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DRAFT ONE

ONE: ox-3000-2 [5 October, 2016]

"Art:" Owning the Word by the Numbers: A 2016 User Guide
By Paul McLean

If we could take a snapshot of Art in 2016, what would we see? Obviously, the notion of reducing Big A art to the format of instant-image is preposterous, but why not entertain the proposition for a moment, as a conversation-starter. The idea immediately generates some dimensional quandaries that are interesting, if not compelling. To begin: What is art, today? We would have to agree on a definition or at least premise of art to start a data visualization process for capturing "art" as a particular representation of its general or universal aspect. After even a cursory scan of the "art world," whatever we might determine that to be, almost by any measure we would have to agree that art is a massive subject, consisting of a huge number of objects with a surplus of characteristics, created by a great diversity of artists. With regards the term "artist," again we might find ourselves overwhelmed by the task of figuring out who an artist is. Because the definition of the artist is practically as multivalent as the one for art. Already we are encountering concept creep. To produce a snapshot of Art in 2016, do we need to define not only "art" itself, but "artist," too? Can the two elements (art/artist) in our "snapshot" analysis be decoupled satisfactorily, without undermining the analysis' potential to offer a real, true and accurate picture of what Art is currently? Does art exist in the absence of its artist, per se, in 2016? This is a technological question. What about art's reason for existing? Why and for whom does art exist presently? What is art's utility, if any? If we cannot ascertain a distinct, viable function for art, can we establish any verifiable point in art's existence? Or to put it another way, is there a common narrative for art? What is the theory of Art, its concept? The value of a snapshot at least partly arises from immediacy, a discernibility that attends a thing or story being described in a static image. Or to abstract "snapshot" a bit, to infer a broader usage, can we apply recursion to Art Now to generate a summary, particularized data set that adequately conveys or communicates a sense of all-Art, as a unity-entity, as it is manifesting in (this) Time-point? Our attendant criteria set for Art is in short order expanding to include: an artist, art's maker; art's utility, its reason for being; its story; art's means of fabrication, or production. Why not include art's contingencies and contextual identity? Does art have definitional property characteristics? What in short, is the essence of art in terms of belonging? To whom does art belong in 2016? Or, to look at art from another direction, what is art's actual value? Which is an assessment not necessarily linked to art's utility or non-utility. Today, clearly, art connects to an "art market" for valuation, perhaps not completely, but at least partially. Even if the "art world" and "art market" are not exhaustively identical, both pertain to any snapshot of Art materially. The issue is topological, if not cosmological. Can we glimpse art outside of its concrete environs? Is art more than its price tag? Does art occupy itself outside a hierarchy of relative worth? Which brings us to some sketchy philosophical questions pertinent to Art? Does any art-itself actually exist, or to put it Classically, does Art still have an ideal form, today? Is it an illusion, a con, that ought to be excommunicated from the Republic? To acknowledge traditional questions in a contemporaneous assessment of Art, is to invite more updated modes of evaluation (political, critical, psychological, anthropological, sociological, etc.) into the picture. Should our snapshot of art include critiques, deconstructions, alternative analytic modes for interpreting our subject (Art). Should we move art into a cultural channel for study, which only considers art in its appearance as one factor out of many that constitute art, as such. Is art ontological, phenomenological, historical? If we willingly concede art to its decomposition in the Humanities, why not address the science of art now? Physics and chemistry might have something to add to our snapshot view of art in 2016. The initial query, though, orients the art-imaging exercise to an output that aggregates all these concerns, basically, into one specific object for one specific moment. Do we have a means for making that happen?

The preliminary exercise above points to a simple, if not simplistic answer for what Art is not only in 2016, but possibly anytime. Axiomatically, what if we assume the overarching project of the artist in her studio to be the generation of an embodied, practical response to the basic question, "What is Art?" Traditionally, the output would serve as a de facto answer, as in "This is Art." That answer would come in form of an object, a painting, a sculpture. The signature on the object would operate like an emphatic proclamation in the singular, as in "This is MY answer to the Art question!" Have times changed, and Art with the times, so substantially that such a linear question-answer construct for art is no longer practicable, as such? Note that we have not broached the good-bad scale for art in the conjecture. Merit as a metric for art has been destabilized nearly to the point of extinction.

