2D desires, 3D realities
It’s the little things. The ones we don’t notice. That’s what defines our reality.
Going on nature walks is transformative precisely because a single leaf can reframe your understanding of what it means to be alive, etc. (”touch grass” is what the Internet kids say these days.)
Most anecdotes about psychedelic experiences invariably touch upon this fact: “then I looked at my hand and it…”
The parts of our reality that are constitutive are boring, basic.
For that reason any technology that interfaces with the most basic parts of our consciousness — the way we see the world — will have profound consequences for how we understand ourselves in the world; what we can imagine to be possible (the first obstacle to human progress.)
For work, I have been thinking a lot about frames.
Both of these images are the same “content” (as we say in our high neoliberal era) and yet because of their frames, they have different aesthetic meanings.
If you’ve ever tried to pick just the right frame for a picture, you know that frames are vexing.
They’re liminal spaces, neither her nor there. Not quite part of the art but also not apart from it, either.
Of course, you can always just defer the choice. I have more than a few items waiting to be framed just sitting on shelves.
That’s the material world. In the metaphysical world, frames are inescapable.
There is no “pure” thought that escapes the confines of a framework. A point of view, prejudice, and history. The material conditions and interests that led to the seemingly “out of nowhere, out of the blue” idea that, of course, is as natural as a chicken nugget.
I have been thinking about frames for work because, with a friend, I am making “theaters” that exist only in your mind (courtesy of technology created by the world’s wealthiest company.)
Why make a virtual theater for a movie when you can just watch it on…
Where, exactly? On the framed screen you are looking at right now? Or on a framed screen called a television?
A theater is like a frame in three dimensions. Or more.
A theater full of like minded people is a frame in many dimensions; their laughter, their jeers, their groans inform the content as much as any other factor. If not more.
(tldr; watching moving images in one theater versus another will completely change your understanding of what you just watched.)
Why did Greek playwrights use a chorus? Why do we say: monkey see, monkey do? 🙈 🙉 🙊
We are, after all, primates who climbed down from trees yesterday in the context of geologic time. (What is context but a synonym for frame?)
We have an inescapably embodied understanding of the world; our bodies our selves, indeed.
For example, most of us see with two eyes. Why not one? Depth perception. Two eyes allow us to perceive distance.
Stereoscopic vision gives us perhaps the most fundamental understanding of the world: volumes that approach and move away from us. (So that we can avoid danger, get food, etc.)
And, yet, for technical reasons, most of our visual culture – the stuff we make to record how we are and to understand what makes us who we are – has been very much unlike us in that it has been two dimensional. Flat.
Paintings? Flat. Movies? Flat.
Sculptures and plays are of course not flat but outside of the small percentage of the public that goes to museum and theaters, most of us encounter visual culture in two dimensions.
But the theaters I get to work on are often for showing stereoscopic images. Which is to say: images that look like the world as we see it when we are… touching grass.
Embodied images. In embodied spaces.
If stereoscopic images (media) finally catch on because of this device, then much of how we communicate will change radically.
I’ll give an indecent but important example.
I have come to believe that there will never be mass or mainstream “3D porn” because the essence of porn as we know it is an attempt to overcome the flatness of the 2D image.
What is pornography but an excess of stimuli? A futile attempt to achieve realness within a medium that is essentially fake.
As John Waters has lampooned, porn is, at best, satire. As Andrea Dworkin argued, porn is, at worst, sadism; the subtext is sex but the text is domination, usually misogynist.
In 3D, porn is unbearable; i.e., it becomes performance art. (What percentage of performance art is adjacent to sex?)
In short: if the 2D image objectifies or dehumanizes its subject, the 3D image, like theater before it, reconstitutes them as bodies in the world; i.e., “people who matter.”1
Now consider advertising: aka, ”food porn”, “furniture porn”, “travel porn”.
(Have I not just described Instagram? Or what used to be the magazine industry.)
What happens to the most pervasive and popular forms of visual communication if/when stereoscopic images are as easy to produce and reproduce as flat images have been?
Again, a fundamental shift is near, if the material conditions break in that direction.2
That’s it for this week.
Good luck to you all and I hope you and your families are well!
p.s. That was an amazing convention, wasn’t it?
p.p.s.
I originally wanted to title this letter: “The sacred in the mundane” for the 4% of you who will enjoy the Eliade reference. But you would also know “the scandal of particularity” which is just a polysyllabic way of saying “the sacred in the mundane.” 😁
Why do we use the word “matter” as a synonym for importance? Our most abstract thought is pregnant with our embodied reality. The phenomenologists won their round. The word importance? Its roots are “vessel” — a thing that carries a thing. It’s turtle-shaped ashtrays all the way down. ↩
Among the radical cultural changes we can expect: the distinction between stage play and tele play and/or the “weight” of testimony. I am reminded of how HD television changed the way makeup is used on set. Or, the way that makeup for the black and white screen impacted society. (Yes, that’s Judy Garland halfway down the page. This has become a Judy Garland fan account.) ↩