viz.

Video Credit: Youtube.com

“Anamorphosis thrives on mystery, and its masters rarely give away their secrets.” The Brothers Quay thus introduce the technique of perspectival distortion, which they document in their short film De Artificiali Perspectiva, or Anamorphosis (1991). This film provides viewers with an introduction to a little known post-Renaissance technique, whose etymological origin derives from the Greek ana (again/against), morphe (shape/form). Re-form against form. Anamorphosis submits a classical paradigm of geometrical perspective to systematic spatial manipulations that thwart a conventional “centric” viewer’s apprehension of representational form on a canvas. In order to satisfactorily envision an anamorphic puzzle, the viewer must adopt an off-axis, lateral, or “eccentric” angle of sight. The mechanics of such sight further requires that the viewer assume a monocular, cyclopean, or “keyhole” gaze, which flattens visual depth and paradoxically conjures up an embedded three-dimensional image. The mechanics of this “eccentric” vision offers an apt analogy for the uncanny aesthetic of anamorphosis.