As a sidebar to the axiom-assumption of making-as-proof of and for Art, we might speculate on whether it is or ever was really incumbent on art to answer to anyone for anything at all. This model for an unanswerable art suggests autonomy that hardly seems available for art in current art discourse. Which does not mean that the model of "free" art is not viable. Perhaps the conception of freedom itself is too diffuse at this point to mean much for art. Perhaps we are no longer able to distinguish the differences among non-art, anarchic "art" and autonomous or free art. For the purposes of starting a conversation here, let us assert for [art] independent of discursive speculation for it [art], and then set it aside momentarily. This setting-aside enables us to consider an expansive, inclusive definition for art today, one that encompasses a spectrum of practices, technologies and disciplines that until relatively recently were not recognizably art, per se. Not only does this setting-aside open the discussion practically, it suggests art that encompasses a broader spectrum of concepts, contexts, modes of production and presentation, etc. Further, this setting-aside of a basic call-and-response Art allows for art to transcend a limited protocol (4D-), to access a promising dimensional one (4D+). Note that we have not asserted the outright abandonment of art, as such, including painting and sculpture, in order to set-aside a linear question-answer construct for art for now.

So far we have allowed no space in our brief treatment for the social provocative assets for art. We have not raised the specter of Zeitgeist, of timeliness. We have not addressed cleverness, sexiness, cool, irony. Nor have we mentioned taste, relevance and resonance. We have not likened the question "What is Art?" to an art-selfie, or any antagonistic positioning of momentous self using art as a transitional life backdrop. Can art and pop track parallel or must they intertwine at some point, in an onanistic art-hipster joint of minute consequence, like a tag on a wall, to be painted over by the wall-owner later, or submerged in a flood of contiguous expressions attached to like-ability, popularity? We have not romantically connected art and artist-life to drugs, drink and debauchery. We have not linked art and artist-life to suicide, isolation, madness, despair and other manifestations of the abject. Neither have we mentioned art and its religiosity, its aspiration to the divine, the sublime, even as an historical referent. Secular art, commercial art, fine art: we have not adjectivized art at all yet, except to propose the dimensional nature of Art. We have left out the Decadent art, the pornographic, the censored and image-less art. We have not spoken of propaganda art, of decorative art, of tactical art. We have not separated art from the tribal, nor have we denied art its outsider-ness. Neither have we embraced genre, either. We are using filters, then, for now, as a means to narrow our search for the right question and a decent answer for art.

In short we are dictating a focus for art, an action which itself is gestural, and inconclusive. We are only hinting at the machining of art, peppering the discussion with clues to the (weary, entropic, perpetual) crisis of the answer to the questions, What is Art, Who is an Artist, What is Art for? If art is, as Baudrillard suggested - to paraphrase - a phenomenon of appearance and disappearance, we are initially drawn to the snapshot as a useful tool for glimpsing Art in transit. Art: an holistic interstitial entity moving between states of being and becoming, dragging its simultaneous dissolving/accumulating past with it; but an object, too, a formal stasis. We are tracing the outlines of an art that is composed of echoes of its former conceptions, manifestations and materializations, an art that may predict itself, even as it contradicts itself moment-by-moment, both in its matter and immaterial. We are going to pretend - if that's what you call it - that art possesses sentience, if not its own autonomous impulses. At the least, we are granting art the same qualifications we would grant any other finite creation suggestive of awareness. We are questioning the divide between duration and timelessness, and any claim that art might express the qualities of either or both, as an artificial object, or to be more generous, as a simulation, and/or simulacra. ...Of What?

Of Time, itself, which Heidegger contended was 4 Dimensional; but he specified "true" time, whatever that means.

Is it actually true that an artist is, should or could be expected to respond generatively to a large set of questions - that swirling miasma of inquisition for contemporary art outlined in section (1), for example. Is this too onerous an onus on the artist, and by inference, too much baggage to place on her painting or sculpture? The prospects for any artist who embraces the task to conclusively succeed in producing Big A (Answer) Art to every questioner's satisfaction are probably not that great. One wonders what the statistical chance might be for each instance of art-making to achieve greatness in the enterprise of "answering" in an art object the totality of questions for art at any given moment. Can we posit an artist practice that refuses to engage with any narrative, fictional or otherwise, and simply remains centered on making the next art-object in her auto-progression or sequence of art-objects? The thought game immediately begs a next question. If art is deprived of a narrative impetus, and the artist presumably is capable of performing the function of making art without a thought in her head, why would an artist make art? The protocol, i.e., the Hegelian concept>object procedure for art, is grafted to the idea of seriousness in art, and one of the linchpins of fine art. With respect to the role of the thinker for art, can we not see that the model (concept>object) represents a clear conflict of interest in the ancient binary techne versus episteme struggle for primacy? And that the artist (art-technician) who adopts the protocol/model is operating against her artist-tech-self-interests by doing so. For an artist to relegate art-craft to a second-order factor in art-making, behind the thought that supposedly prefigures the form to be materialized, is to surrender the impetus of art-action to the thinker. Post-Jackson Pollock, is this model (concept>object) not proven at most optional?

