The Algorithms of Distance: Metaphors in Pictorial Language

The analysis of isometric systems as representations of shadows cast by sunlight, is developed a study of their ensuing patterns of common sense and intimation of apollonian clarity as synthetic beauty. This paper seeks to show the visionary modernist examples of the embracing of the aesthetic with the utopian and totalitarian social ramifications, collectivity, and the triumph of architecture over art. There are interesting and fascinating ideas around the descriptions of space, the orientation of trajectories and their function in creating ideal understanding. The Trimetric projections in the manuals of the Industrial Revolutions, along with the Projection 'felt magnitudes' theories of Monge and Poncelet, into the Kandinsky of 'Point, Line and Plane' and Mondrian's visionary writing and painting, will serve as a backdrop to a discussion of a predisposition in societies for the 'tabula rasa' of radical aesthetics. The paper is a discourse that rests on indisputable axioms in descriptive geometry and most importantly on their cultural ramifications and political expressions. The territory is vast. However, succinct examples and excerpts from criticism and historic research will indicate the seeds of contemporary post-modern sensibilities as an aversion to the grandiosity of modernist emancipation. Jaques Derrida's exhibition "Memories of a Blind Man" Art Intenational 14 (1991) in the Pompidou Centre is the source of these ideas.