Hacking stereoscopic vision: the nineteenthcentury culture of critical inquiry in stereoscope use
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2016
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Edições Universitárias Lusófonas
Resumo
While 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.
Descrição
International Journal of Film and Media Arts
Palavras-chave
AUDIOVISUAL, IMAGEM, ESTEREOSCOPIA, PERCEÇÃO, AUDIOVISUAL, IMAGE, STEREOSCOPY, PERCEPTION, SÉC. 19, 19TH CENTURY