Hours
Mon, Closed Tues–Sat, 9 am–8 pm Sun, 11 am–8 pm
Pieter Vermeersch Of Pieter Vermeersch’s Untitled (2013) it could be written: The work begins with space. Some careful considerations: What is the way to transform its appearance? What would constitute the minimal difference, almost below the level of perception? Is it at this level that we begin to establish an atmosphere? Paint is chosen. Sketches are made. For the first time, these sketches are subject to cuts and rearrangements. Might the logic of gradation be felt more strongly when it is broken? And can we begin to talk of knowledge as ‘the feeling of a logic at work’? Colors are measured and mixed, remeasured and remixed. Two hundred measuring cups are needed. Laid out in rows, full of different intensities of pigment, they look like scientific specimen. The paint is applied directly to the architecture. It may look a bit like smoke, but there is a system. There is a question of how much of the ritual of production will be perceived in the paint that remains. There is also a question of how much of the work should be relayed in words in order for the painting to continue working. This is less a question of mystification than of accuracy. The attempt to say something about the process feels somewhat like the attempt of a camera to record something other than surface. It should be said that the mechanism of photography is something that this artist often thinks about: not in terms of paint versus photography. It is less a zero sum game then a fine balance between the eye and the lens, the shutter and the hand. He does not forget that paint is indexical. And perhaps it records more than surface.
On view in the main gallery: Untitled, 2013 Acrylic paint on walls Courtesy of the Artist
The Fifth Dimension
Tauba Auerbach Of Tauba Auerbach’s Marble (2011), it could be written: The transformation of a slab of marble—a three-dimensional, six-sided, mineral thing— into a book is a process that adds many sides to, and lets us see through, the stone. Marble is a ‘metamorphic rock’, what scientists use to describe limestone that has experienced enough pressure for the carbonate minerals to recrystallize. White marble has been a material favored by sculptors for millennia, in part because of its softness, its malleability and its tendency to let light in, lending stone a life-like quality. Black marble is less common and not so easy to see through. The particular piece of marble used by Auerbach to make her book is perhaps the first one in history to be sanded down to the point of disappearance, and yet preserved as a sculpture. There was a system: first the stone surface was scanned, then a page-thin section sanded off, then the new surface was re-scanned, then sanded again, then scanned again, in a kind of loop. The results were printed on paper and bound into a book whose page edges were handpainted by the artist. There are thus at least two distinct digital processes at play here: the scanning and the offset printing are digital in that they do not rely on film, only combinations of zeroes and ones to organize light intake and pigment dispensation. But the painting by hand may be understood as ‘digital’ in the old way, with digit referring to the finger, or more touch and feel processes related to translating careful observation by hand. The fusions of marble and book, sculpture and photography, the pixel and the hand, the hand and the eye and the mind, that combine in the making of this meta-morphous object require a highly synthetic mind (one fused with a body no doubt!) and may prove confusing. How might one perceive Marble as a book, a material, a work of art? Does one read a book without words? And might we consider confusion as the beginning of wisdom (pace Socrates, who never wrote down a thing)?
On view in the main gallery: Marble, 2011 Digital offset printing, Mohawk superfine paper, 55 pages, hand painted edges Binding construction by Daniel Kelm and Leah H. Purcell Courtesy of the Artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
The Fifth Dimension
Hours
Mon, Closed Tues–Sat, 9 am–8 pm Sun, 11 am–8 pm
Iman Issa Of her Triptychs #1-6 (2009) Iman Issa has written: This project began with snapshots of spaces that I have found myself visiting and revisiting over the last few years. At one point, I realized that what might have attracted me to these spaces was that they reminded me of others; that they triggered a series of memories and associations. In an attempt to articulate the content of these memories and associations, I decided to start constructing settings that corresponded to them, settings which I would then photograph. The resulting images ended up constituting the second element in each of these triptychs. In trying to be as precise as possible, I realized that the certainty with which I was able to construct and produce these images did not translate to my final photographs, that I no longer recognized my constructions, nor was I certain of their sources. This brought about the idea to approach these photographs in a removed manner—as if they were found or produced by someone else—and use them as a point of departure for another artwork, one which eventually became what is presented here as the third and final element in each of these triptychs.
