ABSTRACT
The word “sight” is typically associated with the visual sense of seeing, or observing, with one’s eyes. At base, the word is fundamentally concerned with “perception” in terms of perceiving what is, is to come or might be, which has an altogether conceptually different connotation. As a noun, “sight” pertains to the capacity to realise, grasp and comprehend, or to perceive in a manner which is not specifically oriented to seeing with one’s eyes. Shaman and holy persons are one example of which people turn to for in sight and discernment of events they cannot “see” for themselves. 1 We tend to refer to our sensorial capacity as composed of five senses: vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste. This is, however, a compounded view of our sensorial capacities, which is prompted by the anthropocentric view of existence. 2 The manner in which this overriding view has shaped our understanding of existence has fuelled the pre-eminence of our visual sense over all others and informed technological and cultural (specifically Western society) progress in a manner which is focused on the ability to see visually. 3
The Renaissance representation of space was fundamentally grounded in an ideological conception of the world. The vanishing point and the meeting of parallel lines “at infi nity” evokes a God-like standpoint, determining a representation at once both intellectual and visual, which promoted the primacy of the gaze in a kind of “logic of visualisation”. 4 Coupled with modern physics (if we negate certain relativistic theories) space was qualifi ed as continuous, isotropic, homogenous, fi nite or infi nite and fundamentally a matter, given credence by visually oriented techniques of representation, controlled by means of its visual articulation. The obsession with perspective is entrenched in the perceived superiority of sight and the signifi cance of the image, which was followed, and accentuated, by advances in photography and fi lm. What the image offers is the articulation of space (as visual) itself.
