It is no surprise to me that Zero was birthed outside of the west. We are fundamentally obsessed with matter and forget that much of the universe comprises of others things as well. In fact the Greeks did not have a word for nothing. However when we do try to break free at times from cultural self centered jackassness we seem to have fantastic results. However they are short lived because again not only must we return to mans perspective but the original intent of breaking free such as the in the case of Picasso(read quote below) is not only forgotten but seen as wrong. It took a physicist to explain to me what no Art teacher could. This is what Michio Kaku said, Artists have been particularly interested in the fourth dimension because of the possibilities of discovering new laws of perspective. In the Middle Ages, religious art was distinctive for its deliberate lack of perspective. Serfs, peasants, and kings were depicted as if they were flat, much the way children draw people. Since God was omnipotent and could therefore see all parts of our world equally, art had to reflect His point of view, so the world was painted two-dimensionally. Renaissance art was a revolt against this flat God- centered perspective. Sweeping landscapes and realistic, three dimensional people were painted from the point of view of a person’s eye, with the lines of perspective vanishing into the horizon. Renaissance art reflected the way the human eye viewed the world, from the singular point of view of the observer. In other words, Renaissance art discovered the third dimension. With the beginning of the machine age and capitalism, the artistic world revolted against the cold materialism that seemed to dominate industrial society. To the Cubists, positivism was a straitjacket that confined us to what could be measured in the laboratory, suppressing the fruits of our imagination. They asked: Why must art be clinically “realistic?” This Cubist “revolt against perspective” seized the fourth dimension because it touched the third dimension from all possible perspectives. Simply put, Cubist art embraced the fourth dimension. Picasso’s paintings are a splendid example, showing a clear rejection of three dimensional perspective, with women’s faces viewed simultaneously from several angles. Instead of a single point-of-view, Picasso’s paintings show multiple perspectives, as if they were painted by a being from the fourth dimension, able to see all perspectives simultaneously. As art historian Linda Henderson has written, “the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry emerge as among the most important themes unifying much of modern art and theory.” mkaku.org/home/articles/hyperspace-a-scientific-odyssey/
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 20:54:14 +0000