1st Edition

The New Perspectiva Artificialis From the Mechanical Eye to the Algorithmic Symbolic Form

318 Pages 6 Color & 21 B/W Illustrations

by Routledge

Description

Advancing a comparative thesis, this book aligns Renaissance linear perspective with transformer architectures in generative artificial intelligence as structurally parallel revolutions in symbolic form. Both linear perspective and transformer architectures transform subjective human faculties—embodied seeing in one case and linguistic judgment in the other—into rationalized, computable... Read more

Introduction: The Two Symbolic Forms; Part I The Mechanical Eye: Optical Regimes, Symbolic Space, and the Western Field of Vision; Chapter 1. Sacred Space and Ritual Vision: Classical Optics, Medieval Image-Orders, and the Prehistory of Perspective; Chapter 2. The Grid of Reason: Alberti, Brunelleschi, Dürer, Cartography, and the Codification of Spatial Procedure; Chapter 3. Perspective as Symbolic Form: Geometry, Territory, Administration, and the Social Density of the Subject; Chapter 4. Countervisions: Romantic Imagination, Physiological Vision, Photography, and the Crisis of Mechanized Truth; Part II. The Algorithmic Voice: Corpora, Semantic Space, and the Operationalization of Meaning; Chapter 6. From Archive to Corpus: Print Culture, Digitization, and Machine-Readable Textuality; Chapter 7. Tokenization, Embeddings, and Attention: The Construction of a Semantic Field; Chapter 8. From Prediction to Interpretation: Generation, Mechanism, and the Conditions of Meaning; Chapter 9. Transformer Symbolic Form: Authorship, Collaboration, Attribution, and Institutional Practice; Conclusion. Beyond the Grid: Global Circulation, Procedural Culture, and the Future of Interpretation