“Looking over Heaven helps those who help themselves I and II, and the two different views they present of a sparse tiled room housing a bodiless anime character with a mirror. Remembering a factoid about the rarity of mirrors in video games: that they require too much processing power to justify their existence. That the illusion requires the whole game environment be rendered a second time, only to reveal a sliver of it to the player. Most games bypass this conundrum by having the character not appear in reflective surfaces at all. Thinking that it must be strange to exist in a world that doesn’t have the capacity to show you to yourself.
Going back to the floating anime hair and wondering if someone could recognize themselves without a body. Reading an article on the psychology of mirrors which at some point mentions out-of-body experiences. Recalling the optic strategies used by Quattrocento painters to produce these experiences. The trick of misaligning the actual and apparent point of view in a painting to produce conflicting visual information that would disorientate the viewer, producing the effect of viewing a scene from a position outside the physical body. Intended to make one feel as though they were floating towards the divine.
