[roughly]

One of my favorite books is "Seeing Like a State"[1], which talks about how the modern world has transitioned from talking about things like distance and space in human terms ("an hour's walk", "six bushels' worth of crops") to a surveyor's terms ("3 miles", "5 acres"). In the modern world, we're very used to thinking about things as mediated by technology (maps, cameras, compasses), and that affects how we think about arts, as well - matching what a camera produces is "photorealistic", but isn't how we actually _see_ things. This is one example, another I've always found fascinating is that the large Chinese landscape paintings play a trick where the perspective shifts depending on where you're looking - the whole work does not share a single perspective point, but any given point on the scroll looks "correct" for that spot and its surroundings.

[1]https://bookshop.org/p/books/seeing-like-a-state-how-certain...