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This chapter discusses the dynamic monocular cue of motion parallax produced by motion of an observer with respect to a 3-D display. Topics covered include general properties of motion parallax, parallax and absolute distance, linear parallax and depth, parallax and 3-D shape, depth from rotary motion, and contrast in motion parallax.

Depth cue refers to information about depth arising from a specified visual feature. Depth cues interact in many ways. Information provided by two different cues may be added or averaged or one cue may resolve the ambiguity of another cue. When information from one cue conflicts with that from another, the conflict may be resolved by weighting the cues or one cue may be ignored. This chapter reviews these and other ways in which depth information is combined. Topics covered include types of cue interaction, disparity and motion parallax, disparity and perspective, disparity and interposition, disparity and transparency, disparity and shading, disparity and accommodation, and cognition and depth-cue interactions.

This chapter presents a detailed account of how the pigeon brain detects moving objects, derives depth information from motion parallax, and perceives self-motion. All of these functions are critically important to survival and are accomplished in birds by brain regions along each of the three visual pathways: the collothalamic and lemnothalamic pathways from the retina to the telencephalon, and the pathway consisting of nuclei in the accessory optic system and pretectum. Each pathway processes slightly different aspects of visual motion.

Impressions of depth are created by motion parallax produced by motion of an observer relative to a 3-D display. Depth created by motion parallax has a striking resemblance to that created by binocular disparity. The two sources of information are fundamentally the same. This chapter reviews the role of motion parallax in the detection of absolute distance, relative distance, and three-dimensional structure. The projected image of a twisted piece of wire appears flat but it appears in depth when the wire is rotated. This is the kinetic depth effect. The chapter ends with an account of factors that influence the kinetic depth effect and the related stereokinetic effect.

There are a number of cues to depth perception, the most important one being disparity, leading to stereopsis. Others are accommodation, convergence, motion parallax, interocular velocity differences, perspective, texture gradients, superposition, and shading. Depth perception is important for the control of vergence movements, to look at an object nearer or further away, to detect which objects are nearer, and to determine the shape of an object. Nearly all areas of the brain have responses to depth cues. Those on the dorsal pathway are concerned primarily with large disparities, for vergence control, and navigation through the environment. As with motion, there are separate areas for observing an object in relation to its background and observing oneself in relation to the world. Those on the ventral pathway are concerned primarily with fine disparities and the details of what an object looks like.

This chapter examines the relationship between two socio-cultural formations: the narrative forms that have emerged in conjunction with the control episteme, and the attribution of notions of programmability to human psychology. The chapter begins with a study of programmability as a general concept in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s studies of computing, Manuel Castells’s work on global labor classifications, and the historical connections between cybernetics and neuro-linguistic programming. The chapter then addresses the midcentury relationship between psychoanalysis and cybernetics in the work of Lawrence Kubie and Jacques Lacan. The second half of the chapter situates the shifting narrative and visual form of films from the 1970s to the present in relation to a notion of programmable subjectivity that shifts from character to viewer. This section includes close analyses of films including Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View and so-called ‘post-cinematic’ works such as the Bourne films. This final chapter ends with a ‘Coda’ that discusses interactive media and the principle of targeting as a privileged mode of relationality, before returning to questions of exclusion and critique that have been central to the book as a whole.

This chapter examines how the branching narrative framework of “Wandering Rocks” reflects the structure of the manneristic maze and emulates the nonlinear visual structures which are traced by the characters of Ulysses as they wander through Dublin’s streets. In light of Henri Poincaré’s definition of geometry as “the summary of the laws by which images succeed each other,” it explores how James Joyce presents time presented as the fourth dimension of space in his construction of a textual “picture of Dublin” which follows the movement of wandering bodies. This chapter provides a schema of the narrative network in “Wandering Rocks,” illustrating how Joyce’s textual remapping of Dublin involves the structural emulation of fundamental geometric constructs and related topographical concepts which involve the coincident meeting of lines (as in triangulation, parallax, and the Cartesian coordinate system). In light of the parallactic perspectives which are facilitated by the episode’s branching structure, this chapter demonstrates how the labyrinthine “Wandering Rocks” narrative epitomizes Joyce’s Brunonian perversion of unidirectional rectilinearity on a structural level, disrupting “wider manifestations […] of ‘conceptual and behavioral rectilinearity’” in its nonlinear form.

The stability of the visual world during eye movements has puzzled students for centuries. It resulted in the distinction between inflow and outflow theories, which remain a matter of much debate. Stability is retained during head movements and the involvement of motion parallax is assessed. Similar problems arise during reading and scene processing, thus stability and saccades or perceptual stability across fixations have been examined. This has raised the question of the involvement of mental representation in visual stability as well as questioning whether representation is necessary. In the mid-20th century, concerted attempts were made to study visual stability without displacement of the retinal image. These stabilised retinal image studies indicated how important retinal image displacement is to maintaining vision.

A review of the methods the ancient Greeks used to measure the distances between the Earth and the Sun, and the Earth and the Moon, and the size of the Earth, and the lives of the personalities involved. The remarkable Jeremiah Horrocks. He was the first observer in 1639 of a transit of Venus to use it to deduce the distance from the Earth to the Sun, using the method of parallax, which is simply explained. The story of Halley’s proposal for the first international collaboration to observe a transit in 1671 and of his life. The adventures and misadventures of those who set out around the globe for this and the later transit observations of 1769, including Captain Cook in Tahiti. These produced the first reasonably accurate dimensions for our solar system.

