Depth Effects: Dimensionality from Camera to Computation
Brooke Belisle
Depth Effects recalls early photographic strategies used to capture the three-dimensional shapes of things, portray the contours of embodied identity, and map the terrain of geographical space. Showing how these resurface in AI-enabled techniques of object recognition, depth mapping, and photogrammetry, it exposes how this can also carry over totalizing, colonialist ambitions to collect, calculate, and synthesize every aspect of the visible.
Building on the work Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Depth Effects proposes a concept of dimensional aesthetics that insists on what remains invisible and irreducible. Close readings of artworks by Trevor Paglen, Lorna Simpson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andreas Gursky explore radical potentials that re-open with contemporary practices of renegotiating depth.
University of California Press
Publication Date: December 2023
