080024 UE Course: Image Space - Image Area. Analysis of an Exciting Relation using Kinesthetic Learning (2019W)

From the Classic Period (5th century BC) until nowadays craftsmen, artists, creative people in the film industry as well as in the Ad’s studios are using perspective as a tool to create image-depth on a plain surface. Usable as “plain” is the surface of a Greek vase as well as the wall prepared for the execution of a fresco or the panel of a painting, the vaulting of a baroque church as well as a sidewalk utilizable for chalk drawings, a big movie screen as much as the display of a mobile phone, as tiny as to find sufficient space in our hand’s palm. It goes without saying that the picture space created by perspective (and other tools) can hold an immense power of persuasion. Hence it is qualified for the visualization of utopic situations (for example: the Christian heaven) as well as for the artificial worlds created by the Game Industry. Within the last 2,500 years periods of strong longing for the creation of suggestive picture space can be observed (i.e. the Classic period through the Hellenistic epoch, Renaissance until Historicism, major parts of the film industry including Stop Motion and Animation), alternating with epochs when the generating of suggestive pictorial space was rejected forcefully (i.e. the Late Antiquity, Classical Modernism). We will not only deal with central perspective, but also with parallel perspective, “air perspective“, multi-perspective, anamorphosis (distorted projection), so called “layer-space“, and “status perspective“ (“Bedeutungsperspektive“). It goes without saying: Efforts and dismissal of the mentioned strategies are not at all bound to European art.

Following the Credo of Richard Feynman “What I cannot create, I do not understand” the analyses of artworks should be built on the knowledge of the tools of perspective, not only theoretically but also in practice. Hence the target of the course is to enhance the insight in the mechanisms of perspective by intertwining verbal description with kinesthetic learning (i.e. studying from nature, composing of 3D-modells, video etc.).

For „kinesthetic learning“ within University teaching see:
https://martinapippal.at/transmission/kinesthetic-learning/constructing/