Time for the 4D Art Thing [Parts ONE-FOUR][12.1.2016]

Time for the 4D Art Thing: Opposing Fictional Predictability, the go-to app for Civilizing the imaginary

By Paul McLean

Part ONE

Normal people experience time as a flow, an infinite cascade of falling dominos, a chain of cause-and-effect events that neither leaps forward several moments nor suddenly reverses, but rather passes with the predictable click-click-click of now moments falling into the next with a steady cadence.[1]

1

The enduring allure of astronomy has its ancient origins in man’s urge to make predictable the mortal, danger-fraught world and fearsome, mysterious cosmos we inhabit.[2] Throughout history, and prior to the historical, man has invested in sense-supplementing technologies for rationalizing the universe. We tend consequently to render our experiences in mechanical, architectural narratives. Measurement and calculation have proved indispensable to that end, as have the linked exercises of naming and categorization, provisioning our systematic, cosmological narratives, buttressed by pattern recognition.[3] The outputs of the process are self-reinforcing, contextual narrative complexes, organizing the universe in specific to general loops, within which humanity finds a fear-modulating sense or consciousness of orderly place and logical time. Now our sunrises and sunsets are quantities known to hybridized arts-science. With great accuracy we predict the transit points between Night and Day, either of which and both together have associative-narrative qualities – i.e., imaginary meaning. A prime example: Night and the Nocturne. Measurement and calculation facilitate formulation, and one indispensable astronomical imaginary is the reliable global calendar with objective attributes upon which much of contemporary life is pinned. The calendar makes a host of activities possible, from plane flights to Skype-dates. Temporal predictability aggregates into comprehensive functionality in the Social, enabling a peculiar type of planetary-contemporary, tech-enabled hyper-community, with signs of a shared awareness,[4] plus the phasic, mythic “sharing economy” rooted in timeliness and imaginary benefits seemingly denuded of actual cost. Predictable time is key to speedy, serviceable communication, movement, and production, connecting people and places separated by distance, or durational space. Establishing working “real-time” models for the various accelerated needs of people and products, networking them into integrated need-fulfilling systems, and managing efficient, “user”-satisfying outcomes (the happy corporate clock “face”) for those systems is the overarching socio-economic-tech narrative of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is the Amazon story. It is the information-Media story, the story of mobile devices, of high frequency trading and so on. All of it: I) Points back to astronomy and the evolutionary “creation” of predictable time; II) Functions in the minutely-trackable, sequential present as a contractual sublimation of our fear of uncertainty; III) “Looking ahead,” surrenders itself (and all of us, too) to a database-dependent, matrix-entity, potent as any divinity ever conceived – the artificial personhood.[5] The “it” in “all of it” is a non-human, like-human, man-made, scalable being-object, which may or may not be art, depending on how we define or do not define “art.” Its “blood and bones” are the network database.[6] I call my experimental, prototypical embodiment DIM TIM – an anthropomorphic abbreviation of “dimensional time.” He says, “'‘Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig’.”[7]

2a

Names and categories populate and structure most databases. The interplay between form and database, among other utilities, fosters rationalizing and justifying narrative, which also, like calculable time, serves to order the universe, and thereby makes it less fearsome, albeit differently curious, for us. One type of (rationalizing) narrative is scientific. Another type of (justifying) narrative is historical. Astronomy has provided us a layer of metadata that rationalizes time for narrative history under the auspices of directional linearity. The zones of linear, historical time are past, present and future, linked mechanically and mathematically to the circle. Each linear-circular zone has its own nominal, categorical qualities and propositions. For instance, future-history is speculative. History in the past tense blurs, dissolving regressively behind a membrane, beyond which – from the present-tense view - is a prehistoric puzzle whose pieces are tribal oral transmissions, carbon dating, relics, expert conjecture and so forth. The present is history-happening-now-& now-& now... Yet, we can apply prediction to each zone, as a schematic meta-tool. The database for history, if it is not identical to history, provides history a “motor function” for memory's own neuro-biological apparatus, through additive points and fluid parameters within the overarching construct. Persons, places, things, plus events are metadatic grist for second-order compositing activities, such as comparison, juxtaposition, and so on, which in turn generate utile relativity for meta-, mega- and hyper-narratives, through virtual procedures like hyperlinking. This is conceptual (N+1) for Wiki-architecture. Accurate analysis “on the back-end” is dependent on the constitution of X-database content and the logic of Y-data-accessibility. One way to imagine this is to consign information the affect of objects, with variable degrees of realism, represented “bodily” for the purpose of analytic narrative. My DIM TIM construct operates on this basis. Lev Manovich has mapped the conceptual-formal procedure in his simple-to-advanced data visualization practices.[8] The conceptual foundation for data-viz is the evolutionary graphical user interface (GUI), which is timeline-integrative for computational processes and applications with soft-/hard-/wetware modality – the OS. An astronomical precursor is the constellation, an opportunity for our interpretive imaginations to configure a shared narrative organizing visual big-data (the sky-scape). A note of caution: one observer’s Orion’s Belt is another’s Los Tres Reyes Magos. Both computing and astronomy involve navigation in practice and application, for “users.” Artificial time to an extent developed as a primary means for logistical coordination, for political, military, governmental, economic, and social ends. Now “time” is one component parcel in an aggregate transmission from a source device through a host via actual/virtual nodal locations into “Cloud,” a euphemism for data-prison/bank/vault where it can be “mined”, extracted and exploited in a great variety of ways. The Cloud can, for example, serve as a virtual Panopticon for big wired populations and their immaterial content, expressive and residual, etc. The Cloud’s attached fictional narrative promotes the concept of a graphic, compartmentalized, semi-opaque, mech-comm-tech-enabled systematic global-apperception in a stable temporal domain with ample security. The user is assured by the Cloud-industrialist and Cloud-advocates that the server-storage-pipeline matrix is trustworthy. This verifiably precarious platform for time-based collection and co-optation of reciprocating digitized activities can provide analysts the content suggestive of perceptual user-states and patterns helpful in generating profiles. All of it is a massive resource containable in surprisingly small-footprint gear. Cooling tools and plenty of energy plus small maintenance and security details are generally all that’s needed for upkeep. [See Addendum (1)] The emergence of Cloud cyclically parallels and intertwines with the evolution and convergence of computational and astronomical navigation. The network today is virtually cosmological.[9]

2b[10]

We understand that “dead” data-matter (like light from a distant star, long extinguished) can be re-animated (like that light reaching a person's optic apparatus) and become utile – as revenant data - in user-active imaginary space. In absolute imaginary space (i.e., Mind)[11] with productive imaginary meaning we learn to assign revenant data to actionable reality with purpose. This is the imaginary “feedback loop.”[12] A provisional functionality for the imaginary reproduces itself as Data+Interpretation>Action, the human sense-enabled cybernetic protocol a priori any additive and/or generative layer of environmental causation/external>internal response, pre-habituation. The notion of “In Real Time” (IRT), where it intersects “real life” is metaphorical, until a person acts on the available – imaginary – data, and “life” reacts, and so on. This imaginary-causation cycle manifests in the interstices connecting the sensed phenomenon (out there) and our interpretive-response complex (in here), before it actualizes IRL, IRT. It is up to us to characterize the sequential exchange, to assign it features for its profile (for us), i.e., “good” or “bad” on an evaluative spectrum. To illustrate the autonomous facets in the process: As far as we know, an original phenomenal event – in our example above, the light-emitting star – to exist need not be conscious – in the way we generally think of human consciousness - of the human/earthbound observer’s appropriation of the star's light-emission. That star will occupy its own reality – and post-reality, in this instance, independent of its observation by us. However, we can confer upon the star-once-upon-a-time-emitting-light and the light itself the attribute/quality of anatemporal givingness (for us), since we use the light-data as we would a gift given freely to us via the sense-apparatus (to use as we see fit, or as need be). The interstices connecting us to the star we can imagine to be a 4D space, post-plus-priori, via the givenness. The whole phenomenon is 4D systematic. The light itself maintains its virtuality, even as a past event connected to present event characteristics in the medium of being-seen and useful. Light as such has a complex profile. It can be (for us) performative, practicable, applicable to tasks (like navigation), and much more. The 4D modality permits the integration of a complicated phenomenological “profile” with every other available data applicable to the profile, in the imaginary, then in practice.[13] Heidegger's work Time and Being itself (the original lecture, translations/interpretations, later performance, publication, etc. - plus our citation here) performs and encapsulates the 4D time-based program described above beautifully.[14] Note the “Supplement 1969”:

