De Materia Perspectiva

Abstract

“I inscribe a quadrangle ... which is considered to be an open window through which I see,” the artist and architect Leon Battista Alberti wrote in his 1425 treatise on perspective. This description surely reminds us of Albert Dürer’s woodcut of the draftsman, where a string is drawn from object to subject, intersecting the quadrangle at a single point. Da Vinci’s re-instauration of this diagram five decades later in the camera obscura jettisoned the draftsman’s string, re-casting perspective as an abstract and dis-embodied apparatus detached from medium, the apotheosis of which is arguably the contemporary perspectival viewport. This thesis re-situates the perspectival viewport in the material realm. Like the draftsman’s strings, the projector lines of perspective attain physical properties (applying a physics engine) and can be pushed and pulled by subjects and objects in the scene to modify how you see. Perspective no longer appears as a closed system in this material mode. It is malleable. Therefore, this thesis proposes an architecture where a singular perspective, an absolute definition of vision, and a stable view of objects is impossible, or at least elective.