Imagistic Projection as Relational Becoming

The geometry of projected images onto screens is rather simple and can be quite readily understood through basic optics and Euclidian geometry. As a result of the imagistic immersion of the spectacle of cinema, one shares in the experience of spectatorship through the common subjectivity of the moving pictures and a common point of view. All spectators are served the same relational proposition that enfolds them within the encompassing reach of the projection before them. Still, the shared subjectivity of the content on the screen is different from the becoming-one with the projected screen image that we like to think as inhabiting us: the milieu of imagistic encounter associates what we refer to as the inside and the outside of experience to simultaneously emerge as a singular becoming. In the interest of undoing the dualistic spectator/screen relationship that perpetuates the divide of the subject/object relation, this chapter looks at the nature of the relation between the spectator and the screen and the formation of the projected image as a compositional assemblage where the moving images that ‘live within us as consciousness’ encompass the world we live in. This chapter seeks to answer the question of how we become one with the screen through an articulation of Deleuze’s concept of the fold by way of the optical perspective models of Alberti and Viator, Kepler’s explorations of continuity through the generalized understanding of conics and perspective, as well as the implications of Desargues’s projective geometry and a final resolution through topology.