In the sense of the last sentence, on (sic) can already read in Being and Time (1927) pp. 62-63: “its (phenomenology's) essential character does not consist in being actual as a philosophical school. Higher than actuality stands possibility. The comprehension of phenomenology consists solely in grasping it as possibility.”[15]

3a

A tri-fold static problem of predictable fiction, expressing as data-analyst-fear: A) Analytic FOMI (Fear Of Missing It), a pre-causal reaction to unexpected or asymmetric narrative-shift that generates diagnostic overwhelm, even paralysis [a state fairly common in managed search-users confronting and reacting to extreme instances of flux in hybrid less-than-4D [(4D-)/4D+] systems arbitrary in their organization around the concrete binaric demands of stability and security]; B) Fear of being lost in “space,” a state of sensory disorientation in mediatic vastness – like when a diver cannot discern which direction is up or down, or a trekker experiences whiteout in a blizzard; and C) Fear of good analysis disappearing into the informatic void. The first and second problems are only solved in the “rear-view mirror.”[16] All are time-soluble problems of less-than-4D operators encountering 4D+ logistics. For example, we have Einstein predicting black holes in 1915, and John Wheeler in 1967 applying the term (black hole) to “observable” collapsed celestial bodies, and in 2015, the proof of gravitational waves appearing as the “sound” two black holes made in merging long ago and far away – captured by Advanced LIGO (with its own compelling history).[17] Historical perspective supports the pretense that the hypothetical may be proved in time, but not provable by time. What do analysts dread? 1) They will fail to connect the dots. 2) They will get lost in too much data. 3) They will make a great “discovery” through good analysis, but history will not “care” - the Oracle will be ignored. In the problem's third aspect, History itself is the derelict foe of analytic acuity. “History” as such is not a 4D construct. It is an encrypted, recursive factory, a flattening and transmogrifying device, encompassing people-places-things-in-time, management, users, etc. (the affectless “faceless” corporate syndication, the unimaginary in the schema implied here, an alt.demos/the field of demographics) to “create” a purposed imaginary product. The imaginary can be packaged and bundled into a multivalent app, which channels the possible into the dense flattening nihilism of the numbered list. Metaphorically history becomes a compressive browser feature that mimics a dark cloudbank blocking an earthbound view of the heavens. The third problem transversely correlates in marketable electronic technology to the plight of BETA video: a better technology is subsumed by “externalities.” [Trans.: “'Internalities' consume a worse epistemology.”] History auto-infuses its own obsolescence. All three fears speak to the dilemma of the spy agency analyst trying to predict the next terrorist incident. He eventually develops symptoms of PTSD. He becomes the thing he is searching for and is absorbed in the state he meant to prevent, or vice versa. The undercurrent, with respect to time in each of the user-side logistical problem's three facets, is entropic insufficiency yielding unwanted, unexpected side effects, i.e., an analytic Frankensteinian monster, the unpredictable designed- or montage-creation, whose existence defies its creator’s extensible hubris. The speculative analyst can also be in the artificial personhood game. Whether his prediction proves correct with the passage of time, is subsumed in too-massive data, or fails (whatever the post-facto justification), the fictional predictor-plus-prediction is handicapped, by his practice being predicated upon “identification” plus “location” in the precarious interstitial zones of linear time embedded in the pre-imaginary narrative “exactitude.” His predicament is like Pozzo's at the conclusion of Waiting for Godot, who exclaims, “Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.”[18]

3b

A related existential time-based quandary is, e.g.: Where and what is “Einstein,” a century after he predicts black holes, relative to consequent (revenant) usage of data he entered into the system, then? The system itself becomes a formal, artificial personhood. In the Contemporary, it is a cliché: time-sense-deriving angst, juxtaposed with the sublime in a parallax perspectival configuration, evocative of reactionary explicative exclamation. Howl,[19] and “Howl, howl, howl, howl!”[20] The template can be applied poetically to the long-dead star in the simile above (section 2b), and philosophically/metaphysically to Heidegger/his text. Or to anyone - fictional, historical and/or “real.” In history the predictor is inevitably the subject of his prediction, whatever the prediction's object and object-usage. The complex (time-sense) tenses in language reflect this condition for prediction, and are critical in the formation of predictive fiction, factored as tragic and/or farcical. Once we realize this, we realize the fallacy inherent in the security predictability promises. [I will have been gone.] Art is a hedge against this fallacy.

3c

From a 4D perspective, however, any progressive narrative thread presents an opportunity for rupture of inherent linear (4D-) illusions, sited at the point that predictive hindsight stipulates or purchases a factual territory for notional historical inevitability. To propose 4D rupture-discourse in history and science, apply inertia on the matter of something, for example light extensive to art. Art reciprocally collaborates with science and history in the narrative domain of the imaginary object and the objective. In the case of light, which is more than just an object, but still a thing, 4D art affirms light's reformation in the imaginary, because in 4D the imaginary function is inclusive of the sonic - especially in the intensive practical discourses on “New (electrified, or light-emitting) Media” and “Old” or “analog” art (light-reflecting) - and made congruent to the discursive in presentation arrays also containing environmental sound. In art, we've already “seen” sound synthesize experience as a universal throughput connecting dark and light space. Sound-art in 4D installations encourages us to think about concentricity and waves, the latter phenomenon connecting sound to light in scientific narrative-architectures.[21]

Part TWO

4a

Although first published in 1936, decades passed before Walter Benjamin's “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” embedded in academic aesthetics (to the extent Heidegger text did not). Now the Benjamin essay is ubiquitous, cited in every kind of art writing. [For a marvelous case, which in its elements resonates with this essay's treatment of fictional narratives and other dimensional issues, such as temporal identity in personhood, see Rachel Wetzler's excellent article (21 April, 2014) for the Los Angeles Review of Books, "Walter Benjamin: Writings After Death," which reviews Recent Writings by Walter Benjamin, by Walter Benjamin (published 31 March, 2014 by New Documents) - 74 years after Benjamin's suicide at the border of France and Spain.] “The Work of Art...” opens with a quote by Paul Valéry, from “Le Conquete de l’ubiquite”. I would argue that of the two text-works, Valéry's is more accurate in its prognostication. Let's pick up where Benjamin left off in his citation of Valéry:

At first, no doubt, only the reproduction and transmission of works of art will be affected. It will be possible to send anywhere or to re-create anywhere a system of sensations, or more precisely a system of stimuli, provoked by some object or event in any given place. Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity. We shall only have to summon them and there they will be, either in their living actuality or restored from the past. They will not merely exist in themselves but will exist wherever someone with a certain apparatus happens to be. A work of art will cease to be anything more than a kind of source or point of origin whose benefit will be available and quite fully so, wherever we wish. Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual- or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign. Just as we are accustomed, if not enslaved, to the various forms of energy that pour into our homes, we shall find it perfectly natural to receive the ultrarapid variations or oscillations that our sense organs gather in and integrate to form all we know. I do not know whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality.

Valéry's imagining of wired life in 2016 is uncanny! The rest of the “The Conquest of Ubiquity” emphasizes conjunction of Music and Science as transformational co-agents, delivering the future cultural and domestic architectures for techno-social imaginary man. If the celebratory tone of Valéry's message is cleansed of its neo-colonial underpinnings, Benjamin in his work is essentially engaged in producing weaponized aesthetic fiction for political-economic effect. [By now we are thoroughly familiar with both tech- and mediated eco-political hucksterism. They are dimensionally “mainstream.” 4D temporal perspection helps makes synthetic sense of sensation, confusion and convolution, i.e., Trump's tweets.] ...Meanwhile in 1936 Paris, Charles Sirato was gathering the signatures of prominent artists for the Manifeste Dimensioniste. Auto-nominal 4D Painter Max Beckmann was painting in Germany, and would soon flee the Nazis first to Holland, then (after the War) the USA. Beckmann: “One thing is sure – we have to transform the three-dimensional world of objects into the two-dimensional world of the canvas… …To transform three into two dimensions is for me an experience full of magic in which I glimpse for a moment that fourth dimension which my whole being is seeking.”