And with the emergence of digital tools, like the networked personal computer equipped with "art" software, the artist's virtual studio provisions an enormous array of expressive options, some of which derive directly from the artist's actual studio, and some of which seem wholly new. At minimum, the New Media amplify or emphasize a set of artist options in which thought as such need not apply. Reproduction has been reduced to a mouse-click. Versions of an "original" are easily replicated and modified with hardly any effort on the user-artist's part. On the programming side of the equation, creativity manifests in the code, the language, the architecture, the interface, the output, the transmission, lossiness, the reception. Computing itself makes claims on art, even as it flattens artist-process like any other process for integration into the digital world. Then, the computer connects the people, "things" and concepts through the communications matrix, so that the art world seems instantaneously interactive with the whole (virtual) world, which contains its own "art world(s)" as such. Some of us have witnessed the emergence of the hybrid actual/virtual art world, artist, art, art studio, etc. Ultimately, the phenomenon from an artist perspective may be characterized as an expansion of options beyond concept>object, but possibly beyond the capacity of any individual artist to exhaust the available options. So, mastery of art-craft seems an obsolete notion, especially since digital art technology apparently is constantly and exponentially improving over time. Time itself seems to bend from its digitization.

TWO[a]: ox-3000-3 (11 October, 2016)

Making It Up As We Go: Some thoughts on the state of play in the domains of 4D art

Introduction

What is fourth dimensional art (4D art)? To answer this question, which is really two questions, we must settle on a definition of the fourth dimension, and a definition of art. The term 4D art is art historical, at this point, and we do have a referential database to which we can refer. We also may reference definitions of 4D that exist in other disciplines besides art, such as mathematics or physics. The point of the exercise is a clarification of terms, for practical and theoretical purposes, with potential benefits for artists and non-artists alike. Both 4D and art are currently multivalent phenomena, at lest insomuch as they do not

4D is the interstitial dimension for the material and immaterial dimensions of what we loosely define as reality.

TWO[b]: ox-3000-3 (12 October, 2016)

Making It Up As We Go: Some thoughts on the state of play in the domains of 4D art

Introduction

4D is the interstitial dimension for the material and immaterial dimensions of what we loosely define as reality.

references

> Mueller: Elements & Principles of 4D Art & Design
> Rebecca V Millsop (MIT doctoral student profile) /What is art?
> Ana Teixeira Pinto:Enantiomorphs in Hyperspace: Living and Dying on the Fourth Dimension
> David Joselit (Mult. refs: Greg Lindquist intvw for BK Rail; After Art; Painting Beside Itself; Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age; etc.)
> #Accelerate Manifesto for an Accelerationist Manifesto/OOO/Speculative Realism [Liam Gillick, Alex Galloway, Laruelle]
> 3D Additive Additivist Manifesto
> Dimensionist Manifesto
> Dalrymple Henderson
> Tony Robbins 4D
> Hegel/Heidegger
> Mark Tribe "Rare Earth"
> Artie Vierkant"Profile"
> [eric leiser, owa, oas, novads, etc]

Deleuze suggests that any worthwhile book must have three things: a polemic against an error, a recovery of something forgotten, and an innovation. - Ending the World as We Know It: Alexander Galloway and Andrew Culp on Dark Deleuze and Beyond

The central question to be asked about art is this one: Is art capable of being a medium of truth? This question is central to the existence and survival of art because if art cannot be a medium of truth then art is only a matter of taste. One has to accept the truth even if one does not like it. But if art is only a matter of taste, then the art spectator becomes more important than the art producer. In this case art can be treated only sociologically or in terms of the art market—it has no independence, no power. Art becomes identical to design.

- Groys

>>
But with regard to works of art, I also want to think about different scales of intervention. I mean, art is more modest than other social or political expressions like, let’s say, the Occupy movement. But while it may be more contained, an artwork has a very long timescale and in theory it could live forever. And so, that needs to be thought through a little more carefully because works of art are not always so good at intervening in the kind of daily fray of politics and economics, which have a short-term time horizon. Do we have to give up our sense of art’s political agency, or do we need, again, as always, to be reconceiving it according to these different scales and opportunities of circulation?
<<

- Joselit

Seeking big answers

PhD student Rebecca Millsop uses philosophy to take on contentious questions about how we define art.

