Connecting Spaces between Art and Science: Projective Boxes as (Analogical) Augmented Reality Before and After the (Digital) Augmented Reality

This paper exposes a new (historico-technical) interpretation and some (planning) updates related to the theme of the ‘perspective boxes’, created as cases of ‘anamorphic’ devices pertaining to the genre of the ‘interior views’ in the Belgian and Dutch 17th century. We present our considerations as a demonstrative and experimental topic of a more general thesis concerning the aesthetic contiguity between the social domains that we now call ‘art’ and ‘science’. We argue that these ‘curious objects’ are experimental devices generating aesthetic experience since their functioning induces in the spectator a process of subsequent awareness of the different modes of existence (actual, realised, potential and virtual) of the images of a single internal space. The relationships between the geometric construction of these devices and the semantic frames that are proposed for their use allow us to experience their aesthetic and semiotic functioning through some of their current reinventions in the field of displaying.In the study of this particular category of visual artefacts we have followed an ‘anachronical’ method: a) philological analysis of the existing specimens and their essential genealogy, b) study of their geometric device, c) study of their semiotic device, d) real experimentation through their reinventions that highlight some actualising aspects and allow an in vivo demonstration of the interpretative hypotheses.