Jonathan cheng the screen and the cyborg hts 2015

Jonathan Cheng 4th History and Theory Tutor: Francesca Hughes Architectural Association December 2015

The Screen and the Cyborg:

Tracing Alberti’s Window in Mobile Technology First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen1

1. IBM Simon hand held touch screen phone first released August 1994 1

Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft p. 27

Leon Battista Alberti's treatise on the window set in motion a stream of analyses on how the window has trained our eyes to produce and perceive space in a calculated manner. From understanding the core perspective mechanisms, to representing space, to composing fragments of an historical narrative, the Renaissance window established a relationship of control over the viewing body by locking on to the eye like a prosthetic. The window signifies a powerful spatial metaphor that surrounds us on a variety of scales. We peer through them to the outside world, taking stock of our body in relation to objects and enclosure. They aid us in measuring and figuring scale, filtering and antagonizing. The window is a play on our organic eye, compounding our psychic interpretation of scenarios and inspiring contemplation. The window as a screen locks our body in constant reference to itself, its terminus, the frame, engages our eye to take measure of what is within, mechanically, like a prosthetic. Understood in the context of contemporary media, the window can begin to be imagined as part of a science fictional repertoire, taking different forms of extensions on our bodies and, in a sense, begin to blend with a modern discourse on the idea of the cyborg.

The definition of the cyborg is unique to the 20th century referring to the 1960's advances in space travel, and the imaginative apparatuses that would sustain our organic processes - but the conceptual origins have roots in literature from much earlier.

Currently there are new interpretations of what it means to be a cyborg - falling in line with the kind of language established by Donna Haraway in her Cyborg Manifesto of 1985 - that materializes in the multiplicity of minute technological advances that shape our everyday knowledge of the body and its performance. One contemporary discourse emerging from the sub-categorical field of cyborg anthropology looks at the psycho-physiological impact of mobile screen devices on our interpersonal connections on local and global scales, as well as with our engagement with history and the

development of self. Looking at the mobile screen as part of the history of window metaphors can we come to understand how, with the development of a calculated perspectival way of “seeing through”, we may have already been mechanized to read and compose space as cyborgs? Considering Alberti's methodology, what qualities of our cyborg selves can be identified in the ways that we have already been engaged with the window screens?

and staring at screens."2 Focusing on how we utilize the screen she highlights the way in which we can collapse space and time by sifting through mounds of data and be present for events around the world.

She also explains the emergence what she calls the “second self" - a curated, fully available composition of our selves that can act like a buffer for physical encounter - which divides our attention and our sense of presence in the immediate environment. The way these qualities merge into a cyborg state of being, she explains, is in the way we might habitually depend on the artificial depth of these devices as primary triggers for a critical awareness, attached to our hands and locked on to our eyes.

2. Amber Case presenting cyborg anthropology at TED conference, 2010

At a recent TED conference cyborg anthropologist Amber Case puts forward the idea that “we are now all cyborgs”. This statement builds on the premise of the current frequency with which we engage mobile technology. As an anthropologist, Case frames her observations within the lineage of human technological development stating, "Now suddenly we're a new form of Homo sapiens, and look at these fascinating cultures, and look at these curious rituals that everybody's doing around this technology. They're clicking on things

3. HP model 150 touch screen desktop, 1983

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Case, Amber. We Are All Cyborgs Now

Case’s thesis brings together the undeniable condition of global connectedness with a local sense of unlimited information access, both of which are viewed in a strictly contemporary context given the scale at which she describes them. On an individual level, though, the most significant behaviors Case describes regarding the screen recall the methodology of the window described by Alberti, particularly on points relating to the containment of the frame, the fixed position of artist and viewer, and a narrative-style access of history.

Anne Friedberg outlines Alberti’s formulaic instruction for perspective painting from De Pictura as a combination of “a variable rectangular frame, the window as a metaphor for the frame of the painting, the ‘subject’ that is seen through this frame, the human figure as a standard of measure and as a determinant of the ‘centric point’, and the immobility of the viewer.”3 Together with addition debate about how to interpret Alberti’s method these qualities describe an extension of the eye that reverberates in our psychophysiological understanding of the composition of space and reading of historical narrative.

