Pixel Play

In 'Pixel' Graham Harwood writes of 'constructed seeing' and of our preoccupation with splitting light into it's constituent parts and shifting it from one place to another - present day development in technology for rendering, resolution and saving can be traced back to Newton's Prism and Filippo Brunelleschi's formulation of perspective - 'the quantification of vision resulting in the pixel' (pp 214).
Brunelleschi is said to have demonstrated the principle of perspective by placing a net over a door of the Florentine Cathedral and painting the Baptistry visible from it, using the grid that the net formed to trace interscting lines and paint sample blocks of light (from a central point). This principle is traced through to a Modern context and our relationship with (and consumption of) the image in the following quote.

"The algorithm to render perspective relies on the fact that light normally propagates along straight lines. We can therefore work out, for any object in space, which light rays from its surface will reach a given point. This knowledge allows anyone who learns the method to achieve a repeatable result. In addition to showing how lines of light radiate from objects, perspective sets up rules by which they can be shown to converge at a point. In this way it creates the position of a witness outside the frame of the picture, a position by which the scene can be interrogated. This position can only be occupied by a mechanism or person endowed with the correct procedures of interpretation. Such a systematization of sight sets in play a skepticism of non-verifiable personal perception. It sets up a mechanics of vision relying on self-correction and verification: logical procedures employed in today’s seeing machines. With the dual—and not entirely uncontradictory—ascents of science and capitalism as explanatory and organizing principles, picturing, with its inheritance from perspective has tended to become synonymous with possession." (pp 214)

More on this later...

Perspective is an interesting subject. This image illustrates how Brunelleschi demonstrated the principle.




The video below narrates the story in more detail, providing some context for the image above (view from 19.56 min):



Note: The perspective grid is attributed to Leon Alberti (24.45 min) - it gets interesting when this system is analysed and you relate it to the points Harwood makes above.

I had the idea that I would get the computer to 'paint' the Baptistry using a grid... not for proportion or lines but just to play with the idea of 'quantification of vision' and resolution i.e if you were to paint the scene with the aid of a grid it would not be calibrated to the size of a pixel and the colour you painted with would likewise be more loosely defined. The initial result was obviously disappointing - just pixelated, but once I piped in some variables to incrementally increase the pixel sample size and colour this sample with the average colour value taken from it, things got interesting:

Baptistry Grid .mov

Reference:
'Pixel' by G.Harwood in 'Software Studies\ A Lexicon' (2008), Ed. M.Fuller, MIT Press, London (pp 213 - 217)