Farrago of distortion story pick4/1/2023 ![]() But the tools for representing what we see, contend the Oakes brothers, have always existed - they have existed within the eyes. The labor of translating the many dimensions to a picture plane has been assisted by instruments such as the camera obscura, the camera lucida, the concave mirror. ![]() The three in which we manipulate our meat bodies seem mundane and irrelevant within these complex structures, incommodious compared to the flat images and concepts we can file or frame. The conventions of art and mathematics have abstracted the world down to two dimensions, even while speculating about a universe of 10 to 26. We cave dwellers have ever been intoxicated by representations, loving the illusions more than the original, the selfie more than the self. This story was relayed by that same Plato who imagined us prisoners, nose to a wall on which the shadows of reality flicker, a dimension and a distance away from the ideal forms that we can only begin to comprehend in the light of the philosophical mind. We have this first disobedience to blame for the woes of attraction and the alleged satisfaction of monogamy, and Aristophanes warns we best watch ourselves lest we again be split along the seams of our noses, losing our last axis of symmetry, to be left peg-legged hoppers hunting for a completion now made geometrically more improbable. As punishment, Zeus cleaved them in two, leaving them to wander biped, restlessly searching for their other halves. The ease of their ambit made them bold, and they plotted revolution against the gods. The poet Aristophanes once described the original human body as a two-headed, eight-limbed sphere that perambulated by tumbling like a ball. Against the linear progression of astronomy, artists Ryan and Trevor Oakes have returned the universe to the glory of spheres, centering it not merely on the earth, but on the eye. ![]() Copernicus took his last leave of the earth in 1543 looking on the pages of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, espousing a universe oriented on the sun, the heliocentrism that Galileo would suffer his final nine years under house arrest to defend. Ptolemy advanced the notion of epicycles and deferents, the planets revolving like gears along a universe still cycling, like clockwork cranked on the axle of our planet. ARISTOTLE ENVISIONED a celestial universe of 55 crystalline spheres concentrically organized around the earth, each carrying a planet along its orbit by the angular momentum of the outermost ring, the Prime Mover, made of nothing but divine motion.
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