Two-dimensional Imaging

Book excerpt: Telecommunication by radio shrank the world to a global village, and the satellite and computer have made imagery the language of that village. The creation of images was once mainly in the hands of artists and scribes. Two-dimensional images also occur naturally: a shadow, the dappled light pattern under a tree, the optical image on a retina. Nature provided the motif for much abstract ornamentation, and our written letters and ideograms trace back to representations of nature.