Is 3D Modeling and Animation Descartes Revisited, or Does it Have Other Distinguishing Features?

Upon tracing 3D modeling and animation to Renaissance perspective and spatial construction, an historical figure you will see associated with its development is Rene Descartes, from whom comes the term "Cartesianism". Cartesianism is usually considered to be synonymous with rationalism, and thinkers within this tradition do not generally acknowledge the importance of the body, the theory of practice, and history in the process of thinking. They formalize in an attempt to understand what can be known.

Descartes is known to have doubted everything but his ability to doubt or think. His "cogito ergo sum" means, "I think, therefore I am." But he was also responsible for ways of ensuring that appearances were translated or copied with much fidelity to visual perception: he is responsible for the Cartesian coordinate system, which may, retrospecitvely, be regarded as a virtual construction, a set of rules for representing space on a flat surface. In doubting the existence of everything but what he (paradoxically) felt existed "objectively", he can be seen to have created a system for making so-called accurate copies of nature that is a way of doubting an ephemeral or fleeting Nature. Descartes thought, how must we develop standards to ensure a visually "true" picture of natural objects?

With his program for reaching an indubitable, rational first principle, Descartes also developed algebra, the mathematical representation of space. As a result, mathematically-inclined artists could work in atelier mode, sketching according to the rules of perspective and foreshortening, underlied by Cartesian space, but could also, with Descartes, now abstract visual spaces into a notation that "explained" the visual through a code. The artist sketch was assumed to be completed by a model constructed through counting, computation and mechanical notation of the primary qualities of extension, mass, depth, and form.

With both a visual component and a mathematical component, the Renaissance was simultaneously an appearance combined with a trope of "hollowness" following from its replacement by a mathematical equation or dataset. We have an impression of solid forms in the so-called "real world", because the experience of life is resolved into more detail than in 2D pictorial space, although independently of the equation of greater reality and greater resolution. A flat image shares an inverse relation to the retinal image, so that models and systems are simply, representation. Pictures only model visual perception and emotive response through reference, whereas the world models everything that can be thought.

It is at this intersection that new paradigms in computing doubly invest surfaces with hollowness and depth -- especially in the skin-deep-only geometry of 3D modeling and animation. A recessed surface without solidity from a cut-open 3D model represents vision and surface, but at the same time, the event, as the 3D software suite in default mode implies animation. Surfaces and appearances begin to take on behaviors which extend the system of representation to a larger domain of meaning effects.

Are there differences between contemporary 3D and Cartesian perspective/algebra? While virtual spaces of 3d modeling and animation are Cartesian, with 3d modeling and animation, contemporary virtuality incorporates patterns of subjectivity in its separation of the logic of software from its many views. The task of the software application is to automate the presentation of visual appearance through modeling the meta-probability of "many" views. Three-dimensional pictures may then play with photographic truth: they are stages to realize ideas with photographic articulation of light. Here enter fantastic forms within a "realistic" image.

In this sense, the production spaces of contemporary film aided by 3D modeling still explore the aesthetics of futuristic fiction that authors like Felix Bodin (of the early 19th Century) argued consisted of plausible wonders within conventions of realism. The fantasy genre is still bound to the same representational codes as Cartesian images--even if its protagonists have blue skin or eyes on top of antenna-like eyebrows.

Michel Foucault has addressed this problematic of the realistic imaginary in his Les mots et les choses for which, given seamless knowledge, disruption may be used to mount a politics and to invest value in the world. An example of difference in imaging paradigms then can be shown by film or other dynamic information that disrupts the continuous reality of perspective construction. Bertolt Brecht describes it as critical distancing. A critical distancing, without being disinterested, allows a reflection on viewers' reading processes per unit of pictorial work. An example of a reflexivity that disrupts the continuity of perspective, whether fantastic or realistic--a truly modern usage--could be shown in the Wachowskis' Matrix series, in the second film, The Matrix: Reloaded, when our heroes become allegorical figures engaged in the battle of competing software, fighting to balance an equation on a busy highway interstate. Morpheus and his opponent jump from an exploding Eighteen-wheeled vehicle and are suddenly frozen in mid-air, an indication of the role of media, but also a consciousness of film viewing that has no analogical appearance in the world, except through death -- or plastic media. This freezing of the frame--and especially with the Matrix, other metaphors of inside and outside, "fake" and "real" worlds -- kills the simulacra, and simultaneously, the Cartesian representation of reality.

Along with Brecht, montage cuts into film. Montage is the creation of associative shots through transposing one line of continuity onto another, either through literal superimposition of film frames, or through implied transposition.

So if montage and associative creation is a product of modernity, then is the disruption of simulation or Cartesian vision in contemporary film separate from the fundamental project of modernity? Modernity could argue that even disruptions are to be folded into the Cartesian simulacra. What then is the difference between 3D modeling and animation, perspective, and montage? Well, 3D toolsets allow a philosophical reflection on the dialogue between continuity and disruption that follow with the increase in dynamic image constructs from static ones, co-opted into photographic, filmic appearances. As Manuel De Landa argues -- we don't see progress, really in the development of science and technology, only intensifications. A philosophy of "reality" is intensified by the 3d modeling and animation toolchest.

Enter the new discipline of information management. Our dynamics of the moving and subjective image is intensified, and there's more information to handle. 3d modeling and animation is Cartesian, but users of the software receive this "for free", and bring their own dispositions and proclivities to the system. Individual artist position is superimposed upon built-in functions of Cartesianism and disruption. Cartesianism built into contemporary software is part of the intensification. How well the artist refines signal in noise in the 21st century landscape in particular, distinguishes our practices from those of preceding eras.