New book: Immersions

We are more immersed in images than at any other point in history, which is both wonderful and alarming. Smartphone selfies, seventeenth-century Dutch church paintings, video games, Japanese woodblock prints — they are all carefully designed to be seen in a particular way to elicit emotions and impart meaning. We either absorb the messaging subconsciously or we miss it entirely, because we’re not aware of how to look.

The secret to decoding many images is geometry. Different cultures — European, East Asian, Middle Eastern — at different points throughout history have made radically different choices about how to represent space on a flat surface. Those choices are never neutral: they are designed to shape how the viewer interacts with a constructed reality, and they are deeply influenced by personal and cultural values. By learning how to read the geometric structure of a visual image, a backstory emerges that gives richer context to the surface story being told. It turns out that geometry is one of the most instructive and subversive things you can bring to a museum.

Immersions is about learning how to immerse yourself in images the way they were intended, and then immersing yourself deeper into the mechanics and philosophies of visual culture. It solves mysteries in art history, exposes the hidden architecture of visual manipulation, and argues that the tools of geometry belong not just in classrooms but in front of every painting, screen, and selfie camera. No prior math knowledge required, only curiosity and the willingness to look more carefully.

Immersions will be published by Princeton University Press.

ted-ed animated video

Collaboration with Jeremiah Dickey to create a video exploring anamorphisms, edited by Alex Rosenthal at TED-Ed. View the full lesson here.

Judy chicago and Donald Woodman’s A multimedia project of discovery 2006

A semester during math graduate school when I took art classes and created eight 3x6 ft oil paintings of myself as other people’s preconceptions