The Tilt

There is something so appealing about Three Quarters View, especially when it's diagonally up. Just look at 1990's Solstice for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The game features puzzlebox rooms based on isometric projection - the visual representation of 3-D objects in a 2-D space. Not only that, but you're also projecting yourself onto the TV screen to ensoul the 8-bit sprite (in this case the wizard Shadax); another isometric trip. So, despite the double veils of dimensional delusion, it's like you've never left the comfort of you're 3-D home after all - save for the awesome 3/4 Tilt, diagonal-up edition.

From our first-person shooter perspective, everything tends to look dead-on straight-away. It's the nature of our body's bilateral symmetry. Of course, you might be a flounder with both eyes on one side of your head, the way certain old cartoons do. But even a flounder spends most of her days on her cheek.

So anyway, this is the kind of stuff I've been drawing; in 3/4 Solstice mode.

This boy has a horizontal face and vertical eyebrows trained up the facade, a house cheek, and a chimney beneath his ear to collect ear wax. He also has the icon of a Babylonian Fish God carved into his front. And look at how his Animal Liberation Front baseball cap's plastic adjuster spirals about his houseform, just like a tongue.










Here's a leg-house with pant-leg ceiling, naked flesh siding, and a long convoluted penis, based upon my own leg, pants, lighter, and penis. It's kinda like cubism, although it's probably a lot more like Cube (the movie).


3/4's is also great for Fantasy Cigarette displays.

All fantasy cigarettes are yo! brand. There's Diamond packs with scintillating wisps, Lettuce packs with real dried rolled greens, Index Finger 100's, Tigerettes, and Rook Smokes.



Fun right? Design your own Fantasy Cigarette packs at home!


The most fun you can have in 3/4 mode though, is with the Necker Cube.
Use the metamorphosing and migrating eye of the flounder to switch between the 2 parallaxes of the Necker cube. In cognitive psychology, this is called a headfuck.
Now: Try to see both at once.

The most classic use of Neckers is found in 1982 arcade game Q*bert. Look at all them Neckers! 3/4 diagonal up mode at it's finest. The urge to lean into the dimensions is very great.




Author Tom Robbins says it best. From Even Cowgirls Get the Blues:

"Suppose you awoke one morning with the uneasy feeling that the world had, while you slept, somehow slipped a-tilt and rose to find that your dresser drawers were mysteriously open a fraction of an inch and that prescription bottles had tipped over in the medicine cabinet (although neither you nor anyone else in your household had ventured since bedtime to get an aspirin, a condom or a tums) and that pictures on the wall, shades on lamps and books in the case were askew. Outdoors, the taller buildings were posing a la Pisa, or, should you live in the country, streams were running slightly outside their grooves as fruits dropped like gargoyle ganglia from the uniformly leaning trees. What would be your reaction to such a phenomenon? Honestly, now, and seriously, too. How would you feel? Would you be scared? Confused? Puzzled and anxious? Would you telephone the police? Would you pray? Or would you numbly await an explanation, refusing to attempt to analyze the event or even to experience it with your full emotions until you had read the papers, tuned in the news, heard how experts from the universities were explaining the tilt, learned how the Pentagon planned to deal with it, were reassured by the President, who might insist, as Presidents will, that nothing really nothing had gone wrong? Or instead of fear, bewilderment and anxiety, or in addition to fear, bewilderment and anxiety, or instead of a hard impulse to dismiss the happening and get back to business-as-usual, or in addition to a hard impulse to dismiss the happening and get back to business-as-usual, do you imagine that a bright trace of delight, unnamable and indefensible, might tickle your spine; could you feel in an odd way elated - elated, perhaps, because, in a rational world where even disasters are familiar and damn near routine, something of almost fairytale flavor had occurred?"