Catherine Curro Caruso | MIT News correspondent
July 20, 2016

seen to have come about by a transformation or conversion of consciousness itself

The experience which consciousness has concerning itself can, by its essential principle, embrace nothing less than the entire system of consciousness, the whole realm of the truth of mind, and in such wise that the moments of truth are set forth in the specific and peculiar character they here possess — i.e. not as abstract pure moments, but as they are for consciousness, or as consciousness itself appears in its relation to them, and in virtue of which they are moments of the whole, are embodiments or modes of consciousness. In pressing forward to its true form of existence, consciousness will come to a point at which it lays aside its semblance of being hampered with what is foreign to it, with what is only for it and exists as an other; it will reach a position where appearance becomes identified with essence, where, in consequence, its exposition coincides with just this very point, this very stage of the science proper of mind. And, finally, when it grasps this its own essence, it will connote the nature of absolute knowledge itself.

- Hegel

Is the fourth dimension a mathematical hypothesis or a sexual phantasm? - Pinto

Tino Sehgal Dances Across the Line Between Art and Life

Sehgal’s latest work will likely go down as one of the 21st century’s most interesting hybrids between contemporary art and dance.
Dorian Batycka

Sehgal is an artist whose work eviscerates any boundary between dance, choreography, human social relations, sculpture, and political economy, in the process forging new ground as one of the world’s most relevant, provocative, and puzzling cultural producers of our time. He has helped breathe new life into contemporary art by deascensioning it away from material-object-oriented culture, creating famously objectless works — what curator Jens Hoffmann famously called a “museum of dance.” His tailor-made projects investigate how myriad social relations can form the substance of an artwork beyond any static or strictly material essence. It’s a type of socially engaged practice that I have come to really appreciate in recent years, but one that Sehgal did not invent. Since the 1950s, well-known groups such as Fluxus and the Situationists, as well as more underground collectives like “Museum,” began to change how artworks could be seen as per the formatively gestural. An interesting and little-known example is the work of Raivo Puusemp, whose radical experiments with group dynamics and sociopolitical processes as a conceptual artist in 1970s eventually led him to become mayor of Rosendale, NY, whereby a lifelong project saw art fully dissolve into politics so as to become indefinable from one another. Sehgal, however, is much more subtle. He is neither strictly an artist, dancer, choreographer, or theatre-maker, and his work is increasingly difficult for curators and critics to define. This is really what I like most about his work. It’s what curator Mouna Mekouar describes as Sehgal’s ability to encompass numerous “hybrid” characteristics.

And you can forget about reality now being something rational, because there’s nothing rational to measure it against. It’s basically operational—readymade reality, if you will... So now that we’re in this space where nothing is real, simulation begins by murdering the shit out of anything that references the real world. And what’s worse, all we’re left with is a system of signs which are even more gooey than meaning itself. A sign that represents a concept now represents everything associated with that concept. - Baudrillard, "Precession of Simulacra" trans. English-American (Continent.]

THREE: ox-3000-4-1 (14 October, 2016)

Making It Up As [We] Go: Some thoughts on the state of play in the domains of 4D + art
By Paul McLean

Introduction

The following essay is not intended to be a conclusive survey of developments in contemporary art. Neither is this essay intended to comprehensively map a field of fourth dimensional-plus (4D+) phenomena. Nor is this essay meant to provide the reader an inclusive overview on instances in which art, as a sui generis domain, is impacted by 4D+ phenomena. The subject of 4D+/art at this point is already too massive to be properly addressed in any essay 3000 words or less. Rather, this essay is intended to serve, at minimum, as a good point of origin for further analysis and discourse on 4D+ in general and 4D+ in art today. The cited instances contained herein, of 4D+ practices and theory, operate as a curated set, selected for the purpose of demonstrating 4D+ art to be a viable, even vital, focus for artists, aestheticians and others with interests that require some comprehension of the pervasive perceptual reformation affecting the art enterprise, which arise at intersections of 4D+ and art, as such. Because this particular development (the systemic emergence of 4D+ in art) connects to broader trends in all sectors of society, via 4D and art, the essay references some notable 4D+ phenomena outside the "art world," which in one way or another observably intertwine with art: in artistic practice and art-centric theory; at the macro-levels of the art world, e.g., in art institutions, markets, academies, criticism, funding; 4D technology, applications and theory for math and science, medicine, engineering, management, economics, and so on. Finally this essay is meant to show that the convergence of art and 4D+ is not so much reducible to any single event, but is itself a trackable, logical, organic phenomenon, with both perceptual and practical aspects, which has occurred over time, and will continue to do so.

In Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design, author Ellen Mueller states, "The three dimensions - height, width, and depth - are augmented in 4D design by time. It is the fourth dimension. Although we all have a basic understanding of time, there are many different definitions of this term depending on the field from which one approaches it. For our purposes, we will say that *time* is the progression of events and existence from the past, through the present, and into the future. One could even simply say that time refers to change." [1] In matters pertaining to "a" or "the" 4th dimension, simplicity is only intentionally simple, bracketed for practical purposes, whether we are linking 4D to time, or anything else. What 4D is often seems to depend upon with whom one is trying to discuss 4D. This is because "4D" is a general term that encompasses many particular instances. Here we are hoping to get at what that general term "4D" means. "4D" as a formal term, if we can locate the discussion in an area that most people relate to - vision - is comprehensive of both what is visible (sensible, simple, as with a surface or skin), and also what is invisible but still extant, as in all that comprises the visible, plus the stuff of the universe that currently is operative, or just *is*, beyond our optical sense-comprehension. Certainly we can and will here expand the conception, the idea, the definition of 4D to more immaterial/material binaries, and more complex configurations for contemplation, but it makes sense to make our point of origin, viz art, directly linked to *seeing.* Art traditionally is a locus for discourse on the visionary-thing, to put it glibly, for obvious reasons. That 4D spans a spectrum of virtual-actual relations, within which vision constitutes a small but important part, does not prohibit us from starting here. Seeing and believing can both be discussed in a 4D context, for example, and that particular discussion, additively (seeing-believing/something) assumes a broader discourse with many interesting facets, touching on work in many disciplines. One of those is art, which triangulates all elements of that complex discourse to generate a focal (4D) discourse that is vital to the art enterprise.

In Mueller's summary definition of 4D, and in the contextual statements supporting her definition - which is probably the most common one - compression is key, and that is the initial problem. 4D is a BIG topic, and recursion is a tool that must be handled with care, when one is speaking of, and working in, 4D(+). A reductive description of 4D+ produces lossy effects, to make a nod to Claude Shannon on the point of transmission. To define 4D as time/change fails to identify 4D on its own terms, instead assigning "4D" to a phenomenon (time) that, itself, has 4D characteristics. Time is also a massive subject, itself, as is "change," and time and change are hardly complete equivalents. Change also has 4D characteristics. In short, 4D resists reduction in general. Furthermore, upon close scrutiny, the idea that 4D is "simply" time or change, or any other one "thing," is not sufficient for the purposes of definition, and more precisely, not methodologically correct. 4D is its own thing. 4D applies to many things, if not all things, and not necessarily in the same way for any and/or all of those other, but relative, "things." To form a fundamental concept of 4D requires cognition of the nature of 4D relativity (to all "things," including, for example time). Or to be more specific: all "things" with correlating material/immateriality. Time, as we think on it, comes with a set of attachments, such as, "timelessness," clock-time, timelines, etc. "Time," is both "as such," in 4D, and the whole of all the "stuff" we perceive and/or "make" it to be, and *that* is "4D Time." Any "thing" with "material" (as such) and immaterial (attached, perceptual, productive) properties can be construed as a 4D phenomenon, and addressed as such in 4D systems. This applies to art, change, "us," and many other "things."

Let's apply this 4D formula to Mueller's (and many others') definition of a or the 4th dimension (as time/change). Mueller starts with a common usage of the "dimensional," reducing it to an arbitrary, static-triadic framework (Height/Width/Depth) that links to our "creative" systems of theoretical/utilitarian points, lines and "stuff" (space/volume/mass, etc), thereby situating 4D in the medium of abstract-objects, and by extension numbers, and, extending further, into "real objects" (e.g., for building, as in formal architecture and design, plus "art" - or at least some kinds of arts). "Dimension" is a "thing" that, like time and change, is in itself receptive to 4D processing. Essentially, Mueller is orienting the discussion of 4D in a particular formal language of mathematics and measurement, with pursuant applications (e.g., geometry). Mueller's definition of what constitutes dimensionality and "the thing" and its components most folks would agree with, if they received a basic Western education. Her recitation of dimensional fundamentals (HWD) suggests something like "hard facts," something tangible, settled, repeatable, a base-setting for what we think of as a bitform of civilized and civilizing knowledge, core to our thinking about real-abstract things. Mueller is repeating the essentials of how the world is "put together." By pivoting to time, Mueller (and most everyone), cuts short what is potentially a very important line of inquiry, one that might ask questions such as, "What is 4D height/weight/depth?" "What is a 4D line?" "What is a point in a 4D system?" "What is 4D architecture?" And so forth. If one's "safe" answer to the 4D question is a simple redirection to (something-to-do-with) time, one is deciding not to consider whether "the objective" stuff we associate with 1-3D might evolve seamlessly into 4D stuff in the fundamental models. The facile 4D-time pivot held by Mueller - and many others - has consequences for art, as we shall see. To illustrate why the point matters, let us entertain a potentially troubling question: What if, looking at HWD through a 4D lens, the fundamental components of our diagrammatic image of the world, which stipulate a variety of works practicable in the world, prove insufficient to explain what we recognize to be happening in the informatic "world(s)" of our experience, i.e., our "world view," or our knowing our "place" in the "cosmos?" Put another way, now that we have a BIGGER picture of our universe (thanks Hubble Telescope), are we really going to cling to our "old" geometry of/for figures/figuring? 4D provisions the means by which we can begin to re-assess our concepts for the poly-figural in (all-directional) space. 4D art can be of great service to that end, in that project, which is also true of 4D science, 4D math, 4D literature and philosophy, and so on. It is key, however, that we correctly platform the 4D project in its inception phase, which entails the formation of a practicum, a logic, and organization. What if one of the qualities of 4D is "self"-organization? What if 4D is the *free-form* dimension? That would require complexity, convolution, confusion, polysemia, plus more. After all, "freedom" is an immaterial property. "Form" is indicative of a material presence, even when applied to abstract "things." A "free" shape would have to be free to be any shape, inclusive of its present one, or even free from "shape" altogether, right? 4D art (plus science, math, etc.) can help us to start answering such BIG questions. As long as we have the time, and are willing to change our pat answers for "everything."