4b

A dimension is an article of measurement, as in “height.” Dimension is also a conceptual device for describing complex zones in which spatial phenomena express themselves to our senses, from which expressions we derive sense-order, such as verticality. To measure is the action defining the dimensions we perceive or conceive of, activating interpretive analytic processing. Measuring whatever X we assign to Y dimension operates as a conjoining of object and abstract “worlds.” Dimensional-sense and measuring provide man the means to render the actual into a virtual, but differently operable, version of “the real.” “Moving” something from the object-dimension to the theoretical one, for instance, may be useful in modeling predictability for a class of similar objects in a single-characteristic environment or circumstance, even if that environment is a void-dimension, as in a vacuum. The superimposition of protocols for an experiment in inter-dimensional transduction is itself an act of narrative creation. If the course of astronomy can be plotted as a rationalizing of man in a near-far spatial reality, with implications for our shared sense of time, then by any measure, we will have come a long way over time. “Dimensional” can be used to indicate that something is complex in its composition and effects. Business management guru Peter Drucker applied the term “dimensional” to his idea of quadratic (sectored) society in that manner. He also framed management in the dimensional vernacular, using cryptic, practical labels to organize his conceptions for the domain. Drucker's temporal was a curious hybrid: initially Viennese Fin de siècle; later absorptive of Taylorism; evolving eventually into a global, multi-layered confabulation that inducted others' conceptions in time-imaginary combines - e.g., Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's “Flow” - for a “business world” with “art world” parallels. There are other dimensions of the dimensional that can cause cross-disciplinary confusion, because 4D fictional language can be applicable to almost anything (see David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest for amplification). With respect to nominal 4D art, definitions of a 4th Dimension for art toggle between time-space and geometric references for 4D, although no particularly compelling reason to exclude one referential meaning for the other seems necessary or indicated on an aesthetic basis. “Dimension” is polysemic. Measurement is not. Measurement represents our urge to create systemic surety out of chaos, caused by standard measurement diversity plus overabundant demand (see bread riots/French Revolution). Consistency and predictability are relatives in urgency, stabilizing systematically the universe or world and the things in it. The urge of man to unify all phenomena in a field of the known and knowable is, in another, parallel narrative, a willful act of systematic subsummation and containment. What does this mean for art that by its very nature leverages uncertainty for effect?

5a[22]

In the sphere of geopolitics, 2016 was a bad year for predictability (e.g., the election of Donald Trump for US President and the “Brexit” referendum). Those outcomes defied many political experts’ expectations. The polls these experts rely upon to make their forecasts failed to accurately predict the votes. Currently, there are many explanations circulating, some more plausible than others, for how and why this predictive failure occurred. What is clear in both cases is that the failure to accurately predict these important political events increases skepticism for political expert/poll-based prediction generally. Unpredictability in democratic political events apparently adds to instability in the aftermath of the unexpected happening. Fear of societal chaos increases, amping anxiety in the affected populations. A concurrent meme, pushed by Trump and others during the US campaign season and elsewhere, that the system is “rigged,” gains resonance with voters. Paranoia, that outsiders or insiders are fixing the game, proliferates. And so forth. Lapses in predictability, then, would seem to erode trust in democratic processes, one of the central social-compacts binding diverse demographics into conjectural (imaginary) union. Which begs the question, is an expectation - that predictability and democracy are synthetically equitable - legitimate, given the historical narrative equating the demos to an unpredictable “mob?” The introduction of the imaginary “expectation” moves our discourse toward the consideration of standards by measurement in the dimensional. A 4D aesthetic parallax conjecture is useful in providing relational answers to such a question, since the social constellations in question are mimetic. As an exercise, we can sketch a cascading performative inquiry, pointing out highlights. The exercise resembles a cooking show, in which the chef demonstrates the putting-together of ingredients, but for the sake of programmatic time, produces readymade results, leaving out durational change, i.e., cooking time. Start by linking the subtextual dynamic query [Do political polling and Contemporary art have anything in common?] to a corollary popular opinion (reportedly held by Trump, but also asserted by the likes of David Graeber, and many others) that “Contemporary Art” is a con, given that the genre is so uncertain in many characteristic aspects, exclusive of predictable, progressive “art market” valuations and returns over the past several decades (the “rigged” art world). Do we even know what art and artist are at the moment? Who are prime beneficiaries of aesthetic ambivalence? What do we expect art and artist to do, be and become over time? What does “with-time art” (Contemporary art) mean? Next, (to integrate the concerns and phenomena covered in Part ONE and this Part) link the additional notions of “free-” or “leisure” time and comfort to fictional predictability. The interrogation of trust drifts into an especially prominent facet of artificial time-sense, which bounds all sets we are are inspecting: the prospect of ownership; which is rooted with trust in the contractual, fundamentally in the formalization of valid expectation. The concept of “time-management” implies a superimposition of property regimes into the abstract domain of the temporal, a 4D conjunction. The “question” in 4D inquiry behaves metastitially, omni-directionally. The effectiveness of 4D for datamining owes much to the inertial expansion of the perspectival field, particularly when the analyst is only searching for a few markers, or things. Cross-reference keys on the repetitive instance. With practice, one begins to accepting 4D promise as a platform that makes sense of what is happening now in everything with both actual and virtual perceptual components. 4D perception has been such a long time in the making. The fourth dimension, put simply, is the interstitial zone where the material and immaterial operate simultaneously, transact, etc. To picture it, bring to mind a representation of DNA, and the convoluted shape of the brain, and think, “NOW!” - plus [All of It] happening IRT/IRL. In this image, It represents all finitude. All indicates the universal set. Back to the 4D inquiry: “Arts management” implies a superimposition of business practicum on an imaginary arts. “Arts” in this meaning or sense harkens to an old usage of the word, that is to an extent generic. If the management of time derives from its predictability, what standards measurements for democratic elections and the arts are sufficient to determine and quantify their transitive states? Keep in mind the nature of the things in question. An election is a thing-less thing, that is nevertheless an objective, at least for whomever is campaigning. If art is an object, and Time the only Object, that is one thing. If, as is commonly asserted, 4D art is stuff that has to do with time, what is that, and what would our (art-focal) expectations be for it. What metrics apply to object-less temporal and temporary it-art?

5b[23]

...Add a layer, for the sake of gathering cross-sector congruencies.[24] “Hedging” risk is currently one of the most lucrative arenas in speculative finance. The hedging boom is complex in its dimensional propositions and proportions, a wheels-within-wheels construct, like the intricate workings of a Swiss timepiece. The greatest hedgers play many angles, switch and manipulate sides, work margins and percentages, seek “competitive edge” in data and its transmission, and so on. They operate in immaterial matrices, navigate the intersections of actual society (such as the “art world”), with a singular objective – to make the best bet (against something and/or some result or event) at the right time, to make the most money. The practice is mercenary, although the players maintain close ties to power, by “virtue” of their great new wealth and the influence deriving from it. In a 4D analysis, the hedge industry can be imaginatively construed to be a temporal tech-arts hybrid, in the hypothetical. Its media are timing and certainty in the sphere of the net notional. By any measure, hedging is a true confidence game, a metaphorical “art” and “science” of operative contemporaneity, very creative, innovative, and disruptive. As the crash of 2008 illustrated, gaming risk creates risk, and sometimes, dispersive calamity. Is inducing cataclysm tantamount to art, and by what standard or measure can that assertion be “true?” (Keyword TRUE]

5c[25]

...Predictive failure is not rare. Historical antecedents abound. In the domain of digital-time, one largely forgotten instance is “Y2K.” For calendar-time, the End of the World/Mayan Calendar non-event of December, 2012, serves as a recent exemplar. Both of these un-Happenings reveal in hindsight a great deal about our collective time-based fears. Y2K featured a mechanical-time code glitch that many worried might threaten the newly “wired” global civilization. The Mayan Calendar represented an ancient time-technology that some surmised predictively indicated the date of the world’s and therefore our demise. Fortunately, neither scenario materialized as forecast. Such incidents reinforce the diagnosis that man is idiosyncratically prone to making apocalyptic projections, based on misapprehensions of machine time and “time machines” - a calendar, in the second cited non-event. Also, social fears of systemic breakdown apparently congeal proximal to mechanical-time-based projection. Arguably, our (over-?)reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may co-incidentally generate imaginary threats and directives, formulating as narrative patterns, with wildly destructive potential actuality. When schism and Chronos converge, the popular fear is something bad will happen. “All hell breaks loose!” An entire genre of Hollywood blockbusters co-opts and amplifies the psychic dread of cataclysmic time-fracking, caused by Nature, aliens, zombies or whatever. In end-times imaginings, the climatic scene either arrives, and the audience is served “disaster porn” and/or is focused on the Survivor, who avoids being wiped out often due to some deus ex machina-type intervention. Then the credits roll as the audience ponders the consequences to materialize after-the-Final-fact, which might or might not be a “New World Order.”

