques in painting and photography, which he alone justifies pragmatically due to their functionality. This form of art-historical argument – one may say today media-scientific – thus corresponds to the functional perspective of today’s evolutionary biology, which also argues in a purely procedural and structural manner and not just ontologically. This indicates biological constructivism. Biology itself cannot and does not want to give an answer to the metaphysical question of truth. However, we shall first move away from such epistemological questions and turn our attention to the concrete conditions of human sight.

The distinctive tenacity with which this illusion maintains itself is essential for the evolutionary interpretation of mimesis and one should bear it in mind. But first the experiment seems to rather confirm the criticism of the Western central perspective by the avant-garde, as well as of post-history and of deconstructionism, i.e. the accusation of a lack of objectivity and the deceptiveness of illusion. In fact, comparable experiments of classical Gestalt-psychology were and are still popular arguments for the deconstruction of mimesis. Even Gombrich, who studied also Popper, clearly distances himself from the naive representational realism of the earlier positivist aesthetics, which had basically become obsolete due to Kant’s transcendental criticism (see Popper 1974). He refutes any ontological relationship between the image and the object pictured, only to rehabilitate them at the same time on a more limited level. He assumes instead a relative objectivity of modern illusionary techniques in painting and photography, which he alone justifies pragmatically due to their functionality. This form of art-historical argument – one may say today media-scientific – thus corresponds to the functional perspective of today’s evolutionary biology, which also argues in a purely procedural and structural manner and not just ontologically. This indicates biological constructivism. Biology itself cannot and does not want to give an answer to the metaphysical question of truth. However, we shall first move away from such epistemological questions and turn our attention to the concrete conditions of human sight.

Gombrich initially speaks only of the identity of a particular stimulus figuration on the retina and of a similar one on the canvas. His basic thesis is that certain ciphers, formal constellations, e.g. a particular arrangement of colours on a canvas or emulsions on a photographic plate, can have no concrete mimetic quality as such, and that they simply represent only colours and shapes. This was the known aim of the radical extraction of purely formal image values in the objective art works in the Analysis of Old Masters by the classical avant-garde (see Schmitz 1999, 242f.). The perception of the outside world actually begins in the next stage, namely the neural processing of these perfectly meaningless stimuli. To create an illusion it is sufficient to produce the widest possible congruence of these optical figurations on the retina and image: »One cannot insist enough that the art of perspective aims at a correct equation: it wants the image to appear like the object and the object like the image« (Gombrich 1960 and 2000, 257).

This equation is completely independent of any material qualities of the trigger which generates them, i.e. the things of the outside world. Largely similar figurations on the retina – Gombrich speaks of views – can be produced by a human face, an array of colours or of light spots on a television tube. In the extreme case, as the experiment by Ames shows, a wide variety of objects can create one and the same view, and cannot be differentiated by the brain. Thus, it also becomes clear at the same time that the actual optics – which are reasonably well simulated by the central perspective – can still not make sight possible on their own. We are only concerned then so to speak with correspondences of sign-like figurations that first need to be interpreted in order to be seen (see Fellmann 1998, 191).

At this point it is necessary to combine the gestalt psychological arguments of Gombrich with two further aspects of the biological perception and cognition theories. First: the neural structure of the brain determines that visual stimuli themselves cannot really be ›seen‹ paradoxically, i.e. that the subjective perception arises as a reconstruction of the autopoietically organised brain from the optical stimuli (see Thompson 1994). At this point it must again be emphasised that since I am not a natural scientist myself, I would like if possible to leave the current neurophysiology debates unregarded since any relevant judgment would be incompetent (figure 2).

Figure 2: Human Brain (Ditfurth, figure 1).

But without supposing to give preference to a specific model in a wide range of current theories on the brain, it can still be considered as a consensus of today’s brain research that the subjectively perceived qualities of e.g. colour, light and movement are nothing more than re-translations of the original stimuli ›encoded‹ into neural signals. Our inner world is simply a construction of our brain independent of the problem of ontological objectivity. It completely translates the diversity of the most different qualities of perception – of which only the smallest part finds entry through the bottleneck of our limited senses – into the perennial ›medium‹ of neural information patterns, from which the subjective sensations of different sensory qualities are subsequently created. This is also valid for sight. The brain transforms certain figurations of light on the retina into neural codes whose internal links create an image of the world at the most complex and non-exhaustively researched level (see Humphrey 1992). I am keeping these formulations consciously very open and simple since I am concerned less with the highly complex process of how the subjective feelings of world- and self-consciousness are created in detail. What has already been said is sufficient for the question of the status of the modern perspective model, for it is not about sight, but its essential partial simulation. All that matters is that principally different objects without prejudice to their objective differences can be translated by the nervous system into the same old code. Thus, the central perspective does not simulate sight as a whole, but only its optical conditions, but this more than any other model of perspective. It is precisely this which is so forcibly demonstrated by Ames’ experiment: in exceptional cases, completely different things can generate the same stimulus constellations or – according to Gombrich – the same view. If these stimulus constellations, i.e. the input, are identical, then the brain has to translate them into the same neuronal information, and to understand them concretely as reality. In this sense, each deconstruction of mimesis which contrasts direct perception with the mediation of mimetic techniques even inadequately – such as apparatus systems – ignores the often mediated nature of the organic perceptual and cognitive apparatus (Fellmann 1998, 189 and for a review of this analysis Kamper 1996).

It should be emphasised at this point that these reflections on the structure of the visual perception of humans is incomplete in terms of the purely optical-mechanical conditions of the dynamic system eye