Composites and Linear Perspectives. Thoughts on Hito Steyerl – In Free Fall.

Steyerl’s essay in her compendium of writings called The Wretched of the Screen details the apparent downfall of linear perspective in contemporary culture. Steyerl’s debunking of linear perspective looks at the history of its origins in Arabic navigation to Renaissance art. Its prominence in culture though is beginning to crumble according to Steyerl, thanks in part to other viewing methods brought about by an influx of technology. Firstly, Steyerl outlines the issues with linear perspective and its assertion of a ‘true’ perspective, explaining that it represents an idealised and purely theoretical viewpoint. One important observation, as Steyerl references Panofsky here, that this seemingly objective viewpoint is “one-eyed”, ignoring the complications of stereovision’s role on perspective, as well as the subjective interferences of movement or material distortion. It is an abstraction, a theoretical idealistic representation of human sight. It is an important point to question the validity of not only traditional forms of representation like linear perspective, but also to question our own concept of vision. After all, we see a composite image of 2 x 2D representations. What do we truly know about the ‘mechanisms’ which compose our sight? We know much about the mechanisms of the eye. So much so we have created a vast array of media which imitate the eye. We are now at the point where we can not only imitate its functions, but we can improve on them. However, how much do we know about the brains function and mediation in formation of our sight? Can we call what we see truly 3D?

Steyerl mentions the familiarity we have in contemporary culture to alternative perspectives. The growth of aerial views being one of them, with the rise of Google maps, satellite imagery and drone views. Steyerl questions the nature of the viewer in these perspectives, as a theoretical or imaginary floating viewer. In fact, for her it questions the stability of the ground as stable. “Just as linear perspective established an imaginary stable observer and horizon, so does the perspective from above establish an imaginary floating observer and an imaginary stable ground.” This, for me, call into question a greater power of the composite image. A great amount of Google Map/Earth is a composite of a wealth of satellite imagery, taken at different times, of varying quality and often with environmental interferences. These composites are the imaginary stable ground which Steyerl writes about which inherit great power as objective views. I’m sure one-day Google will manage to ‘capture’ the earth in one big screen grab but this alludes to another problem with ‘capture’ I mentioned in Towards a Generative 3D-Error Methodology, that ‘captures’ negate the complexities of ephemera, time and materiality.

Again, there is a link to Baudrillard’s hyperreality in simulation and simulacra with these composites becoming more powerful and real than ‘reality’. One mechanical reproduction of our own sight, photography suffers from this allure towards the objectivity of linear perspective. A medium which is so powerful it also has a crucial role in the formulation of ‘composite images’ such as photogrammetry and satellite maps. Steyerl says of photography’s relation to space “The tyranny of the photographic lens, cursed by the promise of its indexical relation to reality, has given way to hyperreal representations – not of space as it is, but of space as we can make it – for better of worse.”