...What are the perceptual implications of these forms of “escapist” entertainments, and how do they intertwine with other methods of threat-projection, such as the color-coded Terror alerts of the post-9/11 Bush administration, or those dire, poll-shifting pre-consequences outlined by some parties during Scotland's 2014 referendum on leaving Britain? Can we trace end-time “cinema” to the common collective and individual dread associated with the “deadline,” or is that too simple and granular an assumption, given the amorphous mass of the subject(s)?

5d

[Parallel notational interstices in the gestural mannerisms of Contemporary (on-time-phenomena) fiction, and academic- or art-writing, with Infinite Jest and Capital in the Twenty-First Century in mind, but also Alisdair Gray's Lanark - PJM]

Inspired by Christian Marclay's The Clock – which I first encountered at the Venice Biennale in 2010, where it was awarded the Golden Lion, I bring the inquiry back to cinema-embracing/critiquing/de-/reconstructing Contemporary Art, where the data-topography gets hazy (as if, interestingly, our speculation ventures too-much/-past the proverbial membrane of foiled recollection). By the way, The Clock is now showing at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the marketing material describes it thus:

An ode to time and cinema, Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) is a contemporary masterpiece comprised of thousands of fragments from television and film history—creating a 24-hour video shown in real time. At any given moment, the work displays the accurate time on screen, blurring the line between its fictional clips and reality. Synchronized to the local time zone, The Clock literally becomes a functioning timepiece. Every clip in the film shows a clock, mentions the time of day in the dialogue, or represents a metaphor of time. From Big Ben to Jack Nicholson, viewers can recognize iconic movies, actors, and clips from a century of films.[27]

Part THREE

6a

A painting or sculpture, like the calendar, is also a kind of time machine. The argument for this assertion is fairly complex, but also self-evident. The Altarpiece of Ghent, through a 4D analytic lens, is a prototypical case supporting the assertion. Thanks to a wealth of data and metadata, gathered over centuries, attaching to the famous multi-panel painting, we have numerous angles by which we can conduct a singular-to-general time-and-art discourse, using the Altarpiece as our prime reference, or point of origin. For instance, we can talk about the relative “lifetimes” of art and artist(s). We can discuss the changes that occur in paintings over time, a discussion enriched due to the current conservation program for the Altarpiece. Because of the antiquity of the painting, we can perform a dimensional, morphological study of its symbolic code over time, deciphering its meaning for viewers as a durational factor. In a metaphysical discourse on painting, we may utilize the Altarpiece to: i) confront the idea of timelessness for art in a multiplicity of frames; ii) poeticize painting’s spectral attributes of contemporaneity; iii) delineate the “accidental” but durable memory biases poly-art consigns to its viewership; iv) "de-possess" the iconic case (icons possessing a particular sort of presence); v) connect the instance of antiquity surviving to the present day and our ubiquitous urge to art-selfie; vi) review digital and film-camera-based versions with the original Altarpiece (inclusive of its now-restored sections) through the lens of media theory, and assess the manifold variance connecting or distinguishing the actual painting and its diverse mechanical derivations. This discussion could include a sub-theme, comparing actual and mechanical, now-digital, time for the altarpiece, as scalar or spectral phenomena. We could vii) create a series of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on image-appearances over time on the web. And so on.[28]

6b

 An interesting feature of painting, with metaphysical discursive implications, is the progression from “blank” or “empty” canvas to “finished”painting. Each artist interaction with the canvas/painting entails a choice from the set of available choices, and each choice affects the range of potential painting outcomes, representable as “paths.” A blank canvas contains infinite choice-paths. In a painting's final version, the infinite set of choice-paths is reduced to one outcome, which has the qualities of presence. Parallel to this complicated protocol, science suggests the painting-image is, at a microscopic, or cellular, level, like everything we see, a transitioning, uncertain configuration. In what paradigm can these parallel realities be remedied to each other? Can each be autonomous and correct assessments, and simultaneously be synthesized in a unifying imaginary meaning? What sort of proximal, spatial-suspension formation works to manifest or productively platform such an idea? Is it the [4D] artist signature?

7

Heidegger, in Time and Being:

“…We already heard: In the approaching of what is no longer present and even in the present itself, there always plays a kind of approach and bringing about, that is, a kind of presencing. We cannot attribute the presencing to be thus thought to one of the three dimensions of time, to the present, which would seem obvious. Rather, the unity of time’s three dimensions consists in the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the great extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so to speak – not only so to speak, but in the nature of the matter.
            True time is four-dimensional.
            But the dimension we call the fourth in our count is, in the nature of the matter, the first, that is, the giving that determines all.” (p. 15/26)

8a

In “Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts,” Dean Keith Simonton states, on the subject of temporal stability and art in the art world; in a signifier of genius; relative to fame and durability or longevity:

To be sure, one could argue ‘fame is fickle’ and therefore suspect that any evaluative consensus is only transient – a mere repercussion of fashions and fads. Eventually, the consensus will fade as the new replaces the old and centuries-old creators will be subjected to re-evaluations, the great becoming small and the small great. Yet the empirical data simply do not endorse this cynical view. To a very large degree, we can say that creative geniuses of the highest order ‘survive the test of time’. (p.20)

The negation of the urge to make-predictable impels the urge to novelty. The second urge is more like a need, a hyper-urge, a desire with a driving sense of urgency (to the “New”). Dissatisfaction, then despair at the status quo, the predictable life, on a quality spectrum (good versus bad) can be cyclically ameliorated by the New. In the Contemporary society, the co-optation of Ouroboros-like predictability-novelty urges turns the levers of entertainment, marketing, the Sexual and other compulsions for MORE. “More of the same” and “I'm bored and need something 'new'” are equally urgent in the sensational. In a relentless churn for individual and collective attention, the co-equal forces of management and diversion operate in a striving-domain that uses narrative as a prime means for the achievement of dominance in the imaginary. Saturation, market share, monopoly, and so on can be tracked by calculations in consumption – and wasteful change. The mechanisms of critique are absorbed by the powers of promotion. Percentage is linked to valuation for the fiction elevating one status quo or novelty over any and all other choices in optional space. “Fame” and “cool” are attached to products to collectivize the product in the desirable. The astronomical metaphor for the resultant imaginary topology is a sky-space in which a few stars are visible and the rest of the universe is dark matter. Another version of this metaphor can apply to earthly landscapes with a few spectacular visual features surrounded by an “empty” field, i.e., a “desert.” For the imagination, the psychic interior, the fiction formulates life as a manageable durational experience consisting of several significant moments connected by hours, days and years of patterned repetition, in the negative version, drudgery. In the “art world” the schematic [stasis-entropy-ennui-eruption (incrementally modify, repeat)] informs dimensional scrutiny of presentation modes, institutional architecture, composition, the canon, pedagogy, pictorial evolution and more. What are dimensional alternatives to the complex system operating both recursively and progressively simultaneously, to limit the visible and increase the invisible, in a formidable and durable framework, supportive of a monopolistic status quo, that is by design periodically interrupted by the New thing, in the dualistic imaginary of consumption-promotion? An alt.agent attacking one facet of the machine, or a few, will not even “make a dent.” The notion that this time-(based)-machine will eat itself has not proven true, except in affirmative fictions – as in the symbolic Ouroboros. All of it is fictional, though, and that [f]act-axiom {[f]act = fictional act} may be suggestive of viable options on the macro-/micro-expressive spectrum. All the conjectures in the conjectural fiction are before the objective actualization equally fictional. Plato's association of art and illusion, Maya, the “Mayans” and Donald Trump are identically speculative. Relative to the Object, this realization represents an essential informatic-tactic in 4D artists' strategic, productive evacuation from the destructive imaginary field for cyclic extraction and exploitation by force.[29]

8b

To diffuse the urgent function for cyclic predictability-novelty, individuals combine to form a collective, an actualizing conjunctive imaginary stipulating unique or at least particular bodies aggregating in an articulated, articulating mega-body. The 4D art version of this strategic movement-by-association is a response to prevalent markets rooted in the predictability-novelty imaginary complementing the modal satisfaction of fantastic, fictional desire through speculative production. In Contemporary art-star markets, we find evidence of strategies and tactics designed to satisfy both urges (predictability and novelty) consecutively, and in more complex, neo- or post-hybridist types of art, simultaneously. Predictability is associated with speculation, specifically, in RO! (return on investment). Novelty equates to “re-stocking the inventory.” Variants and anomalies salve the banality inherent in the system and its prime users. Subterfuge keeps the “game” interesting, which is another way of describing the brutality of competition in the exclusive, irrational and opaque market system design. Democratic regulation of the system is abhorrent to the prime beneficiaries of the amorphous System, which is itself a symbolic project of command and control plus plausible deniability for accounting purposes. As such, the schema is obviously (given observation over a duration) 4D-. Its prime recursion always points to money. Its prime function is dominant exclusion. Its pretenses are charity and culture. Its prime feature is celebrated mediocrity (or worse).