To begin with, the media of the perspective picture surface, or screen, initiates a connection with the body through the mechanism of the visual pyramid. This concept stems from Alberti’s description of “the operation of vision in terms of visual rays that stretch between the eye of the beholder and the object seen – a triangular pyramid formed by rays that converge from the eye as vertex.”4 From these rays it is established that the picture plane is an intersection of the pyramid. In a sense it is both a filter and tool for visual clarification, which it could be suggested, forms the basis for an extension of an organic bodily process. On the one hand, the framed window articulates a dichotomous relationship between our immediate environment containing the window and the spatial content of the window, a foreshadowing of how the media has the potential to transport our selves beyond material enclosure. On the other hand, the perspective media exercises a type of control over the body in the way that it both reflects our physical position within an architectural setting – that is, perpendicular with our eyes – and the fixed viewing position with which it was originally composed and, in return, imposes back onto the viewer. Thus Alberti’s establishment of a mathematical foundation for perspective begins to extrapolate particular roles for the body, frame, and subject in dealing with the window as a visual prosthesis, a manual for a cyborg appendage.

The tripartite relationship of Alberti’s perspective steps into the material realm when we consider the mechanical evolution of tools for externalizing this process. The development of the velo-grid is the embodiment of this material externalization. Alberti foreshadows this tool in De Pictura: The “veil” (velo) is a “grid-like” netting stretched on a frame…a veil loosely woven of fine thread, dyed whatever color you please, divided up by thicker threads into as many parallel square sections as you like, and stretched on a frame.

4. Drawing from Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola outlining the visual pyramid

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Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft p. 27

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Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft p. 28

I set this between the eye and the object to be represented, so that the visual pyramid passes through the loose weave of the veil5 The velo-grid further emphasizes the idea of control over the artist and viewer in the way that it materializes the perspective formula. The artist’s eye is fixed in position while the frame is allowed intersect and calculate the organic process of vision. Such an arrangement can be seen in a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, published in 1538. By understanding the surface of the grid as transparent, with the “subject to be represented” set beyond, the artist could also be said to be externalizing himself as well, by setting a specific distance that dictates the measurements of what he composes onto a separate painting surface. Where previously the “self” could be understood as the process of perception contained within the artist and viewer standing before the perspective window, in this case each element is methodically separated into components where the body is as much a mechanical function as the grid itself. The perceptive process existed mainly between the canvas of the grid and that of the painting.

Forming an extension of the body and externalizing the process of perception form a basis for understanding how Alberti’s window anticipated a discourse on the cyborg qualities of the screen.

However, a more particular examination of how the window deals with time and space would propel our perceptive connection from singular to networked, acknowledging the multiplicity of “subjects” that exist on the other side of our mobile screens.

6. Camera obscura design by Trevor and Ryan Oates, featured in NY Times, 2014

5. Wood illustration by Albrecht Dürer showing the use of the velo-grid, 1538

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Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft p. 38

Looking at Antonella da Messina’s St. Jerome in His Study of 1457 we can open up a dialogue about how the concept of viewing space through the window is addressed on a number of levels in the same composition. The painting figures a single subject, St. Jerome, whose body is positioned at the centric point of the artist and viewer’s eye, as methodically as Alberti outlines his use of braccia, or unit of human measurement. However, the surrounding composition is far from prescriptive. To offset Alberti’s claim that it is the frame that mattered, more than the representation of the act of looking through

the window, Messina positions the viewer just outside an arched doorway looking in to the study. The space of the study itself exhibits architectural windows that display formulaic landscapes beyond.

Friedberg points out that “almost as if to playfully taunt Alberti, [Messina] places in the background of the painting a framed window with transparent glass, one that conforms to the mathematics of the perspectival vanishing point.” She also adds that, “the scholar does not look out of his window or into a screen, but holds a manuscript close for its illuminations.”6 Tauntingly or not, what we can see here is that the artist is acknowledging the flexibility with which Alberti’s methodology can be interpreted, playing on the connection between the space of the viewer and the subject, as well as a multiplicity of windows which prefigures the concept of browsing within a mobile screen. Additionally, the manuscript that holds the gaze of St. Jerome over the architectural window is, itself, a window. Coupled with the technology of the print, it projects a vision of what the discourse on mobile screens claims to be a contemporary psycho-physiological behavioral trait, held at a casual inclination and head tilted downward.

