Perspective and The Reorientation of Digital Space A Study of Chinese and Hieronymus Bosch's Paintings

This paper reconsiders ‘perspective,’ a technique of composing spatiality in painting and also particular approaches to space perception, amid contemporary shifts in spatial experience shaped by digital development. The development of digital technologies since the mid- and late-twentieth century has propelled a dramatic reconfiguration of spatiotemporal understanding and the human position in the space of the world, representing an epistemological transformation as radical as the shift from Medieval to Renaissance space-perceiving paradigms. The screen-based spatial logic increasingly automates and replaces embodied space-perceiving modes, overlapping with the technologisation, rationalisation, and planarisation that the Renaissance linear perspective brought about through a ‘window’ view. Linear perspective established patterns of spatial reduction by converging sight toward predetermined vanishing points, flattening multidimensional spatial experience into geometric coordinates, and positioning viewers as spectators detached from their situated space. These reductive modes persist in contemporary digital interfaces through algorithmic systems and binary classifications. To propose an alternative for this contemporary spatial understanding, this study examines the cavalier perspective in traditional Chinese painting and in the ‘eccentric’ spatial expression of Hieronymus Bosch, both of which illuminate multi-perspectival, ecological, and embodied modes of space perception that maintain primitive sensation. Through phenomenology and Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnical thinking, the cavalier-perspective sensory mode can be understood as ‘premodern’ as an exemplification of a ‘poetic revealing’ of the world. Rather than rejecting technology, it reveals how art can transform technology by grounding it in alternative cosmotechnical logics that cultivate adaptive sensibility and participatory dwelling instead of depriving sensory intuition and intention through automated efficiency. This study argues that recognising the contrast between linear and cavalier perspectives enables us to reorient digital technologies from ‘windows’ that reduce space to controllable abstractions into ‘doors’ that invite embodied, adaptive, multi-perspectival engagement with the world.