The Art of Anamorphosis: Subverting Representational Conventions and Challenging the Observer

Abstract

Knoops discusses the seventeenth-century medium cylindrical anamorphosis as a precursor to two defining traits of contemporary media culture, challenging representational conventions and questioning the observer. A study of cylindrical anamorphosis’s deep time signals how other ways of representation and of looking, and another status of the observer were alternative possibilities that did not become part of mainstream media. The analysis of Knoops’s media installation Mirror Mirror (2014) shows how a confrontation with the digital and the moving image magnifies these inherent qualities of cylindrical anamorphosis to subvert representational conventions and challenge the role of the observer, and illustrates how these traits reverberate in the media culture of our time.