8c

Modular art "created" the New through additive linking-objects and reconfiguration-actions for set pieces or scenarios contained by mostly cubic architecture. The narrative imaginary for this “cool new thing” was creative mass production, innovative use of materials, and the promise of boredom-avoidance, since the user could always recycle the old components into new experiential usages. Disruption was always an available, practical option. The monopoly-factory hides its ugly boredom behind the modular.  Next-gen 4D art is capacitated to present an array of things, images, information, performance and so on, within a format that embraces a diversity of “times,” and the architecture for these 4D art arrays is polyversal. Within poly-structures, real time, digital time, clock-time, timelines, deadlines, end-times, etc., can be made visible in nodes, within individual object-forms, in vignettes, usually with sonic components binding the temporal “action” to the omni-sensory “viewer,” who comes to each scene by means of free-movement through networked poly-structures. The “cool” of novelty is obviated by the profundity of autonomic motion, a free radicalism patterning itself relative to the art, and in it. The operative experiential structure is activated by the 4D art, so that the concrete value of architecture as container, as shelter, as domestic stage, etc., is superseded by the dimensional phenomenon temporarily absorbing all elements into an event with time-features more complex and convoluted than designated, periodic usage. Like Life itself, “creating” an ontological “brain” from objective sense-plus reality. Operative time can invisibly determine format of the seen-immaterial, as in the projected film, which simultaneously co-exists in (a) space containing mimetic material, i.e., “traditional” light-reflecting objects. Sound, especially 3D sound, acts as a re-minding time-metaphor in the 4D array. In 4D arrays, the novel and the predictable can benevolently appear – and disappear, since the exhibition is programmatically re-assigned to the hypercubic modality of continuum. Absent a negation of the first three dimensions and their means for representation and reciprocal translation, the system mediates compilation at every operative level. This phenomenal development is actually mainstreamed at the Venice Biennale in a fair percentage of its pavilions, within top-tier, well-funded/equipped museums and galleries, and more or less by accident or coincidence at major art fairs, where noise and designed sound are confused. However, best practices, expressed in the arrays of a few advanced (self-aware) 4D-practitioners and collectives, are still more commonly presented in less-sprawling, lo-/focal architectures, sometimes called “labs,” selected or designed for 4D art purposes. The better examples consistently transcend the cliches of predictability and novelty: i) The programmatic ubiquity of modal risk aversion (fear); ii) The curatorial ana-modal, with its by-proxy passive-aggression, 3rd-party venting of pent-up fear (ferocity); iii) The ostensible suppressive reactions against superimposed predictability (fear-management).

8d

It is easy to say one is “working in 4D.” It becomes easy to see whether the claim is valid, or not, in time by output (T x O). Authenticity, linkable to trust, is an apparent casualty of causal conditioning. Linking systems in 4D arrays consistently represent this axiom in the inverse – proportionally, symbolically and otherwise, throughout the exhibit and wovenform thematic topologies. Trust, on the immaterial side of the 4D equation, is the fourth element binding artist, art and viewer, a dynamic similar to the role sound plays in the 4D environment (as time-metaphor). This is critical to the formation of the exhibit “message,” which creates itself. The message simultaneously is the collective project enacted by artist, viewer and art, via process. It is an inside (and outside) job. 4D art is no less demanding with respect to technological craft than 4D- art is. In fact, 4D + art requires the apt practitioner to not only possess skill-sets of 4D art, but also proficiency (at least) in 4D- arts, and familiarity with other arts, at least inasmuch as the 4D practitioner must be capable of recognizing excellence in the other artistic disciplines. Should the artist not recoil from that prospect as entailing too daunting a practicum, and get past the initial overwhelm, she who embraces the 4D method ought to find practically inexhaustible avenues for craft development. “Artist block” for all aesthetic intents and purposes may become extinct, once 4D art is the polyvalent modality. Which is not to say that no worthwhile reason exists anymore for an artist to pursue craft excellence in 4D- mediums – quite the contrary. The maturing of 4D art-vision does nothing to negate any other visionary expressive pursuit.

Part FOUR

9a

In Simulations, Jean Baudrillard writes:

“Order, signal, impulse, message”: all these attempt to render the matter intelligible to us, but by analogy, retranscribing in terms of inscription, vector, decoding, a dimension of which we know nothing – it is no longer even a “dimension,” or perhaps it is the fourth (that which defined, however, in Einsteinian relativity, by the absorption of the distinct poles of space and time). In fact this whole process only makes sense to us in the negative form. But nothing separates one pole from the other, the initial from the terminal: there is just a sort of contraction into each other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapsing of the two traditional poles into one another: an IMPLOSION – an absorption of the radiating model of causality, of the differential mode of determination, with its positive and negative electricity – an implosion of meaning. This is where simulation begins.

9b

So: We come to what’s at stake: the inevitable collapse of the database, as a binary-mechanical (numerical-nominal) replacement for history; but more to the point, the failure of predictability and novelty as a cyclic container for fear of the vast for now not-known and unknowable. Essentially, this failure is the failure of counting-machines and -ismic or -istic narrative to create a useful, practicable fiction that is more potently “real” than the Real, as a cosmic function affecting each of us in particular, often painfully, unexpectedly. Consider the billions invested by the tech industry in VR systems, and their current yield of “popular” novelty gadgets... The fiction that “Time heals all wounds” is rooted in an urge to synthesize the confusing ontology of mortality cohabiting space with the infinite-thing into an application, a remedy for the human condition in its most unpleasant aspects. VR goggles will not adequately solve the real problem, which is not a problem per se. IT is just life. And death, plus more.

9c

As for fictional predictability and novelty, which Civilization weaponizes to salve or whitewash its most destructive behaviors and banal cycles, art and artist do not have to play along. The binary is not 4D+, except when it is a systemic component suspended in a “bigger” set. 4D realism is a proper, non-antidotal stylistic means by which art and artist can approach socialized experience-sharing subversively. The medium for this non-fictional artistic intervention is the gift-exchange, which is a time-release device for purposed acceptance (of IT ALL). Fortunately 4D Realism as modus operandi permits artists to engage with scientists on a reciprocal service basis. The arrangements approximates and thereby promotes transformational disciplinary equality as simultaneity in the Real. We see this occurring recently in the academy, e.g., at MIT Media Lab. Other programs emergent over the past few decades encourage less-formal, but still effective, interdisciplinary praxis. In these programs transductive exchange is more often granular, amplified by concentric and rhizomatic network effects. Oxford DPhil in Fine Arts is one such program. Oxford/Ruskin, as such, represents a unique case, in which the overarching institution's unique coupling of old & “New” in a smart trans-cultural/-temporary format actively promotes disciplinary porosity as a resonant feature. We are witnessing the creation of “real” AI, verified in art as objects cum possibilities, all of which have cross-temporal value. These represent experiments conducted via conjoined databases. Both formal and informal approaches simply reframe and renew the ancient project of art-science, which converges dimensionally in architecture and manifests in mechanical design. Both MIT and Oxford excel in both the actual and virtual kind.

