The New Perspectiva Artificialis

From the Mechanical Eye to the Algorithmic Symbolic Form

James Hutson author Daniel Plate author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Publishing:14th Dec '26

£171.99

This title is due to be published on 14th December, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

The New Perspectiva Artificialis cover

Advancing a comparative thesis, this book aligns the Renaissance linear perspective with transformer architectures in generative artificial intelligence as structurally parallel revolutions in symbolic form.

Both linear perspective and transformer architectures transform subjective human faculties—embodied seeing in one case and linguistic judgment in the other—into rationalized, computable procedures that reorganize creativity, authorship, and world-making. The argument mobilizes symbolic-form theory from work by Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky to frame perspective as a world-constituting schema and then extends that conceptual apparatus to attention-based language models understood as engines of geometric semantics. The contribution integrates art history, intellectual history, and science-and-technology studies with empirical findings from mechanistic interpretability, including attention-head roles, circuit analyses, and representation-patching methods that reveal structured internal organization.

This book is suitable for scholars of art history, philosophy of technology, digital humanities, and science and technology studies.

ISBN: 9781041384571

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

250 pages