Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Six: Chapter Ten: Structures of Depth
While Murakami Takashi associates superflat with scanning, information, digital art, media sampling, postmodern art, and even a fascination with war and military technologies, he remains at the level of suggestive generalization. He doesn’t see a structure in superflat, and so superflat simply appears as a break with Cartesianism (one-point perspective and Western modernity). Superflat does not appear to any coherent structure that might link it to a perceptual regime. Superflat thus establishes a divide between techniques of superflat and modern structures and regimes. Superflat postmodernity appears as a sort of structure-less condition without any material forms of capture.
But there is a structure that follows directly from the orthogonal perspective evident in Edo art — exploded projection.
Exploded projection (also called exploded view) is commonly used for assembly diagrams, as in the example below of a Yamaha motorcycle front wheel assembly. The elements or pieces of the wheel are arrayed in depth, but this is not the depth of one-point perspective. The elements are arrayed in accordance to orthogonal planes of depth. There is no vanishing point. With one-point perspective, elements that are farther away from us appear smaller, and objects that are very close to us often appear distorted. If the assembly were drawn in accordance with one-point perspective, the elements on the back side of the wheel would appear smaller than the front side. When you are disassembling or assembling something, elements of same size (screws, rings, bolts, etc) should appear the same size. Exploded projection allows things to be drawn in accordance with this sort of technical demand for accuracy. As such, it is as scientific and rational as one-point perspective, even though received wisdom tends to make us think that one-point perspective is the model for scientifically accurate representation.