10a

The Parthenon is on a dimensional throughput that connects to da Vinci (as in Vitruvian Man, etc.), to Muybridge-Eakins-Taylor, to the proliferating corporate "creativity" programs such as IBM Creatives with 4D collectives popping-up and receding like waves washing over the past century art world narrative. Granted, art-science “equality” in that narrative framing is more an ethically-blurry ellipsis-fiction, due to external directional pressures to convert the art-science thing to “run more like a business,” as an entrepreneurial enterprise. For instance, Drucker wanted Management to be recognized as an Humanities/Science-encompassing hybrid, and eventually, the neo-liberal art. Unlike Drucker's hubristic, banal fantasy, 4D sci-arts efforts demonstrate that possible man is already real, and as McLuhan and Fuller indicated, necessary. 4D man is more than a knowledge worker, a gadget, a robot, etc. He is himself, and inherently free. There are many benign, beneficial examples of visionary sci-arts co-labs sustaining, if not flourishing, outside the scope of the “creative” industrial macro-narrative, in spite of concerted efforts to relegate the exemplary outliers to dark matter in consumer-portable promotional history. The best in 4D pedagogy reminds the practitioner that she leads the dimensional field shift within and without the academy, not by orienting to the corrupting facets of compromised collaborative ventures oriented to predictable, novel consumption habits – but by being herself and doing what she would do anyway - i.e., what works best. By pursuing autonomous, sci-aesthetic excellence she can devote herself to mapping the proliferating dimensional with each creation. Each 4D+ dimension - the 4D instructor/facilitator should remind her charge - opens infinite paths, each generative of its own artistic merit and rewards, shareable as such with the partnering scientist and philosopher.

10b

Mankind’s most promising choice-path for survival stipulates collaboration in arts and science, moderated by a version of philosophy “of which we know nothing,” as Baudrillard puts it. It has become clear such a philosophy is rooted in the technological, which is still radical. Philosophy is also to art and science as sound is to time in light/dark 4D arrays: a sentient binder-medium for poly-matters. The spectral imaginary will shape general propositions into policy, ideas into applications, objects into action. Ultimately, all of it flows into the database, where it exists until re-animated and -applied by the user - artist, scientist, philosopher, etc., which in 4D utopian futurism, includes any, each and/or all of us. The theoretical does not need to be empty pantomime. Envisioning material in a “weighted,” balancing equation with the immaterial is not a wasted project for art and science. It is an immediate need. Many of us sense it. Whose “job” is it to communicate a viable survival route for humanity, and whose “job” is it to receive and act upon that information? That is a dimensional rhetorical question. Philosophy, historically, in the nominal aggregate, is not immune to the lure of predictability or novelty, and many other seductions. Philosophy is made of philosophers. Many philosophers have risked much to fearlessly critique the range of seductions offered by urgent reactionaries. Art has always depended on both science and philosophy. Science, whether it is willing to acknowledge it or not, needs both art and philosophy. Philosophy and science have always been interwoven, particularly when they are bound inseparable from religion. Math occupies a special place in the mix. Only now, after millennia of concerning itself (often competitively) with art, does philosophy actually need art. The world needs them all, working synthetically. Beyond the arc of fear-driven Civilization, and its addiction to predictability and novelty, art-science-philosophy may paint a virtual horizon that connects in 4D the real and imaginary, demarcating an interstices connecting us via givings to a reciprocal cosmos – or multiverse - harmonizing the one(s) we all inhabit now, collectively and individually. Artificial time accidentally, temporarily provides the logistical for that operation, for which we as the possible de-factored beneficiaries may someday be grateful. The deus ex machina moment is 4D. The metaphorical imaginary is a “blank canvas.” At any designated, pre-Apocalyptic, original point [-and-click], we may abandon the dynamic decay of ideological contingency, a simulacra as such, and willfully choose to conduct our sense-affairs conjunctively with a renewable vision of every-thing. This is Real power. We can quit wasting time on predictably fallible, false versions of reality, which are not actually “safe.” They are rather derivative and inauthentic “expressions” of the twining urges for predictability and novelty. They are camouflaged negations and DDOS hacks of the what-how-why that matters. What is needed immediately is a practicum for causal virtuality, revealing the impetus for proto-efficient casual meta-hybrid – actual + artificial – systems for all manner of interwoven, networked things, especially expressive ones. We must determine how artists and our partners in science and philosophy can un-Civilize the imaginary, which is currently enslaved to urgent, ineffective fictions.

10c

The “organ” separating the conjecture and its realization is a “skin.” The conceptual “project” is like a tattoo on the skin. The Conceptual is a projection of the internal (idea-visualization) from its surface, its exposed immanence, into the “space” for actualization, the architecture of presentation. The exhibition informed in that 4D “space,” “created” by the Conceptual through its skin, is not exactly a (re-)presentation of the concept, in a Hegelian sense, an object. The 4D artist must think of all these elements as being equally “real.” If there is an “objective,” the object is for every viewer in time to think freely about It All, as in the unfolding Meaning of... The artistic enterprise is ideally suited to the task of reforming the imagination to accommodate a more accurate universal concept, even though art has historically rarely been deployed on that basis.

FOOTNOTES*

[1] D. Thompson, ‘A Brief Economic History of Time’, The Atlantic Monthly, December, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com, (accessed 21 December, 2016).

[2} A. Chapman, 'Surveying the Heavens: Petrus Apianus, Tycho Brahe and Practical Navigation', (lecture), Oxford, Christ Church Upper Library, 18 November, 2016.

[3]  E. Roach and B. B. Lloyd (eds.), 'Cognition and Categorization', Sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, Hillsdale, NJ, IFA, Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., Publishers, 1978, p. 6.

[4]  See: Global Consciousness Project, 2001, [website] http://noosphere.princeton.edu, (accessed 8 December 2016).

[5] For the modern origin story of the artificial personhood, see: Trustees of Dartmouth Coll. v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819).

[6]  For an introduction to the mechanics shaping the evolution of database-dependent industry: F. Bancilhon and D. DeWitt, (eds.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, Publication of Conference VLDB'88 Very Large Data Base Conference, Long Beach, CA, USA - 29 August-01 September, 1988. San Francisco, CA, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc, 1988, p. 259.

[7] S. MacLean, 'Hallaig', Scottish Poetry Library, [website], n.d., http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk, (accessed 12 December, 2016), further attributions and permissions in-site.

[8]  L. Manovich, 'Data Visualization as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime', Manovich, 2002, [website], http://manovich.net, (accessed 3 December, 2016).

[9]  DIM TIM: The “new” cosmos echoes one that fostered the post-middle ages' European colonial boom-times. What is the next New World for Civilization to conquer? As far as I can tell, we are It. The conquest already happened, and we, and, really, All of It, are the latest (notional) iteration of Cerro Rico.

[10]  DIM TIM: [DT:~] Is there a universal “image” that applies to and in all facets of these complex cyborgian systems, inclusive of the user, and is the Uni-image Time? In this speculation, does conjunctive, permeable Time eventually usurp the image through a process of absorption and become the sole encompassing, veritable, user-provisional Object? As such the figural of Time would be unconditional and simultaneous in the possible. Are Object and Time sentience signatures, Signs of Sentience, or something else entirely?

[11]  [Certainly, this notation owes much to Hegel and Phenomenology of the Mind, especially the Introduction (Sections 73-89) – PJM].

[12]  M. DeLanda, 'On Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason', 9 June 2011, [lecture/book launch], Eyebeam, New York, NY, (in conjunction with the exhibit 'BIORYTHM: Music and the Body', 2 June-6 August, 2011). [Assertions in this passage owe to DeLanda, but reflect significant, subsequent reorganization of his concepts for 4D art/theory utility. -PJM].

[13]  “Later,” DIM TIM says, “we can wonder and/or decide, if it was a good trip or a bad one. But there's no point blaming the stars.” & DT:~ This is the nature of confusion in 4D schematic analysis.

[14]  M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh, New York, NY, Harper Torchbooks, 1977.

[15]  Ibid, p. 82.

[16]  M. McLuhan, Q. Fiore, and J. Agel, The Medium Is the Massage, New York, NY Bantam Books, 1967, p. 43.

[17]  J. Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space, New York, NY, Knopf, 2016.

[18]  S. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, The Samuel Beckett On-Line Resources
and Links Pages, n.d., [website], http://samuel-beckett.net (accessed 11 December, 2016). [Stage direction excluded in quotation. –PJM]

[19]  A. Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems, San Francisco, CA, City Lights, 1956.

[20]  W. Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3 (l. 302), Shakespeare Online, 1999 [website], http://www.shakespeare-online.com, (accessed 15 December, 2016)

[21] DT/Q.:~ 4D art starts with “& Why NOT?” (Relative to the instance above, we have already wondered) “Are we leaving anything else out, if we don't turn out the lights and listen?” A: [TIME (gives us speed and frequency, too.)] In the digital space, the timeline is the flattener of both images sequences for projection and sound(tracks), but the timeline does not “touch” objective Time, although the converse is untrue. - & Why NOT?

