A remarkable feature often noted of artist Fred Sandback’s string constructions: The geometrical forms he created with string have a strong planar feel. Phenomenologically, viewers perceive the spaces between the strings as planes with some substance. The illusion is amodally completed, as in the well-known Kanizsa triangle, by minimal prompts, but in three dimensions. Instead of creating an illusory figure, then, Sandback creates illusory planes. By noting how the constructions are like “impossible” figures, one can see how bottom-up and top-down effects combine to complicate the illusion, and the works become about the construction of space rather than its reification.

ABSTRACT Discussions of the specificity of digital media are in a state of fruitful flux. After the dismissal of mediality in the utopian glow of media convergence, new theoretical developments allow us to reconceive this idea. Using the critical realist precept that properties in the world have real dispositions or powers, the author expands this system of thought to provide a framework with which to understand digital media. This is presented to add to and help direct the current debates.