I’m excited to be speaking, alongside an amazing lineup of scholars, at a conference this week (May 29-31, 2025) on Dimensional Vision in Flux: The Stereo-Aesthetics and Politics of 3D Cinema and Media, hosted by the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley. I’ll be giving a talk on “Dimensionality, Perspective, and Imagination in Computational Media.”
The complete program can be found here. And here’s my abstract:
Dimensionality, Perspective, and Imagination in Computational Media
Dimensional vision finds itself in flux, as the title of this symposium would have it. The flux in question has to do with recent and contemporary transformations in visual media: witness the many booms and busts of 3D cinema, recall the short-lived push to put 3D televisions in our living rooms, and consider the rapidly changing landscape of VR, AR, MR, XR, whatever-R. In order to get a handle on the flux of dimensional vision in relation to such media-technological changes, however, I would like to take a step back and observe that dimensional vision has always and only ever been in flux. I mean this, first, in the sense that dimensionality is given to human experience immediately and inseparably from the spatiotemporal flux of embodied existence; this “microperceptual” dimension (in Don Ihde’s terms) is epitomized in Edmund Husserl’s descriptions of the flux of “adumbrations” as he walks around a tree, whereby a multidimensional model of “the tree,” never wholly seen, takes shape in his mind. In a second, more historical sense, dimensional vision has always been in flux in a way that is more closely attuned to the media changes described above; rather than exceptional, however, such flux is a constant because there is no natural or neutral state apart from mediation: the “microperceptual” level of embodied experience can never be thought apart from what Ihde calls the “macroperceptual” level of cultural and technological conditioning (and vice versa).
Taken seriously, this means that dimensionality and perspectival vision are inherently contingent and deeply political—not just perspectival representation, but the embodied experience of perceptual perspective and spatial orientation itself. And while I argue that this has always been the case for humans as an essentially biotechnical species, the political stakes are heightened in an era of computational media. The latter, including VR and similar media of 3D visuality, operate faster than and bypass human perception, opening dimensional vision to fine-grained reengineering. In order to make this argument, I turn to Kant’s notion of the productive imagination (Einbildungskraft) and the stereotyping operation of the “schematism” that connects visual stimuli to concepts of the understanding. Following philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Alan Thomas, schemata are perspectivally indeterminate but determinable, and through them the Kantian imagination is responsible for our empirical experience of things as having depth and unseen backsides—responsible, that is, for our sense of the world as a dimensional, volumetric space within which I am positioned. Meanwhile, computational media are constructing their own spatial models of the world (or worlds), models that exceed and resist human perceptual access while positioning us both virtually and physically. In this way, they assume functions of the imagination and modulate the flux of dimensional vision at both microperceptual and macroperceptual scales.