[22]  DT:~ And what is certain in the Contemporary? What is the “sure thing” now? ∞

[23]  DT:~ 4D analysis is ad infinitum... Within the focal finite.

[24]  [~The 4D process encourages Kierkegaardian leap-taking.]

[25]  INTERNAL ERROR [099]

[26]  DT:~4D analysis also can loops, spiral, etc., i.e., performs circuitously within the given frame.

[27]  ~...I believe an argument can be made that The Clock is actually a “disaster movie,” with respect to art, a triumph of the banal over the substantial, representing the co-optation of invaluable spaces by artificial, derivative “time.” As such, The Clock is indeed a contemporary masterpiece, and the same can be said of the clock, generally (DT weeps).

[28]  DT:~Does the singularity of a famous painting extend to art as a universal phenomenon? Is cloning the Altarpiece of Ghent an interstitial experiential option for viewers who, depending on the time of day/week/year, are prevented from seeing the polyptych as a “whole thing?” Is the non-encounter between art and viewer still ontological? Does the recently launched “Lascaux 4” replication, and/or the earlier (1-3) iterations, serve as a viable comparative case? Can we consider viewers who have been excluded from the original Lascaux cave since 1963, due to preservation concerns, to be in a similar situation to the centuries-spanning excluded viewership of the altarpiece? In what aspects are the teleologies of the Altarpiece of Ghent and the Lascaux cave paintings consignable to the Contemporary, or even “art,” as such? What is it that these two (x4) famous things share in common?

[29]  DT:~”I am a creative-genius corporate-database (avatar).” = signature (X-effect)

* Only the citations for Part ONE are complete (as of 12.1.2016). Additional footnotes will be included as the edit process continues (see INTRODUCTION TO PROJECT).

ADDENDA

(1) Forbes (www.forbes.com) offers a collection of articles on the Cloud, with a nice mix of new and archived resources. Several stories speak directly to the portion of section 2a of "Time for the 4D Art Thing" focused on Cloud technology/industry, as well as other passages in other sections. "Why Are We So Afraid of Petabytes" by Kalev Leetaru is a good starting point for the reader interested in the subject (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/17/why-are-we-so-afraid-of-petabytes/?ss=cloud-computing#22288c7740c8). Another, with a different focus that is also relevant to our discussion here, is “IT Security: Why A Disaster Recovery Strategy Must Be Top Of Mind In Today's Environment” by Jeffrey Ton (https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/01/24/it-security-why-a-disaster-recovery-strategy-must-be-top-of-mind-in-todays-environment/2/?ss=cloud-computing#266f2d6a1a1d). As I wrote above, it is a fiction that the Cloud is "a stable temporal domain with ample security." The Forbes Cloud article-set gives the reader a good sense of the stakes in the game, and a sketch of the topology and players, mainly from an industry-aligned/-ing, boosterish perspective. For a handy and succinct criticism of cloud computing, I would refer the newbie to Zach Smith's at http://zsmith.co/Cloud.html.

(2) An early version of "Time for the 4D Art Thing" introduced a counterbalancing narrative thread, the focus of which juxtaposed the sensations attaching to man's view toward the heavens, and an analysis of astronomical time, with the subterranean, and its alt.temporal ontology, as vividly described by Joseph Nechvatal in Immersion Into Noise, via an account of his descent into Lascaux Cave, pp. 65-89 [see introductory text for section NINE: ox-3000-4-4-4 (27 November, 2016) and endnotes for SIXTEEN: Paul-McLean-Ox-EssayBETA2 (4 December, 2016) in ESSAY DUMP]. The juxtaposition of the cosmology of stargazers and the underground "world"-view presents an opportunity in 4D schema to reevaluate the fictional binaric imaginary man (celestial = goodness versus the demonic/hell below) and those contingent near-infinite battles of divine and evil impulses having the directional associations of up/good and down/bad, that for millennia have defined the West's moral/visionary topology. I would suggest this is a very promising "line" of inquiry for subsequent 4D analysis. The visualization of the phenomenon (a model) for such an investigation would be two parallel lines containing a progressive helixical format with focal nodes of intersection. Referencing "Time for the 4D Art Thing" and its point of origin (fictional predictability) I would point to Nechvatal's text for an apparent verification:

What we can conjecture is that the subterranean aesthetic visualization process at work in the Apse may have been used to feedback optic stimulus to the neocortex in a foreseeing enterprise, an attempt to look into the future, as this process of feedbacking impartial stimulus to the neocortex is roughly the basis for magical gazing. It is imaginable that such a foreseeing enterprise would also be deemed of help in prognosticating the existence and movements of prospective herds of game which would facilitate the success of the hunt, among other things.

So much of the "dark matter" of human experience displaced by the celestial divine orientation of the imaginary can be "fleshed out" with an additive consideration in an equivalent space of the whole view (verticality + "the depths"). This is I would argue fertile ground for a new school of realist aesthetics consistent with dimensional 360º trans-dynamics, inferring inner- and outer-space/-time "travel." The cited passage in Nechvatal's Immersion Into Noise indicates many potential modal paths for the subterranean facet of a 4D inquest, which could be to some extent correlated to those outlined in "Time for the 4D Art Thing," or matched to new ones.

[3] In an early version of "Time for the 4D Art Thing [see part 2 in section THREE: ox-3000-4-1 (14 October, 2016) in ESSAY DUMP] I apply the term "lossy" to the general discourse on 4D, as time (e.g., by Mueller in Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design), and frame the action of superimposing the definition on 4D art as a problem of both recursion and compression. Recursion and compression are not identical processes and my framing in that draft is sloppy for inferring that they are. For an excellent new essay focused on and proposing an aesthetics of compression within a broader discussion of compression in philosophy, please see "Compression in Philosophy" by Alexander Galloway and Jason R. LaRiviere [boundary 2, Duke University Press (2017) at http://boundary2.dukejournals.org/content/current]. Underscoring the narratives(s) in "4D Art Thing" - and not explicitly introduced at this stage of the drafting of the text - is the proposition of 4D hermeneutics. Particularly in section 2a above, but also throughout the text, one can see interpretive opportunities in things, in the sense procession of things, in the categorical and other second-/third-/etc.-ordering of things (in time), and reflexive and/or critical analysis of those orders and so on. And again the question is whether art (objects) need to or should be subjected to such processing. "Compression in Philosophy" cites Tim Griffin's analysis of Cory Arcangel's gradient prints and adds:

By putting a conceptual frame around the readymade processes of digital production so prevalent today, by simply leaving be, Arcangel is able to effectively represent the informatic milieu of post-Internet art, rendering a critical intervention into contemporary modes of production—critical in its very withdrawal from expression.

Looked at another way, Arcangel's gradients do not withdraw from expression, but opt out of critical reformation of the object by the third party observer. The mechanics of production denude the object of narration, except as a function of manifesting an apparent object from studio software (the virtual), its codes, numeric/nominal/symbolic identity (displacing potentially the wetware signature-gesture), which identity is referentially topological or cartographic, and so on. The hermeneutic impulse in 4D art schematics generates diverse permutations, including hyper-hermeneutic negation, diffusion, directional proliferation, and sublimation in other spectral 4D artistic operations. I would not suggest that "opting out" of art's critical discourse is desirable, or to the point, an effective or worthwhile artist strategy, even if self-removal by object-proxy is a sound tactical move. Especially for the 4D painter and sculptor, whose work might be subjected to malpractical critical reduction, through rendering of specific objects by the critic into facile categorical containers (minimal, abstraction, formalist, etc.), discursive reframing tools are necessary. In some early versions of "Time for the 4D Art Thing" I attempted to engage the reader in the current phase of anti-object art critiques, as an extension of the attempt to define 4D/art. Certainly this engagement should extend further, and prominent critics have stated positions on what they see as problematic patterns in the art/painting field in particular that bear scrutiny and possibly remedy. For instance, Jerry Saltz in his 2014 New York Magazine broadside "Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same? (http://www.vulture.com/2014/06/why-new-abstract-paintings-look-the-same.html)" took aim at what he named "Dropcloth Abstraction" and what Walter Robinson termed "Zombie Formalism."  Since then, the topic has been much discussed in A-List art circles, in print, on panels and blogs, in academies and so forth. Add this critique to presumptions such as David Joselit's (cited in several early versions of "4D Art Thing" that painting is a corrupted, outmoded or co-opted medium. Liam Gillick devotes a chapter in Industry and Intelligence ("Abstract") to deconstructing and even invalidating the practice. Abstract painting since its emergence as a designated genre of painting has attracted voluminous and varied opposition. It can be argued that targeting abstract painting today and the most recent generation of "abstract painter" - forever a bizarre identifier - amounts to a critical avoidance tactic, a cliche, "low-hanging fruit." Perhaps a more interesting exercise might involve identifying the critics who have succeeded at writing about "abstract" painting at depth? Who among these critics has acknowledged the stunning variety of "abstract" paintings being made right now? Abstract painting is a dimensional, global phenomenon. Recursion and compression of that phenomenon to dismissive -ismic non-genres, attached to a fractional set of known/anonymous ("typed") artists on the art market and/or top-tier academic platform, strikes me as an act of irrelevance. More interesting and rich is a discussion within the parameters of 4D painting practice on how "abstraction" over the past half-century (and more) and "representation" are integrated/-ing in the work of many accomplished 20th/21st century artists (e.g., Adrian Ghenie, Neo Rauch, etc.). This discussion can unfold parallel to one on the artistic practices that span 2/3/4D (e.g., Frank Stella, etc.). Unfortunately, few art writers seem equipped to see art dimensionally, and instead cling to outmoded, corrupt, malpractical (including non- or anti-art) criteria when assessing art for their selective readerships, for whatever reasons. 

