One-point Perspective Research Articles

Subject playing with flat images: Transmedia spreadability of anime and manga character images

Anime and manga characters are so ubiquitous in Japan that people see them anywhere, regardless of public or private. The two-dimensional flatness of line drawing allows the character images to straddle the boundaries of the worlds of works and media. The analysis of individual artworks needs to be revised to understand the transmedia spreadability of characters and our living conditions. This paper, thus, overviews the preceding discussions of anime and manga scholars on human-character relations and compares them with the theory of subject formation in film studies, whose realist tendency once emphasized the three-dimensional space and time. While psychoanalysis-influenced theories such as suture and male gaze model after one-point perspective and subordinate two-dimensionality, Thomas Lamarre formulates a de-unified perspective in relation to the multilayered image field of Japanese anime. In conjunction with the orientation of cultural and fan studies to emphasize audience agency, this article discusses the de-unified perspective on flat images which has the potential for understanding the complexity of subject formation through the interplay with two-dimensional images.

On “Perspective(s)” and Empathy in Art Education

Abstract When teaching the use of perspective, art teachers usually begin with the linear perspective of the Italian Renaissance with the intent of providing pupils with practical tools to create spatial illusion in their drawings. Perspective, however, is and can be much more than a technique for constructing pictures. Given that perspective-taking is one of the central aspects of empathy, the teaching of this topic can serve as a tool for improving openness and empathy among school children. The transformative power of art education makes this possible. The current article suggests a method of using photographic works of art to encourage children to see the world from the perspective of the other. Complementing the teaching of one-point perspective, the teacher introduces the children to the idea of multiple points of view to engage them in imagining things as if they could be otherwise, leading eventually to increased social sensitivity.

Subject playing with flat images: Transmedia spreadability of anime and manga character images

Anime and manga characters are so ubiquitous in Japan that people see them anywhere, regardless of public or private. The two-dimensional flatness of line drawing allows the character images to straddle the boundaries of the worlds of works and media. The analysis of individual artworks needs to be revised to understand the transmedia spreadability of characters and our living conditions. This paper, thus, overviews the preceding discussions of anime and manga scholars on human-character relations and compares them with the theory of subject formation in film studies, whose realist tendency once emphasized the three-dimensional space and time. While psychoanalysis-influenced theories such as suture and male gaze model after one-point perspective and subordinate two-dimensionality, Thomas Lamarre formulates a de-unified perspective in relation to the multilayered image field of Japanese anime. In conjunction with the orientation of cultural and fan studies to emphasize audience agency, this article discusses the de-unified perspective on flat images which has the potential for understanding the complexity of subject formation through the interplay with two-dimensional images.

Urban School Area Road Safety Improvement and Assessment with a 3D Piano-Keyboard-Styled Pedestrian Crossing Approach: A Case Study of Chiang Mai University Demonstration School

Traffic accidents are a major cause of death in Thailand. Thailand is ranked third in the world by the World Health Organization for traffic-related deaths. Decreasing road accidents is one of the Thailand National Strategy Goals and also the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Several traffic calming tools for school areas were reviewed for safety improvement. An approach of creating a three-dimensional piano-keyboard-styled pedestrian crossing was implemented. It used a one-point perspective technique to increase driver perception when approaching a pedestrian crossing. The assessment data were observed during 12 weeks of a school semester. A roadside camera was used to record vehicles during the morning peak, midday off-peak, and evening peak traffic. The vehicles’ average speeds were used to compare the pre- and post-installation safety. The results showed that after the new crossing was installed, vehicle speeds drastically decreased. After three weeks, vehicle speeds began to increase. After twelve weeks, the vehicle speeds had gradually increased toward the same level as before the installation. A z-test was performed at the 95% significance level (p-value 0.05), showing that the new crossing approach had only affected vehicle speed during the first three weeks post-installation. Driver familiarity behavior and faded paint were major factors in the results.

On the Use of Perspective in a Drawing Attributed to Diego Siloé

The drawing analysed in this article, conserved at the MNAC in Barcelona and attributed to the Spanish architect Diego Siloé (ca. 1490–1563), has never previously been studied in depth. It is a relatively rapidly executed sketch depicting a Renaissance urban setting, in which the authors not only demonstrate the sound use of one-point perspective, an extraordinary feat in Spain at that time, but also reconstruct it geometrically. Raking light photography provides a tool for identifying numerous incised lines, the true geometric support for the drawing, while a comparative analysis reveals a significant connection between the drawing and Siloé’s works, giving rise to new suppositions. The authors also detect a strong connection with Italy, consistent with existing hypotheses about the extent of the young Siloé’s Italian sojourn. The research conducted reinforces the attribution of the drawing to Siloé and opens up new channels for interpreting his life and work.

