Summary

1 Part 7 takes as its point of departure a Renaissance image that purports to demonstrate the rules of linear mathematical perspective, to take up historically similar questions of experience and of self. The work connects its own exploration of often-troubled relationships between viewing positions, visual technologies, and notions of modernity, “back to a far earlier period, when the very notion of a ‘technology of viewing’ was first being forged.” It offers a simultaneous crashing together of linear perspective, anamorphosis, and sfumato, together with other visual modes and systems, implicitly comparing early Renaissance revisions to perspective to those realized through digital technology. This raises issues of the possibility of permeable boundaries among objects and between physical and virtual worlds, and radical revisions of notions of space and scale.