Tracing vision: the emergence of subjectivity in landscape

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1628629 (Table of Contents)

The main objective of this text is to question and research the relevant historical context of the ways in which vision is constructed and content is utilized to (re)present the flow and accumulation of subjective experiences based on vision. The dissertation especially meditates on the use of linear perspective in depictions of landscape and the configured relationship between vision, representative forms, reality and the position of the eye and observer beginning from pre-Renaissance and reaching towards the modern era. Lens-based images, due to their indexical nature is readily taken as a duplicate of reality. Following this, the text explores possible means of shifting this documentarian burden and contextualizing photography and video as tools for the construction of subjective realities. This paper aims to offer a textual basis for a number of photographic and videographic works that I have produced within the last two years. In the core of these works lie the concepts of subjectivity, multi-perspectivity and the transformation of space and vision through time. Looking at traditional and modern art forms that exclude linear perspective and avoid representing space in realistic manner, it investigates how conceptual features of these forms can be applied to contemporary digital moving image practices.