On view in the small gallery (left to right): Triptych #5, 2009 c-print, framed c-print, light bulb, flasher, metronome, painted white shelf Triptych #1, 2009 c-print, framed c-print, wooden sculpture, red tape, painted white shelf Triptych #6, 2009 c-print, framed c-print, framed text panel All works courtesy of the Artist and Rodeo, Istanbul
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Geof Oppenheimer Of Geof Oppenheimer’s Modern Ensembles (2012), it could be asked: Could a return to certain conventions of modern art by means of unconventional weapon technologies point the way towards another dimension of art and of warfare? The two works on view (two of a total of three are exhibited here) obey certain conventions of modern sculpture, in terms of scale, in terms of their placement on a plinth and also perhaps in terms of their deployment of modernist building blocks (the manufactured cube, color field painting). Working with a pyro-technician formally with the Disney Corporation, the artist developed a series of custom made charges of various explosive chemicals that were then detonated within the voids of ballistic Plexiglas cubes. He relied on IED instructions found on the Internet, as much as his knowledge of art’s history. An IED (Improvised Explosive Device) is a homemade bomb constructed and deployed in ways other than so-called ‘conventional military action’. It is the product of ‘asymmetry’ in military capabilities—something used by ‘insurgents’ against greater, better-equipped, internationally recognized powers. By 2007 IEDs were reportedly responsible for 63% of the Coalition deaths in Iraq and 68% of Coalition deaths in the current Afghan War (began in 2001). These conflicts have also been the testing grounds for what the US Department of Defense calls The Fifth Dimension of Warfare, or cyberwar, which involves a whole spectrum of information operations. In this new type of war, asymmetries are more difficult to maintain and attacks are sometimes difficult to detect as they lack visibility. “Inside all of us there is a part that would like to burn down our own house,” the artist has said, naming the show wherein his Modern Ensembles were first exhibited. But looking at the full landscape of Oppenheimer’s work one notices that it is somewhat like the desert in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point: a site for testing weapons of war, but also (recalling the title of another key work) a space for “love and other abstractions.” The question of symmetry between beauty and violence remains.
On view in the main gallery: Modern Ensembles, 2010-2011 Gunpowder, blackpowder, smoke dyes, ballistic plex, and aluminium (left) Collection of Paul Rickert (right) Courtesy of the Artist and Ratio3, San Francisco
The Fifth Dimension
Hours
Mon, Closed Tues–Sat, 9 am–8 pm Sun, 11 am–8 pm
Ika Kneževic´ Of her multivalent project Nine Hour Delay (2012—ongoing), Ika Kneževic´ writes: The Borosana shoe was first developed over a nine-year period (1960-69) at Borovo Rubber Industry Headquarters in Vukovar, Croatia. After being designed and tested by the Borovo female workforce and an orthopedic surgeon, the shoe was institutionalized as mandatory for all Yugoslav women working in the public sector. Borosana was launched in 1969, in white and navy colors, featuring an ergonomic platform, calculated as ideal for nine hours of standing without hurting the wearer’s spine. In the declining years of Yugoslav communism the model was withdrawn from mass production and fabrication was abandoned when Vukovar became a major Yugoslav war zone in 1991. The workers returned in 1999 finding only the office building, the shoe factory, and the company hospital structurally safe. Today those buildings house factory production. The remainder of the industrial complex can only be described as an overgrown post-apocalyptic ruin. Despite the decline of recent wars, the Vukovar plant of the Borovo factory network remains the most diverse of all Borovo factories throughout the ex-Yugoslavia. It is the only factory able to model the Borosana shoe base as it was designed in the 1960s. Nine Hour Delay reinitiates the fabrication of the Borosana work shoe. Each time this project is exhibited Borosana becomes the official work shoe of the host institution advancing the constructivist maxim of great utilitarian design in service of the working woman. The Logan Center for the Arts is the inaugural site of Borosana’s reinstitutionalization. The new production run is black and available for checkout at the Logan Media Center as part of The Fifth Dimension. The project disperses throughout the Logan Center through clouds of poster and video ads and uniforms sporting sayings and slogans that Borovo workers adopted from the 1990s war. Since Borosanas can only be worn while performing work, the shoes become a medium, a prosthetic of labor: once they are on, work commences; when they are off, work ends. With each step, the shoe extends the architecture of labor and facilitates distinction between labor time and leisure time. Borovo remains the last public Yugoslav infrastructure. The inability to split and privatize the company’s public assets legally prevents Yugoslavia from fully splitting to this day. The ultimate goal of Nine Hour Delay is to keep Borosanas in production as long as possible, suspending the formal dissolution of the country of Yugoslavia. With every new step Yugoslavia persists (insists).