What ought to be clear at this point, is that we are proposing a radically open, and *opening* conception for 4D, for which the definition of 4D as time/change is insufficient. In fact, or in essence, we are suggesting that "definition" as such is, if not the opposite of a correct way to approach 4D conceptually, then it at least unnecessarily limiting evaluation of the capacity of 4D to be/apply itself to many "things," including art. One characteristic of 4D is changeability, relative to many "things," if not "everything," material and/or immaterial, an open/-ing (BIG) conception for 4D, which is not necessarily reducible to "change." It is the possible in 4D that makes the impossible, possible. In 4D change can be programmatic, progressive, regressive (all-directional), looping, spiraling, algorithmic, and so forth. 4D "change" is only a fixed/fixable entity, by (our) design. We certainly can observe change that occurs external to our (human) faculties for inducing, controlling, categorizing (etc.) change, for instance, in what we call "natural" change. Change as such does not exactly conform with any human "order" or ordering process, direct, derivative or otherwise. Mueller packs multi-disciplinary notions of 4D into a selective recursion that shortchanges "art" - a term which in the singular not long ago referred primarily to painting and sculpture. Do we actually need to abandon painting/sculpture in a 4D conception of/for art? Mueller seems to think so, perhaps in the interests or as a matter of expediency, in effect dis-integrating painting and sculpture from the working definition of 4D art. If we consider and apply Mueller's own conception of 4D (time/change) art, we notice that time is at play in, if not centrally important to, painting and sculpture, in many of their phenomenal aspects. Painting and sculpture are both roughly speaking time-based phenomena, *and* somewhat stable - if not forever-static - objects, and these characteristics are not necessarily mutually or meaningfully exclusive in a 4D formal schematic derivative of 1-/2-/3D. As a timely reference, we can look to the Altarpiece of Ghent, inclusive of its recent restoration project(s), for a relevant case study. "The Adoration of the Lamb," or "Het Lam Gods" in a 4D art analysis-production, consists not only of the object itself (over time), but all the contingent and congruent stories, media, context/content, too, and also the appearance of iterations of the object (and the attachments) in linked (subsequent) artwork, which comprise an additive set inclusive of the original thing (the Ghent Altarpiece) and all its "relations," material and immaterial. The 4th dimension is "where" all this "stuff" can "mash-up," be reassembled, "inspire" new works/narratives, be re-examined, and so on. In that sense, 4D is a medium for "everything" art, the dimension for infinite re-configuration *and* specific objects, which are the result of 4D processes. The main features or dynamics of 4D are *convolution* (which echoes the "shape" of the human brain) and confusion (literally, with-fusion). Complication is a practical asset, verging into additive (N + 1) processes. Polysemia is not a liability in 4D.

