Percorrer por autor "Bantjes, Rod"
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Item Hacking stereoscopic vision: the nineteenthcentury culture of critical inquiry in stereoscope use(Edições Universitárias Lusófonas, 2016) Bantjes, RodWhile recent scholarship has emphasised the narratives of immersive realism that surrounded the parlour stereoscope, my aim in this paper is to better understand the counter-currents of nineteenth century stereoscopic culture – the artefacts, practices and discourses that powerfully undermined realist assumptions about spatial perception and the “truth” of stereoscopic representation. Wheatstone’s original stereoscopes were designed to “hack” spatial perception and subject each of its component principles to artificial manipulation. What Wheatstone uncovered were glaring anomalies in the prevailing theories of veridical sight, which had relied upon the principle of binocular convergence (understood as a precise trigonometric measure of depth). Following a popular tradition of critical inquiry known as “rational recreation,” amateurs too used their stereoscopes to reflect on the perplexities of binocular spatial perception. Analytic line drawings highlighted the inexplicable binocular suture of strikingly disparate images. Stereoviews with their images transposed revealed the capacity of the mind to constitute volumetric objects irrespective of binocular cues. Hyper-stereo images (taken from a wide separation and therefore at an increased angle of binocular convergence) sparked debate and perceptual uncertainty as to whether their 3D effects, or indeed all stereoviews, were distorted – elongated along the z axis and/or miniaturised. Realists, including some astronomers hoping to use hyper-stereo photographs as visual evidence of the shape of the moon’s surface, sought unsuccessfully to solve the problem of elongation by ensuring that the angles at which stereo photographs were taken were reproduced in the angles at which the eyes viewed them in the stereoscope. Astronomers were forced to quietly abandon the stereoscope as a reliable witness of spatial form. Others, artists in particular, revelled in the anti-realist implications of a spatial imagination which constructed the perceptual world in a sometimes capricious fashion.Item Media archaeology experiences : method, meaning and amusement(CICANT, 2022) Bantjes, RodIn this paper I make four interventions in favour of the seductive value of experiential media archaeology. 1) The constellation of material artefacts that mediate between us and the world are an implicit context for historic writing on perception, representation and epistemology. Engagement with the materiality of these often-forgotten artefacts offers insight into the meanings of texts that exclusively text-based scholarship would otherwise miss. 2) Tacit, artisanal knowledge embedded in artefacts sometimes exceeds that which can be found in written texts. I argue that an effective way of accessing this material logic is to re-build old artefacts to see how they work. Applying the theory of extended cognition to this process, I make a case for its unique epistemo- logical value. 3) I show how the seductive intimacy of these objects can be amplified by re-imagining their aesthetic possibilities. 4) I discuss the educational value of the “rational recreation” with media artifacts as “philosophical toys.”