Reading Stereoviews: The Aesthetics of Monstrous Space

Abstract

In this essay I argue that the diverse archive of stereoscopic imagery has not so far been properly read historically – that is, in relation to its material and discursive context. The early-nineteenth-century context was characterised by multiple positions in debate which can be used to make sense of three broad projects of stereoscopic representation. The first, naïve realist project was to subsume stereoscopy under geometric optics and to claim for it verisimilitude to the thing represented, and in the process leave unchallenged the conventions of perspective painting as a model of how we actually see. The second was to embrace the stereoscope’s contribution to a long-standing critique of the anomalies of binocular ‘natural vision’ and to explore a new pictorial logic of geometrically impossible objects in geometrically monstrous space – an aesthetic that I begin here to document. This was not so much a project of ‘realism’ as of verisimilitude to a radically transformed conception of natural vision – one that had already begun and would continue to undermine the ‘truth’ of perspective convention. The third project was anti-realist, inspired by evidence that spatial perception was not determined by external stimulus but rather constructed through the intervention of a sometimes capricious spatial imagination.