Checkout Borosanas at the Logan Media Center, Lower Level 004.
The Fifth Dimension
Karl Holmqvist Of Karl Holmqvist’s Untitled (Chess Cubes), it could be written: The works’ appearance in The Fifth Dimension occurs after several conversations in Berlin in the formative days of this project, when the particular contribution by Karl Holmqvist that I imagined was him reading a poem, the presence of Karl and his voice, ‘sculpting with sound’. (This too will take place at 7pm on February 15, 2014 in the Logan Center.) Lacking words to describe possibilities for The Fifth Dimension to an artist whom I very much wanted to involve in the project, because his way with words was key for what is at its core a sustained practice of articulation, I thought to offer something spatial: the example of an exhibition of Constantin Brancusi that Marcel Duchamp organized at The Arts Club of Chicago in 1927. (Duchamp and Brancusi were very involved in speculations about the fourth spatial dimension, before the fourth dimension became more firmly associated with Time and lost some of the imaginary force that had proven so productive for artists. And the question remains: could the fifth dimension be said to resonate with that kind of curiosity today?) I told Karl that, in the dynamic distribution that Duchamp gave to Brancusi’s elemental forms I detected (or maybe projected) the French artist’s love of chess—that great silent match of minds, rooted in martial art, which in the sixth century travelled from the Indian subcontinent to Persia and beyond. Little did I know that Karl had been working on a body of two- and three-dimensional works where the chessboard was the main motif. Why the chess board? In a later conversation, Karl recalled Duchamp’s quip that chess is the opposite of art. This had a lot to do with chess having clear rules and relying on reason whereas he saw art as something happening more by chance, or someone ‘being lucky’. To make art out of (or into) chessboards is to add dialectic to Duchamp’s dichotomy. Karl points out that chess in general carries a ‘poetic license’: with each square being assigned a letter and a number, the notation of a match can read like (concrete) poetry. The cubes are also an echo of his earlier (often black and white or mirrored) graphic and sculptural works that used yantras, mandalas, and words (of course)—in short, ancient and flexible structures. Some of these forms are so old that to repeat them now begins to confuse chronology, expanding our sense of the contemporary. The question of repetition surfaces in a very different way in Holmqvist’s verses, which often make sly rhymes out of popular slogans, lyrics, adspeak, and the names of the famous. Listening to Karl Holmqvist’s spoken poetry one hears him listening to signals in the air, as it were. Familiar phrases have to be (re)used to be (re)thought. Familiar forms also. On view: Untitled (Chess Cubes), 2014 Mirrored vinyl adhesive on pine wood Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin The Fifth Dimension
Hours
Mon, Closed Tues–Sat, 9 am–8 pm Sun, 11 am–8 pm
Lili Reynaud Dewar Of her contribution to The Fifth Dimension Lili Reynaud has written: Monika is in her office in Chicago. I am in my bedroom in Grenoble. It’s a dark place, I can’t feel the heat outside. I don’t have an office or a desk. Monika tells me about the Fountain of Time, a public sculpture located just outside her office and the gallery space where The Fifth Dimension will take shape over the course of a few winter weeks. Fountain of Time was to be built in marble during the 1910s and was finally built in concrete in the early 1920s. It was derelict at some point, abandoned. Now it is restored and cared for. The sculpture’s subject matter is time. Monika’s distant image is freezing. It is ethereal, even, lit by the summer sunshine coming through her window, stuck in digital haze. At times it moves slowly on my computer screen, which sits on an uneven wooden table the previous tenants had left in the basement. It’s been six months. In the meantime, I have moved to a new place. I am now writing from a large room with a view