modify it, or translate it into another medium (three 
dimensions, for instance), the native fails to recognize it.

     An anthropological film showed a Melanesian carver 
cutting out a decorated drum with such skill, coordination, and 
ease that the audience several times broke into applause—it 
became a song, a ballet. But when the anthropologist asked 
the tribe to build crates to ship these carvings in, they 
struggled unsuccessfully for three days to make two planks 
intersect at a 90-degree angle, then gave up in frustration. 
They couldn’t crate what they had created.

     In the low definition world of the medieval woodcut, each 
object created its own space, and there was no rational 
connected space into which it must fit. As the retinal 
impression is intensified, objects cease to cohere in a space of