Reality

I thought this chapter was itself very interesting because it really forces the reader to think deeply and contemplate how even to determine what is real, let alone represent it realistically. I agree with Descartes on alot of his philosophy on perspective, and certainly that rationality is what creates our experience. Experience, and the senses do not form our perspective, rather we make sense of our experience from our perspective; Through what we already know, with our thinking mind. I think the chapter made this very clear by taking us through the history of representing perspective realistically and letting us see how much change (whether in space or form) has occurred from age to age and culture to culture.

The political side to this, could possibly be the debate on the way to depict what is real. This is simply political because of how different cultures have their own epistemes. An episteme me being each age or culture's "the way" to finding truth, knowledge, what is "real". Here in the US, the epestemology is centered around Math, Science and especially the idea of physical proof. The problem with this approach is that much of the time "physical proof" isn't "physically possible". Personally, I see no destinction between what is "real" and what is "unreal". I think its almost silly that someone can say something is or is not real. You may say a unicorn is unreal, but its concept is certainly real, and its concept is that of a horse with a horn, both concepts that have actual existing representations. So is one realer than the other? I think only depending on where you stand, and what episteme you have.

I know this may be a bit off topic, but personally I certainly don't think you can accept anything as real unless you accept everything as real. The truth is that we all, as living beings in this existance have several root epistemes. The reason we all must have have some kind of epistemy is because of what we consider "actual knowledge". Plato defined the word as being "that which does not change, which remains unmoved", and fortunately one of the "laws" that seemingly governs the entirety of the universe is that everything must change! (Except of course for the only thing that doesn't of course, yourself). So what isn't epistemy if nothing is actual knowledge? One of the more important epeisteme's being that we all project the concept of space and time onto everything. Even though it may seem these limits are real, any scientist / mathematician (even with their physical proof) knows that time is illusory and is different depending where you are in the universe.

This is the importance of avant-garde, and why abstract art can be appreciated just as much (if not more) then conservative realism. Why should we limit ourselves to what we consider real, if we can't even determine 'what is real' in the first place? Avant-garde is the same as what I was talking about in my last entry with "the weird" and "the strange" as in: what is new and different, therefore alien and unknown. The importance of it is that because it is alien, it is beyond our current limit. We havn't accepted it yet. However, when we introduce weird, new, avant-garde things is that eventually through time they are no longer weird and new and therefore become accepted! Basically, it is through stretching beyond our "limits" and grasping the unknown we expand our total knowledge and ourselves. What we will find, is that everything we reach out and grasp has to be in some way connected to what we already have, are. Cubeism is actually an interesting example of this. The avant-garde of cubeism is how "weird" it is to see people, plants and (smooth) landscape depicted in regid geometry. How its connected, and how its real, is it's true on a level, because everything really is a part of and constructed from similar rigid geometry and really just math as a whole.