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Perspective was developed in the 15th century by architects, first and foremost as a medium
of communicating and propagating architectural content in ways familiar to non‐architects.
However, it spilled out ever since to other adjacent territories of visual communication, soon
to be recuperated by renaissance artists as an ideal method of representing space for
centuries to follow. On the contrary to that, stands isometric, which developed much later
and remained tightly a limited practice between draftsmen usually associated with technical
details of machinery.
This is largely due to the nature of both; on one hand perspective is a closed space, depicting
a take cut out from a larger still life scene, a take bounded by the picture plane and the
vanishing lines. What lies behind the picture plane, ahead of the horizon, or to the sides of
the cadre are unknown territories, if ever existed. On the other hand, isometric is
borderless, its only limitation happens as an abrupt intersection with the physical materiality
of the medium on which it is drawn, i.e. the paper. If the paper sheet is bigger this means
more isometric grid cells to be drawn, and further possibility for objects and information to
be added to the scene, an issue never visited in the case of perspective which operates with
its own boundaries regardless of the medium boundaries.
But perhaps the most interesting capacity in perspective that caught architects and hence
artists’ attention was its ability to record time, that is to capture motion. Perspective
happens with time, while movement in isometric seems timeless. It feels like where
perspective seems to be more about happening, isometric seems to be more about being.
This capacity to depict time comes from perspective’s layering logic that uses distance from
the picture plane as an index of depth. Objects seem to dive inwardly in the direction normal
to the paper, though this happens at an expense; to achieve layering, perspective trades off
accuracy of objects in favor of the consistency of relationships between them. As objects sail
away from the picture plane, they lose details to give the illusion of being far, while in
isometric objects seem to hover just above the immediate space of the paper, where all
objects enjoy the same degree of detailing regardless of how far. Perhaps this immediate
equal existence is what makes depth sometimes impossible to depict in isometric. This
graphic equality of detailing between what’s near and what’s far is exactly why isometric
remained within the circles of technical detailing of machinery, its prominent drawing
subject, where the parts themselves are as important as their assembly.
Isometric leaves the objects stored as absolute entities, whose characteristics can be
immediately retrieved; immediate measurements from the paper space are possible, but not
immediate arrangements. Isometric logic has the power of instancing whatever is saved in
its language, but relationship between instances might be lost in translation.
Perspective is only a representative of the real, as many hidden errors can lurk undiscovered
in its folds. On the contrary, an isometric drawing is an extension of orthography. It doesn’t
represent, it is itself. Any mistake in the drawing can be invariably easily identified as
internal error threatening the consistency of the drawing. In other words, orthographic
systems have their own internal proofing mechanisms, those that perspective systems lack.
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The checkpoint is one architectural device that separates what it also mediates. It’s basically
a wall that is porous enough to permeate motion yet without existence. The word ‘here’
cannot be used on a checkpoint unless it’s thick enough. The generic checkpoint doesn’t
normally generate a situation of locality; one cannot belong to a checkpoint, it’s not place, it
does not generate a ‘here’, it is always a situation of crossing between the two ‘theres’
straddling the checkpoint. However, the checkpoint generates a situation of immediacy. It is
‘now’ that can always and only exist on any generic checkpoint: as you cross the checkpoint
now, you’re neither here nor there. Simply the checkpoint is time without space. This might
be also held true for the whole philosophical category of ‘crossing’. Not so quite surprisingly
the word ‘now’ only exists as extension of other times, a mathematical function that
mediates the two different domains it separates: past and future, again ‘now’ is a checkpoint
in itself.
But ‘now’ is not absolute. So as I write these words in my ‘now’, you read them in my future
which is your ‘now’, and as I type them in my ‘now’, my brain had spoken them in its past.
‘Now’ is relative and ephemeral to the extent that there is no limit to the number of ‘nows’
that might be nested in any one given ‘now’. One can think of possible variations of the
Allegory of the Cave where times are sought to be explained instead of shadows.
The checkpoint is a non‐place where ‘now’ manifests; however, the checkpoint in its reality
and stability is a constant inversion of the ephemerality of ‘now’. The ideal checkpoint
should be an inversion of crossing, an object that exists without time.
3‐
‘Objects without Time’, or the ideal checkpoint, is the non‐space through which events
happen, yet, without materializing into spaces. But since this is impossible to happen in real,
it can only exist in a medium that depicts no time: the isometric.
The checkpoint here is a swarm of objects that appear to float over the immediate space of
the two‐dimensional field of paper, as if departing from all what connects them to time.
They depart from the picture plane, vanishing points, depth, etc. They are just themselves.
Relationships render useless here, what matters are the objects in themselves and for
themselves.
In a more political understanding, the checkpoint is what always separates a hierarchical
system from a heterarchical one. A crossing here would be a crossing from a system that
iterates relationships between its subjects to a system that instantiates free selves.