Polishing a window out of existence (Bolter & Grusin)

In 1896, Auguste and Louis Lumiere screened a 50-second film of a train pulling into a station.  Popular legend holds that the Paris audience leapt to their feet in fear that the locomotive would rip through the screen and into the theatre.  The story is funny and poignant to us in the 21^st century; how could those silly people be so naïve?  Bolter and Grusin explain that “[t]he audience members knew at one level that the film of a train was not really a train, and yet they marveled at the discrepancy between what they knew and what their eyes told them” (30-31).  The Parisians were connecting with an image in a way they never had.  This is an example of what the authors call transparent immediacy, the desire to remove the barrier between images and reality.  Our digital world of computer-generated images and virtual reality has continued the trend of the Lumiere brothers a century earlier.

Masaccio's Holy Trinity, an early

use of perspective.  See this video for

an exploration of the work.

Bolter and Grusin contend that the quest for transparent immediacy began with earnest in the Renaissance, with the invention of linear perspective.  Before perspective, art appeared relatively flat.  People and objects seemed to sit on a single plane.  Some artists experimented with varying the sizes of objects in the background of a picture, but the effect was uneven.  Innovation came in considering a single vantage point for the artist.  Bolter and Grusin quote the 15^th century architect Alberti, who explained that “[o]n the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is seen” (24).  Alberti’s “window” onto his work became the viewer’s window into another world: their perspective.

To Bolter and Grusin, perspective represents the beginning of the mathematizing of art.  Alberti’s window was squeaky clean compared to what came before.  Art was more transparent, and its subjects more immediate to its viewers.  The photograph removed even more of the smudges from the window, and film put it in motion.  What’s the state of the windows through which we view the digital world?

As the authors state, although Renaissance artists used geometry, they distorted perspectives to suit their tastes.  A programmer who uses physics equations to make a digital model reflect natural laws is applying mathematics much more rigorously.  Contrasting these two extremes, I can see the appeal of abstract art, and why it emerged in the late 19^th century, after the invention of photography.  Just because an image is natural, it may not be appealing.  Reflecting the natural world as perfectly as possible is the goal of what the authors call the “naïve” view of transparent immediacy (31).  

Strangely enough, the closer media moves toward replicating nature, the less natural the methods become.  Whereas a photograph or film can at least claim that the photons entering the lens are direct remnants of the natural world, it would be difficult to claim the electrons flowing through a computer chip represent the hand of nature (27).  The authors state that computer graphics’ claim to reflect reality “seems to be appealing to the…proposition that mathematics is appropriate for describing nature” (26).  I think they come off as a little condescending of this notion, but I do take their point: the path toward bringing images closer to reality relies on progressively rigid and complex methods.

Bolter and Grusin repeatedly refer to virtual reality as a kind of holy grail of immediacy.  A truly immersive virtual experience would mean that a viewer “has jumped through Alberti's window and is now inside the depicted space” (29).  The window is smashed, and the image supplants reality.  While seamless virtual reality hasn’t arrived yet, even the art of making two-dimensional images seemingly pop out of a screen can trigger a novel reaction in viewers.  There are digital maestros who are not only aware of how to perform these tricks, but actively strive to push their audience through the window.  At what point does art for its own sake get replaced with ideology?  I think this is what the authors mean when they talk about transparent immediacy being a naïve goal.

3D video and virtual reality are simply the next steps in the legacy of transparent immediacy.  The trend has been to gradually remove the presence of the artist or even a medium.  It’s easy to speak of Masaccio’s Holy Trinity; a single work by an artist whose methods we can dissect and whose inspirations we can debate.  The creation of digital art can seem so much more remote and sterile, the work of hundreds of programmers and animators pushing electrons around screens.  But this is what it takes to make the subject immediate.  I doubt many in 1896 thought a train was really going to roll over their seats.  I think they just marveled at what technology could show them.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin.  Remediation: Understanding New Media.  MIT, 1999.