∞

Talking about 4D is a complex exercise, because language has its own 4D issues, which a book like David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest demonstrates dramatically. As soon as we add global perspective, scalable technical granularity, awareness of rotational and directional movement, multiplicity of trajectories and possible outcomes, the fact of shape beyond geometry, pattern recognition in chaotic environments, etc., we enter 4D "space" and linear text, written/spoken/sung/thought, stops being sufficient unto itself as a mode of accurate, orderly, "literal," representation. Definitional kernels of 4D[-] text/language reduce now to "tweets," an entertainment format, more and/or less. Definitions aren't the conceptual building blocks they were in 4D- modalities not long ago. 4D language relies on mult-modal imaging, "flipping the script" on 2000+ years of language-over-all hegemony. Whenever Time is involved in narrative, meta-narrative tendencies arise, and the dimensional narrative will tend toward confusion, convolution and complexity, whether the narrative is art-centric, literary, performative, scientific, socially oriented, biometric, (and/)or philosophical, etc. In 4D this is no problem, and thus we rediscover the potency of the unconditioned, unpatterned utterance as "music."

Time is not a settled matter in/for any discipline. The same is now true for the definition of art, which is dimensional, linked to time, as in "contemporary art." It seems that "basic understanding" is not what it used to be. "Things" have changed, or rather, people's perception of things has changed, and that change is basically dimensional. At any rate, time does not matter-of-factly equal an object-oriented 4th dimension, and is not a conclusive, or simple, referent for "change." Change can occur in reverse, as a function of memory, for instance. The notion of repurposing time for a project, which is what Mueller proposes, is problematic, itself. The status quo for art has only partially to do with language, and more to do with 4D. And in 4D no one tells art what to do or be: that just doesn't cut it anymore (a reference to the great Carl Sagan apple-based demo/intro to 4D); a 4D perceptual platform insists that art be/define itself in each instance, with or without accompanying documentation and/or descriptive narrative. In short, the transition to 4D systems simultaneously and continuously reboots "the thing," does not erase previous iterations, and *only* provisions an array of possible futures in the medium of choice. None of which implies obsolescence of painting and sculpture in any 4D mode of art. Actually, in 4D space, Mondrian's lines go on forever (really!), whether we can see them doing so, or not. Noland's concentricities and line/color stacks can be understood as scalable, multivalent forms, and vector-notations with implications for both the imaginary infinite and finite image. In translation, these artworks (Mondrian's and Noland's, and many others') pertain to a host of other virtual and actual applications in many disciplines. Their relativity extends to production and pre-/post-production, which is to say, the conceptual, the immaterial. The interstices of these two fields (virtual and actual) expresses itself in the sketch, the drawing, an element of (what we think of to be) design. If we are searching for convergences, the drawing is where art and language meet (as recursive symbol for worldly things, including us, in the cosmos): in the "alphabet;" and beyond that set of signs we find a technical progression for each and all cohesively, to calligraphy, typesetting, and eventually, the "letters" of today, in their electrified, digitized and formatted (as in stock abbreviations) iterations. 4D encompasses the rendering of the real-and-imagined, derivative/projecting sign in practical form. That said, drawing has its own 4D issues, but let's leave it at that, for the moment. Suffice to say that language is not art is not drawing in 4D, but they all are 4D together, which extends to all that they do autonomously and collaboratively, which is a lot. The phenomenon is dynamic, energetic, forceful, and command-resistant.

Before proceeding, we should acknowledge the significance of Mueller's text for 4D Art pedagogy. Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design stands as an important contribution to the field and offers excellent practical instruction, useful references, and a strong point of origin for creative students seeking a foundation for multidisciplinary, multimedia projects. The book generally frames much of the applicable technical architecture in language that is straightforward and accessible, and practicable.

That said, Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design has shortcomings that preclude its utility as a conclusive 4D+ art primer. These problems are nonetheless correctable, and can be righted without diminishing the value of the particular 4D practices Mueller emphasizes in the text. Some of the problems have to do with exclusion, others are problems of scope, some are problems of definition. We can begin with a problem of specificity, pertaining to definition of 4D art. The book consistently addresses its purpose, theory and findings to the designated user set "4D artists [and./or] designers." This phrase-construction promotes a false equivalence between those two disciplines, with regards 4D+ practice and theory. Mueller writes in the Introduction:

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Four-dimensional art and design refers to those practices that involve time, the fourth dimension, in some way. For the purposes of this book, we will define art as those practices whose products and experiences are to be appreciated mainly for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content, while design will be defined as practices that focus on users and work within constraints established by a client. Having noted this differentiation, it is important to immediately acknowledge the border between art and design is nebulous and overlaps a great deal in certain areas. Examples of 4D practices include motion graphics, film/video, performance art, social practice, sound art, installation, Internet art, game design, animation, and so on.
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After speculatively, exclusively - and incorrectly - attributing the Bauhaus school of art and design as historical ground zero for integrative 4D+ studies, theory and practice, Mueller continues:

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Fast-forward to the present day, and many of the most popular art and design practices - whether online videos, animated GIFs, the opening titles of a movie, flash mobs, video games, websites, and so on - embrace the use of time. The elements and principles of 4D art and design are central to our ability to create and critique contemporary art and design.[2]
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One wonders what John Ruskin might have said about the art/design elements and principles of the "flash mob." He certainly was no fan of mobs in general, and it is doubtful he would consider any valid equivalence in art-production and mob-actions. That was then & this is now. Has anything really changed?

