Axonometry

Discussion

Jan Krikke:

"Anyone reading The Ever-Present Origin can sense the intensity of a man who wants to share an important insight with the world. But those who have studied East Asia art and architecture will recognize a fundamental flaw in the way Gebser frames his insight with his perspectival metaphor. Gebser was unaware that the Chinese, some 1000 years ago, had developed their own pictorial projection system that anticipates his notion of the “aperspectival.”

The Chinese projection system, dengjiao toushi, (or “equal angle see-through”), originated in Chinese architecture and came to be known in the West as axonometry. The Chinese projection system was to Chinese artists and architects what linear perspective was to European artists and architects. Moreover, the Chinese were aware of both space and time at least 2000 years ago, which they referred to as Yu-Zhou. Axonometry is based on the conceptual synthesis of Yu (space) and Zhou (time). The projection system was essential to the development of the classic Chinese handscroll painting, the only pictorial format in the world that aesthetically integrates space and time. Gebser’s unfamiliarity with axonometry leads him to give a highly questionable account of the Modernist Revolution.

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Artists and architects from modernist movements like De Stijl in Holland, the Bauhaus in Germany, and the Suprematists in the Soviet Union discovered axonometry as the non-optical alternative to linear perspective. Axonometry became emblematic of modern architecture and has since become an essential tool for artists and architects the world over. English mathematician and science-fiction writer Charles Howard Hinton, who popularized the notion of the Fourth Dimension in the 1880s, used a tesseract to illustrate the concept. The tesseract was in fact an axonometry projection. Coming to terms with the Fourth Dimension, said Hinton, requires “the casting out the self” in perception, a notion not far removed from Geber’s aperpectival. Axonometry has the attributes Gebser ascribed to aperspectivity of the Integral Structure. "

(https://jankrikke2020.medium.com/china-and-the-search-for-a-global-consciousness-f1e0ef3df710)