B6_#064 // The Cave // David Flook

‘He led a wretched life, unto himself unknowne.’ – Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser. Book I, Canto IV.

 This drawing recalls Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and represents it within the bounds of a cube.  Plato theorised that a group of prisoners who are in a cave and facing the back of the cave, would know only a projected reality of shadows.  He likened this to our human condition of perceiving our environment through the limits of our senses and that this can only be considered an interpreted reality rather than being of ‘pure form, pure fact’, as A S Ferguson later put it.

The drawing focuses on the repositioning of view, light, screen, object and projected image within an abstracted cave-cum-cube.  A rationalising of the cave to a cube affects the objects and their projected counterparts in the fact that their representations, which were once flickering and organic, now appear angled and glossy.  The drawing argues that whilst interpretations of our reality are of a higher resolution than ever before, they remain in many respects as limited as when Plato’s Cave was first proposed.

David Flook is a Diploma Student at the Architectural Association