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The Class' Object of Study: Technology informs the construction
of subjectivity. Gilpin, the father of picturesque aesthetics, compares
human sight to machine technology: "The imagination becomes a camera obscura,
only with this difference, that the camera represents objects as they really
are; while the imagination, impressed with the most beautiful scenes, and
chastened by rules of art, forms its pictures, not from the most admirable
parts of nature; but in the best taste." (Three Essays 52) As Martin Jay
has points out in Downcast Eyes, sight is a privileged epistemological tool
. Our way of seeing and thinking about the world around us is informed by
the camera obscura and its historical derivative, the camera. These machines
define the position of the interiorized observer to the outside world. By
setting landscape aesthetics next to the aestheicts of Kodak, we explore
how the camera works in relation to the picturesque, revealing some basic
assumptions about how observers in the 19th century and the present represent
their relationship to the world. The dominant way of seeing both then and
now is what Jay calls "Cartesian perspectivalism," a method of perception
that represents space and the subjects and objects in that space according
to the rules of Euclidean geometry. Developing the historical relationship
between optics, the picturesque, and the camera de-naturalizes the Cartesian
scopic regime. By disturbing the relationship between sight and truth, including
the picture as a true representation and tour guides as accurate documents
of places, we can begin thinking of other modes of representing place and
experience. |
