Geometry of the unspeakable: experience of one construction

Abstract

Picture geometry is often regarded as an area of technical knowledge that accompanies or provides useful information for basic research on visual culture and almost never as a methodological one. Despite the historical and conceptual connections between mathe­matics and the visual, even a basic geometric competence is by no means a common of image and visual culture researchers. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of this kind of work belong to the field of technical knowledge, the history of mathemat­ics, or positivism based theories; in other words, they do not address the most important issues for humanities research. Rare non-technical works in this area do not find due recognition and dissemination among a wider community of specialists. The article offers the main result of the research, the subject of which was pictorial depth. Pictorial depth is the version of the specific experience of distance with which the image is traditionally associated. The problem of distance is a classical area of philosophical reflection on the image. The article presents an attempt to geometrically express one of its versions, namely pictorial and visual depth. At the same time, the important dimension of inacces­sibility and heterogeneity is preserved, that is, the experience of depth is not reduced to visual data or the literal geometry of a flat picture. By constructing a geometrically object that can be considered depth, it is possible to extract intuitively non-obvious properties that would not be available through direct analysis of experience and other methods of naked reflection. The article presents only some of the findings obtained during the study.