onto the snowy mountains. I do not have book shelves, so the books sit on many piles scattered on the floor, making my way to my desk uneasy. In addition to moving flats, I dyed my hair grey. I wanted my hair to be the same color as the Fountain of Time and as the hair of an artist also featured in The Fifth Dimension, an artist very different from me but with whom I’d like to bear some remote resemblance. I wanted to put on some age too, to grow old for the show. And I wanted to think about this thing I read somewhere: artist David Hammons considers hair, and certainly not skin, to be a distinctive feature of race. Or to put it more precisely: hair texture, not skin color. When I was in Chicago this autumn, we walked around the Fountain Of Time one particularly grey and rainy day. We tried to spot the sculptor Lorado Taft’s self-portrait amongst the many other figures of his public allegory. The sculpture was wet and shiny and its grey was turning yellow. Then I danced in the empty gallery. I was alone and naked, my body covered with make-up the same color as my hair, Karl Holmqvist’s and the sculptor’s concrete self-portrait. The sweat on my body formed clearer zones around my lips, under my armpits, in between my breasts. My dark pubic hair was also quite visible—the make-up wouldn’t cover it. This make-up is intended to be used on skin, not hair. I repeated the same dance moves I have been repeating for some time now and that I will probably repeat for some time in the future, for as long as I can. These dance moves were invented by American performer Josephine Baker who settled in France nearly ninety years ago. She repeated them many times, to the point that her very last show was a spectacle about her career and her life, a semi-danced autobiography incorporating, of her past choreographies, only the bits she could still dance: the symptoms. Baker left the United States because, amongst other reasons, she didn’t want to perform in front of segregated audiences. She never performed in minstrel shows—shows in which white and also black comedians blackened their faces up and enacted characters such as “dandies”, “Sambos”, “coons”, “buffoons”, “pickaninnies”, within a specific décor, that of an idealized southern plantation, washed of its inherent violence. Baker preferred to enact another stereotype: a savage but free and sexually attractive woman. This was more in tune with her times and places, marked by the Harlem Renaissance’s essentialist and essential vision of the African roots of black Americans and by the French avant-garde’s interest in (and sometimes pillage of) non-European art forms. When I trained as a ballet dancer we would often watch videos, memorize them and dance in front of the mirror until we could perfectly repeat the steps they featured. It is often how we learned. So I watch films showing Baker dancing and moving. Then, naked and my body covered with dark make-up, in the silence of my studio or an exhibition space, empty or full of works, I cut her choreographies into small bits, repeating and repeating just one bit in front of my camera. I try to not repeat the most exaggerated and comical parts of her art, although I find her incredibly funny and entertaining, as I feel this would be a caricature and an imitation, but not a means to bear some remote resemblance with her. I believe that the most offensive aspect of minstrel shows lies more in the caricature and the exaggeration of the stereotypes than in the actual blackening. I blacken my entire body and present myself naked in order to be vulnerable and not in a position of dominating my subject matter and my model. I too can only dance the symptoms. Recently, I started intersecting these abstract dance bits with elements of my life in the studio (or the study)—making things, taking phone calls, looking at myself in the mirror, cleaning up the space, smoking, reading, sitting at my desk, naked and my entire body covered with dark make-up. The videos form some kind of journal, recording the places where I travel, work, exhibit and live. Because I would also like to bear some remote resemblance with myself.