Perception of Perspective Drawings: A Contention on the Principle of Choosing Eye-Levels and View-Angles

Drawing is a powerful tool for industrial designers when presenting the potential of an idea to convince viewers. Thus, they should have an increased understanding of perspective drawing techniques. These techniques may still cause miscommunication between designers and viewers even though they are applied correctly. The present study examines whether the perspective drawing techniques in terms of eye-level positions and view-angle choices, influence the viewers’ ability to identify the drawn-objects accurately. Results reveal that the identification accuracy in one-point and two-point perspective techniques is found dissimilar between different eye-level positions. Drawings generated at 20° to 50° of view-angles with one-point, and 10° to 20° of view-angles with two-point perspective, are perceived more accurately compared to other view-angles. Results partially conflict with the guidelines suggested by the literature. Findings of the study are relevant for designer practitioners, researchers, educators, and students when creating design drawings carrying high communication value.

Ephemeral Spaces and Pneumatic Architecture: The Films of Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Abstract The Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s films consistently thematize linear perspective as a mode of thought. His documentaries use one-point perspective to draw attention to a scientific habitus, with its studied neutrality and foregrounded objectivity. His “partitive images” home in on the fleeting relation of part to whole, revealing the difficulty of understanding large concepts such as the West or the human species through such supposedly objective images. This article also discusses the connection between Geyrhalter’s photographic mode and sophisticated technological processes. It looks at architecture as an organizing element in relation to Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher’s nomadic typologies and the pneumatic architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, with special attention to the films Unser täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread, 2005), Abendland (Occident, 2011), and Homo Sapiens (2016).

Bases, Inputs and Reliability of a Basic Drawing Workbook

A developmental study was conducted on the reliability of a developed workbook in Basic Drawing. Three experts, and faculty and students of the University of Eastern Philippines rated the workbook. The entire study was completed during the School Year 2018-2019. Results of the study showed that the bases for the workbook were determined by the faculty handling drawing in three years in the UEP System who revealed that students have poor performance in drawing subject. From the bases, suggested inputs in the workbook included lettering, oblique drawing, isometric drawing, geometrical figures, polygon construction, ellipse drawing, orthographic drawing, one-point perspective, two-point perspective and section construction. The workbook was subjected to reliability test and the results showed that the workbook did not meet the requirements for a reliable material in all of its aspects considering that all of the values in accuracy, illustrations and presentations, readability, time allotment, and usefulness were below the acceptable value of 0.70. As such, the workbook still needed further improvement.

The Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture by Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen

Reviewed by: The Model as Performance: Staging Space in Theatre and Architecture by Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen Marjorie Bradley Kellogg THE MODEL AS PERFORMANCE: STAGING SPACE IN THEATRE AND ARCHITECTURE. By Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen. Performance and Design series. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2018; pp. 200. This is a book about models, or rather about the idea of models. Its language is complex, but its thesis fairly simple—not exactly revelatory, but well worth scholarly examination. It is that a model, like any artwork, can be created, considered, and read as an object in its own right, not representative of some past or future final version, but autonomous, with its own particular commentary or content expressed in its interaction with the viewer. This expression, however subtle or static, can be understood as a performance. In development of this thesis, the book lays out a good deal of interesting history about models and their uses. For millennia, people have made small-scale representations of the world around them to augment ritual practice, to inform, or simply to entertain. This study limits its scope to architectural and theatrical models, and "rallies against the prevailing assumption of the model as a second-order object awaiting its realization as a future 'real' building or 'real' set design" (1). Instead, the authors propose "a new writing of the model's history as a history of agency and performativity that frees the model from its professional pragmatism yet acknowledges its central importance in the design process" (2). Who would want to think otherwise, especially those of us who work daily with models? The Model as Performance is organized both chronologically and thematically into six chapters, rather like a series of connected essays on the model's various incarnations, with theme generally taking precedence over a strict timeline. Early on, Brejzek and Wallen cite Claude Lévi-Strauss's argument that a model's reduced scale "allows for more immediate understanding and control" (59). Accordingly, each chapter delves with some depth into a few pertinent works that serve as case studies—verbal models, if you will—to advance the authors' thesis. Chapter 1 begins in Renaissance Italy with the use of models to experiment with theories of perspective. We meet set designers Sebastiano Serlio and Inigo Jones, then follow the evolution of stage scenery from fixed architectural cityscapes, to eighteenth-century wing-and-border scenery, to the grandiose naturalism of Wagnerian stagings. The authors' enthusiasm picks up in the 1920s with Russian constructivism and the Bauhaus in Germany with "the emergence of the utopian, forward-pointing model," which they label "the singular revolutionary object that (whether realized or not) sought to radically redefine and transgress social, political and cultural conventions and boundaries once and for all" (35). By this point, the definition of model has expanded to include the full-scale scenery and often the theatre as well. Chapter 2 cycles back to the Renaissance, where the rigors of one-point perspective in Sabbioneta's Teatro All'Antica become a reflection of the autocratic rule of the local duke. The next step is to embrace collections of models and artifacts, as in seventeenth-century "art chambers," the precursors of museums, where the model is characterized as "staging knowledge" (42). All along, examples are offered of the increasing autonomy of the model, building to Philip James de Loutherbourge's dining table–sized model theatre of 1781, where he staged "natural phenomena in a realistic and recognizable way" (65), entirely without the use of actors. Chapter 3 brings a long section on Edward Gordon Craig, who despite being the son of a famous actress, considered the actor "imperfect" and wrote in praise of the uber-marionette. Perhaps as a result, Craig's seminal ideas were rarely produced and were most fully realized in drawings and models. Interestingly, the authors basically dismiss his fellow Symbolist and contemporary Adolphe Appia, "whose rhythmic spaces and abstracted stage elements were always in the service of the actor" (70). Chapter 4 sidesteps into architecture, or perhaps architecture as theatre, focusing on house models and model homes, particularly as a medium for social change. The notion of performing models gets a lot easier...

Charles H. Carman, Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus: Towards an Epistemology of Vision for Italian Renaissance Art and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. 2018. £65.00 (cloth).

Charles H. Carman, <i>Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus: Towards an Epistemology of Vision for Italian Renaissance Art and Culture</i>. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. 2018. £65.00 (cloth).

Ecocriticism and the Modern Artist’s Notice of Nature

By assessing the relationship between William Carlos Williams scholarship and the visual arts my article focuses on how Williams’s aesthetics, influenced by Cubism’s fusion of object with surrounding space, challenged human-centered perspectives. I compare traditions of appropriative art such as Dada that reconditioned, re-used, and redeemed “found” material that had been regarded as waste to perspectives on art, nature, and subjectivity that can be defined as post-human or at least not human-centered. Building on Clement Greenberg’s focus on the materiality of representation—pigments, language itself—I argue that modernists such as Williams drew their medium closer to physical environments and thus away from structuring the picture plane according to Renaissance/Humanist one-point perspective. My article reflects on the ecocritical implications of such work as Williams’s Paterson , and his loyalty to a city characterized historically by abandonment and pollution. A bond, I argue, that was forged partly by Williams’s Dadaist openness to conventionally unaesthetic and “irredeemable” subjects and objects, things that the industrial world used up, transformed into plate glass and automobile, or discarded as slag heap. The poem’s empathy with the Passaic’s “down-at-the-heel,” neglected, spurned, and ordinary beings also extends beyond humans.

The shock of the odd.

When Linda Dalrymple Henderson's The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art first appeared in 1983 it generated a lively discussion, most conspicuously in the pages of the journal Leonardo. Here was a book that undermined two of the central tenets of modernist theory: first that developments in art and science were linked not by any real connections or strong form of shared endeavour but by the fact that both partook of the modern spirit or zeitgeist; second, and more specifically, that Einsteinian relativity and cubism were in some way analogous embodiments of that spirit. By relentlessly pursuing the fate of two nineteenth-century developments – the non-Euclidean geometries and higher dimensions of her title – Henderson clearly showed that many of the avant-garde artworks so admired by critics for their formal innovation were at once more literal and more bizarre than anyone had previously suspected. Some were attempts to expound the ‘geometrical occult’ or to engage in multidimensional communion, some projected the enhanced intellect of ‘four-dimensional man’ and others explored the lonely but profound reaches of hyperspace. As she puts it in the ‘Re-introduction’ to this new edition of The Fourth Dimension, ‘these works function as “windows” on an invisible meta-reality of higher dimensions and etherial energies' (p. 27), and, elsewhere, ‘belief in a fourth dimension encouraged artists to depart from visual reality and to reject completely the one-point perspective system that for centuries had portrayed the world as three-dimensional’ (p. 492).

