Abstract

The Renaissance perspective represents the three-dimensional space onto a bi-dimensional one. This cultural construction, which unifies real and virtual, like all simulations, has some limitations – the main one is that it only works from a precise viewpoint that rules the illusion. When moving away from this position the illusion becomes imperfect. Similar to physics, where reality depends on the observer’s position, perspective depends on the viewer’s position. Since perspective has been inherited by photography, cinema, video, computer images, virtual reality, 3D videogames, we live in a perspective-based culture. In perception the boundaries between opposite qualities are often blurred and even indistinguishable. A screen is generally considered as rectangular, but it can be viewed as really rectangular only from its central perpendicular axis, at the crossing of the diagonals. When moving from this position it should appear as trapezoidal, but people still say it is rectangular: because they see it as rectangular or because they know it is rectangular? This threshold between vision and knowledge is imperceptible and obscure. Something similar happens with the senses. They are considered as separate entities: touch, hear, sight, smell and taste are described as distinct ways to detect the phenomenal world. But they are intermingled; the boundaries that are supposed to separate them are apparent: they are logically separable but not separate. The sensorial system is a cohesive and interrelated continuum where the senses act in synergy with each other. Continuity and discreteness, indistinguishability and distinction, inseparability and division are qualities to individuate, describe, classify and/or communicate the phenomena. These qualities are both theoretical and technical, since they depend on the general perspective of the analysis, on the goals to pursue, on the scale at which the phenomena are observed and on the accuracy of the instruments that are used.