The New Perspectiva Artificialis by James Hutson

The New Perspectiva Artificialis by James Hutson

Advancing a comparative thesis, this book aligns 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.

James Hutson is Senior Professor of Art History, AI and Visual Culture at Lindenwood University, USA .

Daniel Plate is Professor English at Lindenwood University, USA.