[4] Much of the content in "Time for the 4D Art Thing" composites the cosmological and a potential re-communion of science and art sited in 4D+ zones of ______-duction and ______-action. The video embedded below, featuring Anthony Aguirre illustrates the promise inherent in that vision. One notable feature in Aguirre's presentation is his frequent willingness, given his material, to insert the admission "We don't know." I found the summation section of his exposition particularly compelling. Aguirre establishes two fields (Unitary Relativistic Block and Experienced Reality) and discusses the intersections and possible remedies where the modality of scientific activity and progressive expansion of known and knowable territories in our universe accessible via science and the more prosaic perceptual facets of sentient life IRL/-T share a commons. For me this is the ripe region for 4D+ growth for both science and art. Aguirre's overview contains enough parallel or twining narrative points relative to "Time for the 4D Art Thing" to at least warrant a more involved comparative study. One should keep in mind, however, that some of those co-incidental points express the polysemiac nature of artistic and scientific analysis, inquiry and language. "Freedom," for example, in Aguirre's talk may or may not signify the "freedom(s)" referred to in "Time for the 4D Art Thing." A measure of respect for the specific meanings applying to a discipline's usage of words is helpful in most interdisciplinary collaborations, in which confusion is cultivated in the positive. 

[5] In an early version of "Time for the 4D Art Thing" previously referenced in the addenda [see ESSAY DUMP THREE: ox-3000-4-1 (14 October, 2016)] I wondered at Ellen Mueller's inclusive definition of 4D art, and questioned how John Ruskin might receive the notion that a "flash mob" might be a valid category of fine art. I also dismissed Mueller's summary contention that 4D art origins could be attributed to the Bauhaus school of art and design. Although I won't disavow those initial reactions to Mueller's assertions, I now realize those assertions provide an opportunity to address a much more expansive aesthetic discourse with many facets. The catalyst for my realization is Joseph Nechvatal's Hyperallergic review ["The Lifespan of Bauhaus Utopianism" (8 February, 2016)] of the current exhibition at Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In his essay Nechvatal adroitly connects the many artifacts generated during the school's relatively brief duration to their correlates, and he links Walter Gropius of Bauhaus to Ruskin, and to a list of other phenomena! He writes:

Gropius, who considered himself a follower of John Ruskin and adhered to the ideals of Ruskin’s sublime, developed the curriculum based on his ideal of art as gesamtkunstwerk (or total artwork), which Ruskin traced back as far as the Gothic period. However, Gropius theorized that his 20th-century version of unified art harmony was only possible under the direction of a creative leader, which for him was the architect. Paradoxically, the historical legitimization of this concept was rooted in the medieval communal anonymity of working for the church. Yet Gropius used the expression “cathedral of future freedom” interchangeably with his more prosaic phrase “unitary work of art” when promoting his total-artwork ideal. In his 1919 programmatic essay “Architecture in the People’s Free State,” he explicitly revealed this integrative function, which he determined for all the arts under gesamtkunstwerk principles, predicting that different art forms would break their isolation from each other in Gothic fashion. That is why L’Esprit du Bauhaus kicks off with a 15th-century sculpted oak lectern from St. Pierre church in Subligny (in the center of France) as an example of cathedral aesthetics. For Gropius, the supreme model for artists was the organization of the guilds that worked together to build medieval cathedrals. However, near the lectern are also examples of art from Asia and two movements indebted to the philosophical history of Romanticism: the British Arts & Crafts movement and the Viennese Wiener Werkstätte (or Vienna Secession).

Here I would add Baudrillard's analysis of Bauhaus for an amplifying perspective on the school's import and impact, from Chapter 10 (p. 186), "Design and Environment," of his text For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign:

This functionality inaugurated by the Bauhaus defines itself as a double movement of analysis and rational synthesis of forms (not only industrial, but environmental and social in general). It is a synthesis of form and function, of "beauty and utility," of art and technology. Beyond "style" and its caricatured version in "styling," the commercial kitsch of the 19th century and the modern style, the Bauhaus projects the basis of a rational conception of environmental totality for the first time. Beyond the genres (architecture, painting, furnishings, etc.), beyond "art" and its academic sanction, it extends the aesthetic to the entire everyday world; at the same time it is all of technique in the service of everyday life. The possibility of a "universal semiotic of technological experience" is in effect born of the abolition of the segregation between the beautiful and the useful. Or again from another angle: the Bauhaus tries to reconcile the social and technical infrastructure installed by the industrial revolution with the superstructure of forms and meanings. In wishing to fulfill technology (la technique) in the finality of meaning (the aesthetic), the Bauhaus presents itself as a second revolution, the crowning perfection of the industrial revolution, resolving all the contradictions that the latter had left behind it.

The Bauhaus is neither revolutionary nor utopian. Just as the industrial revolution marked the birth of a field of political economy, of a systematic and rational theory of material production, so the Bauhaus marks the theoretical extension of this field of political economy and the practical extension of the system of exchange value to the whole domain of signs, forms and objects. At the level of the mode of signification and in the name of design, it is a mutation analogous to that which has taken place since the 16th century on the level of the mode of material production and under the aegis of political economy. The Bauhaus marks the point of departure of a veritable political economy of the sign (see original for author's emphasis).

The totalizing impulse (or urge) for art is a polyvalent quality underpinning human expression. For Joseph's narrative I might add a wrinkle in the form of a reminder that the machining sensibility of Bauhaus and Ruskin's association with the arts & craft movement poses a curious juxtaposition in terms of techne and technology that could jump-start a worthwhile discussion - I think Baudrillard's analysis serves the purpose adequately. Still, given Nechvatal's beautiful Lascaux reverie in Immersion Into Noise, expansion on the thread above is practically limitless, and points, for me, straight at the most substantial features of 4D theory. Can we identify a throughput that connects cave art to Michelangelo to Bauhaus to current modes of 4D art production? I think so, and this excerpt and the "All of It" concept/urge it circles offers an opening to do so, in the zone for 4D art and theoretical operations. Consider a sample set - a "basket of explorables," to commandeer a gnarly phrase in circulation currently in American campaign rhetoric, containing Ben Vautier's "Total Art Match-Box," Allan Kaprow's "Notes on the Creation of a Total Art," Boris Groys' The Total Art of Stalin, John Dewey's Art As Experience, Matthew Wilson Smith's The Total Work Of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace, the Sistine Chapel, Tino Seghal's recent Paris show elsewhere covered in "Time for the 4D Art Thing," Wagner's Ring cycle, Andy Warhol's Factory, Second Life, plus more...

In the Nechvatal text excerpted above, I found the mention of guilds resonant, given my Occupy "arts" experience - a guild model was experimentally employed in the first few months of OWS for the organization of arts and culture activities and actions - but also because I see a direct connection from the tribal to the guild to the contemporary/4D collective structure on a spectrum of art production. Moreover, I would argue that the total discourse includes space to consider the notion of Riegl's concept of Kunstwollen, and its reference in Sirato's Dimensionist Manifesto. This is a too-broad topic for an addendum to accommodate - although I believe 4D space to be entirely and readily adequate for that vital synthetic concourse - and so we will leave off there, in the speculative for now, and perhaps this is an appropriate point on which to momentarily culminate this piece.

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