This chapter considers how the antipodes operated as a realm of utopian fantasy for writers in the early eighteenth century, and how the satirical works of Benjamin Franklin rework this tradition to position American and Australia in parallax relationships to the British Empire. It discusses how Crevecoeur’s interest in philosophical primitivism, particularly in his Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York, leads him to appropriate “New Holland” as a test case for his analysis of the relation between Western society and rational design. The final section of this chapter discusses how the fascination of Thomas Jefferson and John Ledyard with the West Coast of America led them to take a particular interest in transpacific engagements.

This chapter’s title, ‘Retrodynamics,’ is taken from a term in mechanics when a rotor’s power thrust is generated through inverse and opposite turns, and its general argument is that an analogous kind of backward motion should be seen as integral to the constitution of modernism. This chapter accordingly considers modernism in relation to the science, philosophy, anthropology and geography of the modernist period. It discusses ways in which time is represented ‘inside out’ in the works of Joseph Conrad, Joseph Furphy, and Marcel Proust. It also reads the fiction of James Joyce in relation to the discourses of parallax and empire, arguing that Ulysses brings together different times and places in a global imaginary where past and present, like proximate and distant, creatively interfere with each other.

This concluding chapter takes its title from a book of photographs about Australia published in 1931 by E. O. Hoppé. The cover of The Fifth Continent showed the photographer atop a globe looking back at a map of Australia, and it is this attempt to reconstitute the world in relation to alternative spatial perspectives that provided the impetus for Hoppé’s work. Similarly, to read authors such as Slessor or Dark in parallax with canonical types is not only to correlate relatively neglected figures with modernism’s larger orbit, but also to highlight various neglected aspects of more established writers, the complex ways in which their narratives face backwards as well as forwards. The particular force of backgazing within a sphere of modernism thus lies in the way it resists conventional classifications by projecting not an oppositional but a reversible world, one whose boundaries are rendered enigmatic.

This chapter studies the concepts of parallax and palimpsest in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Hilda Doolittle's Palimpsest, first describing the cultural and political unrest in 1910, and looking at the qualities of modernist writing that are presented in an essay by Woolf. It then examines the avant-garde novel, before finally discussing the parallactic narrative, showing that while parallaxis cuts between different texts, histories and realities, palimpsest overwrites them.

The 1960s was the start of a new cinema in Britain, a neo-modern remake of 1920s modernism for the sound era: 1963 with the release of The Servant was as momentous as 1929, and the expatriate eye was an integral part of modernism's second wave, the aesthetic dominant in the rise of the British neo-modern an aesthetic which can be called the aesthetics of the parallax view. In general, the writing is native, and the fusion of expatriate eye and insider's text counts for so much — John and Penelope Mortimer with Otto Ludwig Preminger, Harold Pinter with Joseph Losey, Edward Bond and Mark Peploe with Michelangelo Antonioni, Anthony Burgess freely providing his brilliant novel for Stanley Kubrick, Martin Ritt and Sidney Lumet with Paul Dehn adapting John Le Carré. This chapter examines Joseph Losey's films The Servant and Accident; Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, The Passenger, and Profession: Reporter; Alain Resnais's Providence; and Chris Petit's Radio On.

In this chapter, legendary critic David Thomson revisits Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View, one of the signature “paranoid thrillers” of the 1970s—a film that offers itself as a color film noir for the 70s. According to Thomson, Pakula's exploration of paranoia was as filled with delight as dread. Looking back, we can see the film as a step in the progress of Warren Beatty (the star you dare not trust), as Pakula painted a portrait of the spreading unease of the era with an evocation of the anti-social killer personality - a type that would be terribly fulfilled in the years to come.

Although Bester spoke disapprovingly of his early career, dismissing all of his stories written before 1950 as juvenilia, he produced several promising works in the early 1940s, most notably “The Probable Man,” “Adam and No Eve,” and “Hell Is Forever.” These stories appeared in leading markets such as Astounding and Unknown but pushed beyond them, at once invoking and subverting the conventions of the standard techno-adventure. This chapter demonstrates that even at this early stage in his career, Bester experimented with SF reading protocols in highly self-conscious ways. It also traces the emergence of key elements of his approach, including the use of hybrid SF-mystery plots, metanarration, metafictional references, the frame story, pastiche, extra-coding, and ambiguous resolutions

This chapter contains a study of the processes of neurology involved in humor detection and what those processes tell us about incongruity and risk-taking in the works of Joyce. A “Joe Miller” is a joke, and this study of Joyce’s jokes takes us into the heart of Joyce’s treasure hoard, which is language. Getting a joke is a cognitive function, performed in the same section of the brain where language tasks take place; appreciating a joke is an affective function, performed in the insular cortex, which is also implicated in pain perception, the perception of disgust, and vomiting. Both depend on parallax, or comparison with existing paradigms; the ability to think of two things at the same time is a useful way into the lexical world of Joyce.

Following an extended theoretical examination of the continuing relevance of the concepts of influence and rapport de fait for comparative criticism today, this chapter provides a contrapuntal “parallactic” reading of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795) and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The focus is placed on the role of irony and “parallax” in the depiction of the main characters of these “Bildungsromane,” Wilhelm Meister and Stephen Dedalus (and, to a lesser degree, Leopold Bloom), the role and relevance of chance and coincidence in these novels, and the symbolic significance of the Icarus-motif for an interpretation of the protagonists’ development.