Transductions of the Virtual Eye

I’m fascinated by the operational logic behind ray tracing. Rather than simply recording a preexisting scene, the renderer constructs visibility from the position of a virtual eye. Rays are projected from the camera through an image plane and into the model, where intersections with geometry initiate further calculations of light, shadow, reflection and transparency. A shadow is therefore not simply located at the dark surface we see, but emerges from a chain of spatial relationships between viewpoint, geometry and illumination.

There is something poetic about this computational eye. It recalls Merleau Ponty’s idea of the seer being embedded within the world it perceives. Perception is not a neutral image of an external reality, but something produced through the relationship between body, viewpoint and world. Artistic perception operates through a similarly situated logic. The artist does not simply record how a space “exists,” but renders it through its sensual presence, extracting what might be called its phenomenological pulp.

Ray tracing and embodied vision therefore approach space through strangely inverse systems. One is computational and disembodied, the other bodily and phenomenological, yet both construct a world from a situated point of perception. I am interested in the transduction between these two systems: the virtual eye of the ray tracer and my own virtual eye. What happens when information produced through one perceptual logic is passed into the other?