The Fifth Dimension
Now that the works of the participating artists have just about all appeared in The Fifth Dimension, it seems fitting to write about the project again, differently, with some hindsight and certain anticipations. At the outset one thing was clear: there is little consensus about and no clear measure for what constitutes ‘the fifth dimension’. The term is deployed in vastly different contexts from the U.S. Department of Defense through New Age teachings to sociology and perhaps most famously as the name of a band. Here, it is also a name—for an exhibition ending in a couple of days as well as a seminar, which continues through the end of March. And it will be interesting to continue to ask how each context wears this name differently. The name signals a desire to expand perception, to sharpen the sense of how invisible, inaudible forces (the workings of the imagination, of intuition, of meditation) are bound to a process of showing, of sounding. The invited artists are rather distinct in their approaches, and I wondered how their works would talk to each other. On separate recent occasions, Iman Issa and Karl Holmqvist have each remarked that they are at base interested in communicating through their work. I think this is true for all the artists in the exhibition.1 And yet I have realized how their works rarely spell things out. Or if they do quite literally spell out words, each one is weighed with much precision. Language becomes more concrete, stranger, more beautiful, but also capable of holding several contradictory meanings at once. In some way, the show also spelled itself out. All the works currently on view were introduced separately, so that the exhibition slowly changed and cohered. At each stage, David Giordano’s mercurial graphic design accentuated the transformations under way. The people who frequent the Logan Center (the students, the faculty, the staff, the regulars) have come to know the exhibition very differently from the person who comes once. When you come in, few of the artworks in the gallery ‘show you the elephant’ which is to say that they seem to conceal as much or more than they reveal. Some of this has been discussed in various ways in the folios which are bound here, but which were produced in stages. But it is difficult to capture in text how the works are working on your retina and on your gut (understood as both body and intuitions). And how the possibility of seeing through what appears as their surface is activated in various ways. Actually, there are two works that pretty much show you ‘the full monty’: Ika Kneževic´’s ad for the Borosana shoes, which she introduced into the working life of the Logan Center, is on screens throughout the building; and a chapter of Lili Reynaud Dewar’s video diary is shown on a screen at the north threshold of the gallery. You have to walk around the gallery, shift angles, explore and you find it. If both these works involve communicative bodies, they seem to operate at opposite ends of a spectrum. A new question that only now crystallizes: How do different ways of showing skin, painting skin, or even painting walls heighten a desire to work through surface appearance? And what’s with all these smooth and sleek surfaces in The Fifth Dimension?! A plastic and poetic anchor offered to the artists in conversations and correspondence leading up to the show was Lorado Taft’s Fountain of Time, a monumental sculpture depicting a lone figure (Time) looking across a pool at the passage of humanity—one hundred people representing one hundred years of peace.2 Erected in 1920 at the foot
The Fifth Dimension
of Washington Park, it is a short walk from the Logan Center. Beside it lies a plaque stating that the inspiration for this concrete configuration came directly from a poem by Henry Austin Dobson entitled “The Paradox of Time,” two lines of which are quoted: Time goes, you say? Ah no! Alas, time stays, we go; Time and time and time again, I have returned to this plaque, to this sculpture, and each time I notice something different. Geof Oppenheimer also visits often; he has his classes at the University of Chicago sketch Taft’s monumental work, so they can see it anew. To me he notes how the corrosion reveals the passage of time. On another day, he examines the Modern Ensembles, which to his surprise have not aged visibly or transformed since they were made. Walking over to the Fountain of Time with Karl Holmqvist on his first day in Chicago, in the bitter cold, I realized that the hundred bodies (plus the figure of Time) all have shrouds, clothes, covers. And this puts me in mind of the dress and cape that Ika Kneževic´ made to my measurements—a second skin—to wear every day with my Borosana shoes. But I only feel like wearing this rather extravagant thing on special occasions. I know this disappoints her somewhat. Later she tells me she is only consoled by how this situation proves she cannot bend another person’s will. The situation also reveals a tension between the everyday and the special occasion— ways of parsing time that are distinct from each other, but both different from the kind of clockwork rhythm set by the metronome in Iman Issa’s Triptych #5.3 If having a will means having a particular sense of time, and being able to change this sense at will, could we think of time as something to wear and to share, not so much like the figures, but like the shrouds in Taft’s sculpture? Monika Szewczyk Early Thursday, February 13, 2014
Notes 1 Talking in seminar, Iman Issa opposed communication to expression, and I continue to think how this dialectic plays out for the other artists in the exhibition such as Pieter Vermeersch, who noted a desire to communicate neutrality; or Geof Oppenheimer, whose repurposing and containment of IED technologies points to something like a language of expression. 2 The work began in 1914 on the one hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Ghent (1814), which was signed between the United States and the United Kingdom to mark the end of the war of 1812. 3 The ticking that permeates the entire exhibition makes me a little nervous, as if the explosions of Geof Oppenheimer’s Modern Ensembles were still waiting to go off.
arts.uchicago.edu/thefifthdimension
February 4, 2014 – February 16, 2014
Image courtesy of Marina Faust The Strati Portraits, Untitled (Lili), 2013 Collage with inkjet prints on silk paper
Archaïscher Torso Apollos von Rainer Maria Rilke
Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt, darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber, in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt, sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug. Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz ; aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.
Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell
We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs . Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.
arts.uchicago.edu/thefifthdimension
Photo: Heinz Peter Knes January 29, 2014 – February 16, 2014
Duchamp vs. Menchik, Paris 1929 Opening D10: Queen’s Gambit Declined Slav 37 Moves, Result 1/2 – 1/2 1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. cxd5 cxd5 4. f3 c6 5. c3 f6 6. f4 e6 7. e3 d6 8. xd6 xd6 9. d3 O-O 10. O-O d8 11. b5 b8 12. c1 d7 13. e2 a6 14. c3 d6 15. e4 dxe4 16. xe4 xe4 17. xe4 g6 18. h4 g7 19. g5 h6 20. xh6 xh6 21. xf7 g7 22. xd6 b4 23. e4 c6 24. xc6 bxc6 25. c4 xd6 26. xb4 a5 27. c4 ad8 28. e1 xd4 29. xc6 d2 30. g3 f8 31. f4 h8 32. h4 b8 33. b3 xa2 34. exe6 xb3 35. xg6 f7 36. b6 d3 37. bd6 b3
arts.uchicago.edu/thefifthdimension
Photo: Learning Ross January 21, 2014 – February 16, 2014
FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS OF HOW A NEW IDEA STUNS THE PERSON WHO IS NOT PREPARED FOR IT by Daniil Kharms
1) WRITER: I’m a writer. READER: I think you are shit! (The writer stands still for a minute, shaken by this new idea and drops dead. The writer is carried off the stage.) 2) ARTIST: I’m an artist. WORKER: I think you are shit! (The artist instantly turns pale as canvas, sways like a candle in the wind, and unexpectedly dies. The artist is carried off the stage.) 3) COMPOSER: I’m a composer. Vania Rublov: I think you are shit! (Breathing heavily, the composer drops on the spot. Suddenly, the composer is carried off.) 4) CHEMIST: I’m a chemist. PHYSICIST: If you ask me, you’re shit! (The chemist doesn’t say a single word .) April 13, 1933.
arts.uchicago.edu/thefifthdimension
Photo: John A. Givens January 17, 2014 – February 16, 2014
cosmic eyes by Sun Ra
the worship of a statue can be the worship of the spirit that inspired the art of the statue the statue itself is nothing but the spirit of the statue is the abstract reality of the living being that inspired the creator to create the image of the radiating idea because the idea is apparent in the visibility of the statue and those who have cosmic eyes can see the cosmic meaning projected through the statue
arts.uchicago.edu/thefifthdimension
January 14, 2014 – February 16, 2014
Royal Dansk by La Keisha Leek
Give me a space of unexpected emptiness. Void because of abandonment, empty because of a new birth, And I’ll write there. Give me a hollow box to scribble outside the lines and I’ll place my pen inside there. . It is direction. .