Perspective: of Time and Eternity

This paper considers geometric perspective in relation to devotional requirements in Italian religious painting from about 1250 to about 1450. The content of the altarpiece consisted in antithetical elements---the graphic exposition of Christian dogmatics, and a dramatis personae increasingly to be identified in empathetic terms. The one-point perspective system that was invented towards the end of that period, then, presented an opportunity and a difficulty. It enabled the creation of a naturalistic space, aiding empathetic identification with psychologically plausible individuals in the pictured world. On the other hand, whilst superficially the space marked out by the geometry of the vanishing point coincided with that of Christian hierarchy, it threw dogmatics into crisis, as it set picture space against picture plane. In addition to a humanistic imperative, the method was driven by a mathematical one, consideration of which allows us to see it as the last stage in a process of simplification of the conditioning geometry governing representation within the altarpiece. The paper shows that, despite first impressions, the earlier mathematical perspective systems were systematic. It demonstrates that, as there was a stand-off between dogma and empathy, there was one between iconic stability and mobile perspective in the earlier perspective methods, and one between static viewpoint and imaginative mobility in the invention. From within these antitheses came the necessity for very devious negotiations of the timeless and the historical---all compromising one another in one way or another---and, after the invention of the one-point system, the proposition of an expanded mental life both in those depicted and in those observing.

La modificación del espacio arquitectónico a través de la perspectiva: la intervención de Andrea Pozzo en la iglesia de los jesuitas de Viena

The importance of point of sight is shown in the mural painting on the ceiling of the nave of the Church of the Jesuits in Vienna, produced in one-point perspective by Andrea Pozzo. The importance of point of sight is seen through the spatial modification it creates, from the perspectives of the illusion of reality and symbolism.

Landscape With Two Poplars

<i>Landscape With Two Poplars</i>

선분분류를 이용한 실내영상의 소실점 추출

본 논문에서는 선분분류를 이용하여 실내영상의 소실점을 검출하는 방법을 제안한다. 실내영상을 효율적으로 검출하기 위하여 2 단계로 소실점을 추출한다. 1 단계에서는 이미지가 1 점 투시인지 2 점 투시인지 판별한다. 만일 이미지가 2 점 투시이면, 선분분류를 위하여 검출된 소실점을 지나는 수평선을 구한다. 2 단계에서는 선분분류를 이용하여 2 개의 소실점을 정확히 검출한다. 또 본 논문에서는 인공영상과 이미지 DB를 이용하여 제안한 방법을 평가하였다. 노이즈를 첨가한 인공 영상에 대해서는 노이즈가 60%를 차지할 때까지 검출한 소실점과 실제 소실점과의 차이가 16 픽셀 이하였다. A. Quattoni 와 A. Torralba가 제안한 이미지 DB를 이용한 평가에서는 87% 이상의 이미지에 대하여 소실점을 검출하였다. This paper proposes a method to detect vanishing points of an indoor scene using line segment classification. Two-stage vanishing points detection is carried out to detect vanishing point in indoor scene efficiently. In the first stage, the method examines whether the image composition is a one-point perspective projection or a two-point one. If it is a two-point perspective projection, a horizontal line through the detected vanishing point is found for line segment classification. In the second stage, the method detects two vanishing points exactly using line segment classification. The method is evaluated by synthetic images and an image DB. In the synthetic image which some noise is added in, vanishing point detection error is under 16 pixels until the percent of the noise to the image becomes 60%. Vanishing points detection ratio by A.Quattoni and A.Torralba's image DB is over 87%.

Scenographic Paradigms: Some principles of perception and interpretation

This article examines the relations between design of the stage and the scenography, particular of what we somewhat loosely refer to as “modern” theatre. I will set out by presenting three inter-related principles regulating the processes of perception and interpretation of space/scenography in the theatre. The first principle draws attention to the hybrid semiotic modeling of the stage space, based on the one-point linear perspective developed by the Baroque tradition, using both two- and three-dimensional principles of representation; the second focuses on the entrances, the presences and the exits of human and in particular of the non-human agents to, in and from this hybrid scenographic space; and the third examines the hermeneutic strategies and the philosophical concerns activated by the two first principles, in particular through the audience perception and interpretation of the human/non-human split communicated by a specific performance. My basic claim is that the theatre enables the spectators to measure and evaluate their own humanity (physically, emotionally and ethically) in relation to this human/non-human divide, in particular through the entrance of supernatural and divine figures into the hybrid container of the stage, but also by their absences. This sense of humanity must finally be considered in relation to the still constantly recurring failures in the world around us today, as well as in history to grasp and to express what we perceive as our own truly human proportions. After presenting these claims, I analyze Bertolt Brecht's representations of space in his own productions of Life of Galileo.