A sense of time emerges from an analysis of the multiple windows of St Jerome in His Study when we consider how those windows can also be thought of as fragmented moments brought together to represent a narrative. Amber Case explains how the mobile screen extends our reach through past and present history, allowing us to follow events and piece together information as the need presents itself. So to has the perspective window inspired debate about whether or not it is limited to a static view of a singular moment or if it can embrace a temporal dynamism. On the one hand the perspective was considered by German art historian Dagobert Frey to have immobilized narrative composition in the same way that it fixed the physical position of the viewer. But looking back to Alberti’s treatise, it is important to reiterate the emphasis on

the frame mechanism over a rigid realism in the composition. Lew Andrews offers a counter point of view in his study of Renaissance frescoes, which he asserts are “polyscenic” compositions. “They contain a repetition of figures seen in a variety of narrative moments – a continuous narrative in a single frame.”7

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Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft p. 35

7. Antonella da Messina, St. Jerome in His Study, 1475

Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft p. 36

Having drawn out a selection of qualities within Renaissance perspective following Alberti’s treatise we can see a similar logic echoed in the idea of Amber Case’s contemporary cyborg, in which the mobile screen fixes our physical relationship to itself at arms length. Our hand is both the anchor of the mobile window and the outlet of visual perception, acknowledging with our body how the screen acts as the frame through which the “subject to be represented” is seen, and the composition of networked communication. In relation to how the window acts as a plane that intersects our visual pyramid, Friedberg suggests that the perpendicularity, as “a position that implies the artist’s and the viewer’s upright posture facing a picture plane also in an upright position”8, and is indicative of how we would also come to face the computer screen in an upright position, though it would be debatable in how it differentiates in terms of representing depth. Case’s position is a blend of how the screen and the body lock position in relation to each other, and how the idea of depth is more of a hybrid between Renaissance composition and tabulated time travel than in Friedberg’s assertion of how the “computer screen flattens the spatial differences between near and far, supplying no perspectival depth.”9 The social condition of how we interact with the mobile screen – clicking on, swiping through, and gazing into application windows – is an amplification of how the singular viewer, in Alberti’s methodology, becomes a part of the tripartite components of the perspective mechanism.

Case encapsulates one role of the mobile screen in the new history of cyborg tools and the way that it works on condensing the space of information stating, “We can put anything we want into it, and it doesn't get heavier, and then we can take anything out. What does the inside of your computer actually look like? Well, if you print it out, it looks like a thousand pounds of material that you're carrying 8 9

Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft p. 28 ibid. p. 28

around all the time.”10 Like the velo-grid, we can position it in front of any “subject to be represented” while our physical proximity remains fixed. And like St. Jerome in His Study we can embrace the flexibility in the composition to construct an historic narrative within the frame, stretching and condensing time the way we flick through browser tabs or digest headlines. Alberti’s treatise on the window shares a similar visionary language and ambitious pragmatism as Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline did when they first incorporated the term cyborg in their projections about space travel. So too does the window exist within a continuing discourse that has continued to inspire our characterization as cyborgs.

8. “If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes”, Blade Runner, 1982

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Case, Amber. We Are All Cyborgs Now

Points for further development:

References

1. I would like to improve the critical organization of the essay regarding the specificity of the Renaissance window

Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft.

Cambridge: MIT, 2006. Print.

2. I would like to include 1 or 2 more critical references that would help define the argument

Case, Amber. "We Are All Cyborgs Now." Ted.com. 1 Dec. 2010.

Web. 9 Nov. 2015. <http://www.ted.com/talks/amber_case_we_are_all_cyborgs_now? language=en>.

3. I think the footnotes could be improved to help support the argument through the inclusion of counter points

Kunzru, Hari. "You Are A Cyborg." Wired.com. 1 Feb. 1997. Web. 10 Nov. 2015. <https://archive.wired.com/wired/archive//5.02/ffharaway_pr.ht ml>.