Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Putting a Face on Things
The Virtual Is Older than Simulation
Historian and theorist of modern media culture Anne Friedberg, in her discussion of
virtuality from the age of perspective painting to the current period of computer-medi-
ated simulation, makes the key point that how we see changes who we are (how we
see ourselves). It is often technological innovations in the visual field that stimulate this
change. Freidberg argues that through our manipulation of media—the applied mathem-
atics of perspective painting as she discusses—we perceive the world differently.
She gives the example of Leon Battista Alberti, who in his 1435 treatise on painting
and perspective,
De Pictura
, became the first to articulate the transfer of the three-di-
something that could be made schematic and virtually rendered. That difference comes
to be reflected back in how we understand ourselves; we begin to see in the physic-
al world around us geometric order and points of harmony that previously had only
appeared as disordered acts of nature: the harmoniously ordered world of Renaissance
paintings reflected the aspirations of the philosophy and technology of the time.
From the Renaissance to the present, Friedberg states of the history of visual simula-
Friedberg's argument for her insight that a technical change of perspective can stimulate
changes in human perception. She relates the mechanics of vision and visualization with
the idea that the world is always a construction as such (the virtual in her language).
For the current generation, a networked one, we find a revivification of the visual and
perceptual. In effect, we are putting a face on things. In this chapter I discuss the visu-
al history of avatars before they became embodied figures. I also describe a model of
cognitive perception of mediated images from experimental research. I put into relation
discourses of technical design, cultural comprehension, and a science of perception.
Emoticon Rising