Oblique drawing: a history of anti-perspective

For more than half a century, Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form has dominated studies of visual representation. Despite the hegemony of central projection, or perspective, other equally important methods of representation have much to tell us. Parallel projection can be found on classical Greek vases, in Pompeiian frescoes, in Byzantine mosaics; it returned in works of the historical avant-garde, and remains the dominant form of representation in China. In Oblique Drawing, Massimo Scolari investigates anti-perspective visual representation over two thousand years, finding in the course of his investigation that visual and conceptual representations are manifestations of the ideological and philosophical orientations of different cultures. Images prove to be not just a form of art but a form of thought, a projection of a way of life. Scolari's generously illustrated studies show that illusionistic perspective is not the only, or even the best, representation of objects in history; parallel projection, for example, preserves in scale the actual measurements of objects it represents, avoiding the distortions of one-point perspective. Scolari analyzes the use of nonperspectival representations in pre-Renaissance images of machines and military hardware, architectural models and drawings, and illustrations of geometrical solids. He challenges Panofsky's theory of Pompeiian perspective and explains the difficulties encountered by the Chinese when they viewed Jesuit missionaries' perspectival religious images. Scolari vividly demonstrates the diversity of representational forms devised through the centuries, and shows how each one reveals something that is lacking in the others.

Radical Perspectivalism

Radical Perspectivalism Thomas Lamarre (bio) Lines of Sight sounds a call for radical perspectivalism. It calls for getting to the root of perspective and aims for a transfiguration of the values associated with a regime initially articulated by René Descartes in the registers of one-point perspective, coordinate geometry, and rationalist dualism. It may seem odd to make so much fuss about a mode or system dating from the seventeenth century. After all, subsequent developments in science and mathematics may be said to have surpassed Cartesian geometry and perspective, or at least to have shown their restrictions and limitations. The Cartesian paradigm may thus appear outdated today, easily relegated to a transitional role within classical or early modern sciences, or to the status of a precursor, an incomplete articulation outstripped by modern and contemporary forms of knowledge. But Lines of Sight is not first and foremost concerned with the bare materiality or scientific accuracy of Cartesian geometry or one-point perspective. Rather it is concerned with Cartesianism. As Martin Jay reminds us in the context of visual culture, Cartesianism is not simply a structurally determined outcome of the use of one-point perspective or coordinate geometry. It is the combination of this mathematical mode with “Cartesian ideas of subjective rationality in philosophy” that served to make Cartesianism appear to be “the dominant, and even totally hegemonic, visual model of the modern era.” 1 In other words, Cartesianism is a historically articulated mode of rationalism, implying a highly specific field of rationality. Central to Cartesian rationality [End Page ix] is the establishment of a series of conceptual and practical divides—between space and time, between body and mind, between object and subject. These divides became so entrenched and so identified with Enlightenment thought and rational thinking that modern Western thought is still frequently characterized in terms of such unrelenting dualism with its corresponding sense of a subjective mastery over nature implicit in certain modes of visual ordering, scaling, and mapping. The problem, however, is not only that Cartesianism has dominated conceptualizations of modernity, providing the hegemonic model. But also, as a systematic attempt to ground various forms of inquiry, Cartesianism has shaped the ways in which we make connections across different disciplines or domains of knowledge—aesthetics, mathematics, history, biology, ethnography, physics, and philosophy. Nonetheless, while this collection of essays on Japanese media and popular culture proposes to go to the root of perspective and thus to overturn key aspects of Cartesianism, its goal is not, for instance, to denounce one-point perspective as inherently or deterministically fated to produce a hegemonic regime of modernity. Instead, the aim is to get to the root of this received regime of perspective in order to explore other modes and practices, other potentialities of perspective, which may have radical implications for determining what counts as art, or what makes for identity, and how we work across disciplines today. Indeed, as the use of the term “radical perspectivalism” indicates, Lines of Sight does not dispense with perspective. It is concerned with the radical potentiality of perspective, and not only in the field of vision. The emphasis on sight in the title is a lure or point of departure, designed to attract and activate a broader engagement with questions pertaining to aesthetics and to multisensory operations across fields of inquiry. As such, even as it aims to uproot and overturn Cartesianism, Lines of Sight makes no claims to supersede or overcome it. This is not because we feel that Cartesianism plays such a deterministic role in modernity that it can never be overcome but only incessantly displaced or deconstructed. Rather the problem for us is that Japan has so often been situated outside Western modernity, as a site of overcoming Western modernity, that is, Cartesian dualism—yet such a gesture merely reinscribes and reinforces Cartesian dualism in a geopolitical register, usually in the form of an opposition between the spirituality and nondualism of the “Orient” or “Asia” versus the materiality and dualism of the West. The effect, if not the intent, of such a gesture is to shore up a divide between Japan and the West in order to consolidate their identities. Take, for instance, a...