There you’ I am the holder of road maps. . I use all my favorite colors,
. ’ve come from, you say. , it’
I will try,
, . used to be.
,
’ve come.
’
. ,
.
I’ , people want them. And if even for a moment I am able to offer up my words in their empty space.
arts.uchicago.edu/thefifthdimension
.
January 14, 2014 – February 16, 2014
From Claude Bragdon’s A Primer of Higher Space (1913)
Having now in a manner paved the way, let us put aside all our preconceived ideas as to the limitations of space, and form a new concept which will embrace the higher dimensions as easily as the lower. It is necessary to do this, not because our space conception is false, but only because it is partial. Let us think, not of abstract space, but of material spaces, differentiated from one another by their dimensionality, and designated in terms of it (as a one-space, a two-space, a threespace, a four-space, and so on)—the greater the number of dimensions, the “higher” the space. Let us think of each space as generated from the one next below it, and as having the dimensionalities of all spaces lower than itself patent, and those higher than itself latent. Also, conceive of each space as the cross-section of the next higher space—as limiting two contiguous portions of higher space. For example, one segment of a line (a one-space) is divided from another by a point, and the line itself is generated by the motion of a point; one portion of a plane (a two-space) is separated from another by a line (a one-space), and the plane itself is generated by the movement of the line in a direction at right angles to its length. Again, two portions of a solid (a three-space) are limited with regard to one another by a plane (a two-space); this plane, moving in a direction at right angles to the surface, generates a solid (a three-space). Also, by analogy, two portions of a higher solid (a four-space) are limited with regard to one another by a solid (a three-space), and this solid, moving in a direction at right angles to its every dimension, generates a higher solid. applicable to a space of any dimensionality: A space is that which separates two portions of the next higher space from each other. Also: Any space can generate its next higher space by moving in a new direction, that is, a direction not contained within itself.
arts.uchicago.edu/thefifthdimension
Photo: Monika Szewczyk December 20, 2013 – February 16, 2014
Weather for Liquidity by Brian Kuan Wood
The weather forecast for tomorrow is just what you think it will be. In fact, it is exactly what you are thinking. Today. Which means it is how you feel. Coming back to you. And you are feeling: Not so great. You might be insane. Maybe because you realized that your feelings control the weather. So what would happen if you tried to feel nothing? It would mean that for tomorrow ’s forecast, we will have stillness all over the world. Nothing will move. No air currents. No tsunamis. No hurricanes No monsoons. It will be as if the earth stopped moving around the sun. The weather will basically stop. It will simply—go away. The sun will shine, but it won’t be a sunny day. There will be clouds, but it won’t be cloudy or overcast. Water will fall from the sky, but it will never rain. You will ask yourself crazy questions like: What is the history of wind? How did this gust arrive here? Where did it come from? And who am I to be blown by it? , then down the West Coast of North America to Los Angeles and along the equator back to the South China Sea again. Tomorrow these trade winds begin moving in reverse blowing goods back to their factories. Blowing people back to their homes. Blowing their homes back to their countries. Blowing their countries back to their assumed origins. Blowing full–grown adults back into wombs. There is an equatorial band that runs around the circumference of the earth. Here weather stops for days or weeks at a time, for the stupid calm of stagnation, of having no weather, . And when weather does appear around this equatorial band, it is severe.
arts.uchicago.edu/thefifthdimension