Image Essay: Mobile Worldviews

Image Essay: Mobile Worldviews Stefan Riekeles (bio) and Thomas Lamarre (bio) In cel animation and digital animation, the anime image is composed of layers. Compositing is the term commonly used to describe the process of establishing of relations between image layers. Much of our experience of movement in animation comes from compositing, and a variety of artists contribute to the mobile relations established between layers of the image. The usual point of departure and overall focus for discussions of compositing are the relations between characters and background, and there is a tendency to treat backgrounds as inert and static backdrops for action. Yet, production design in anime does not simply provide a passive space for action and emotions to be played out but plays an active role in orientating and qualifying all manner of movement, which is beautifully conveyed in the Japanese term used to describe the role of production design—sekai-kan or “worldview”—an incipient mobility that generates perspectives. Here, we propose to explore the layers of production of such “mobile worldviews,” both to impart a better sense of the dynamics of animation and to acknowledge the range of artistic contributions to anime production. [End Page 174] Background Painting and Design A scene generally consists of several takes or shots, which in anime are also called “cuts.” Each cut requires a background image. Usually, the background image is painted on a sheet of paper with watercolors or gouache on the basis of the layout and image board designs. In cel animation, the sheet of paper is generally larger in format than the transparent sheets on which characters and other figures are drawn, to allow for movement of the viewing position. Patlabor—The Movie (1989, dir. Oshii Mamoru) brought new attention to background painting in anime production. Often in animation production greater attention is paid to the movement of characters, at the expense of the background. Of course, Miyazaki Hayao’s films had already begun to employ beautifully painted backgrounds, but Patlabor introduces a new kind of focus and mobility into its design. This becomes especially apparent in a sequence in which the two detectives’ investigation brings them to the old suburbs of Tokyo, which are being demolished to make way for islands of high-rise constructions. The abandoned wooden houses that are to be demolished stand in stark contrast to the sleek, white, soaring towers. It was a combination of talents that allowed this sequence to set new standards for animation. On the one hand, Oshii allows the background to come to fore: as our viewing position follows the two detectives, they hardly speak, and their silence, in conjunction with Kawai Kenji’s music, heightens our focus on the background. On the other hand, there are Ogura Hiromasa’s paintings. Ogura uses high contrast to express the quality of light on a summer day in Tokyo, extending the contrast to the relation between the old wooden houses and the new ferro-concrete high-rises (Figure 1). The houses are rendered with thin lines in high detail, while the background high-rises are drawn schematically, and their vertical lines fade out, implying that there is nothing to see (Figure 2). Our attention thus settles on the wooden houses in the foreground, which effectively block the vanishing point, refusing to vanish. In sum, Ogura uses different degrees of detail in order to guide attention within the image, deploying one-point perspective only to undermine its ability to structure this worldview. In his designs for the room in which the character Ayanami Rei was “born” in Anno Hideaki’s digital rebuild Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance (2009), Watabe Takashi first generated a three-dimensional computer model. While our viewing position adheres to one-point perspective, his wire-frame rendering of the space (Figure 3) builds in the possibility of looking at the central chamber from any point within the cylindrical room. As such, rather than a single fixed viewing point, we have a sense of mobile perspectivalism. [End Page 175] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Ogura Hiromasa: background painting for Patlabor—The Movie, cut 382, watercolor and gouache on paper, 25 × 35.3 cm. Copyright...