The promotion of a fungible answer to the questions "What is art?" and "Who is an artist?" and "What is art for?" is not an unusual activity among a broad constituency of advocates for a radically inclusive de- or re-definition of art, or for a strict and exclusive one, one which would prefer to leave painting and sculpture out of the picture entirely. For amplification, see Harold Rosenberg's collection of essays on the subject.[3] Arguing for a polysemic definition of "art," which includes re-contextualizing art fundamentally as a type of reproducible expressive, politicized language-function - a project consequentially undertaken by Benjamin[4] and sustained currently, with allowances for evolutionary technology (e.g., New and Social Media, Internet of Things, etc.), by art-critical descendants such as Boris Groys - is an exercise that is at least a century old. The roots for excommunication for art, however, can be traced to Plato's Republic, predating the Inquisition by a millennium+. Much is at stake, in this speculative discussion on art/artist definition and utility, for reasons that would fill a long list. To identify two: the identity, status and livelihoods of millions of people depend on a shared understanding, a social agreement on what art is, who an artist is, and what art is for, or does. Gregory Sholette in Dark Matter couches the stakes in terms of artists' collective macro-economic, political and social agency:

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...(A)rtists operate within a continuous state of *oversupply equilibrium*. And yet despite this inherent precariousness and the built-in "income penalty" the market charges for becoming an artist, the number of people claiming that title is on the rise. In the US the population of artists doubled between 1970 and 1990, roughly the same time frame in which deregulation and privatization delivered us the entrepreneurial risk society.
According the US Census, nearly 2 million Americans listed "artist" as their primary employment. Another 300,000 claimed it was their second job. This makes the "job" of being an "artist" one of the largest single professions in the nation, just slightly smaller than those employed in the active-duty military. The actual number of "professionally trained" artists in the United States, or in the world for that matter, is difficult to quantify. Perhaps some idea of this mass can be gleaned from the fact that over 150 specialized "art schools" are dedicated solely to turning out artists in the US, and that most other colleges and universities now offer a bachelor or graduate level degree in fine art. Likewise, although visual artists are only one portion of creative industry workers typically surveyed by the EU, its cultural sector reportedly employed at least 5.8 million such people in 2004, which is more than the total working population of Greece and Ireland put together.
At the same time, although the overall number of artists in England has kept pace with other types of labor, employment in the arts has allegedly increased by some 150,000 jobs between 1993 and 2003. An estimated total revenue of between ₤23 and ₤29 billion was reportedly generated by the cultural sector in London alone, making art second only to the city's business sector, according to the Arts Council England in 2004.[6]
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Sholette goes on to reference the burgeoning artist populations and activities in Germany and Canada, eventually wondering, "If...art is the precarious profession par excellence, why then does it appear to be thriving in an environment of deregulation, privatization, and risk? Bluntly put, might there be a secret bond between post-Fordist enterprise culture and contemporary art?" The neo-liberal counterbalance for Sholette's terminology (post-Fordist enterprise culture and contemporary art) can be found in Richard Florida's conception the "creative class," which has emerged as its own hydra-like cultural-industrial enterprise, consisting of many advocates, such as Sir Kenneth Robinson, whose operations and consultancies, books and lectures affect strategic development across the main societal sectors (business, government, social/educational/religious/etc.). We have come a long way from Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi's Flow. Clearly, the dimensional expansion of "art" over the past several decades, and the explosive growth in the "artist" population worldwide are major stories that seem not to have significant traction overall in the general media discourse. Even less apparent is any macro-level mediatic evaluation of the concurrent diffusion of meaning for the definitions of "art" and "artist," which one might think would follow, given the exigency of the "art/artist" macro-phenomena. Instead, one finds a blossoming academic field devoted to analysis of the arts and culture as an economic proposition,[7] and also an increasingly obtuse, in some aspects robust, cross-media (encompassing traditional and new media), multi-disciplinary discourse justifying and rationalizing the dissolute state of art/artist, especially as represented and managed in the top-tier international markets, with implications for all art systems, down to the local (micro-) levels. This discourse is driven by a range of players, such as: a diminishing faction of high-profile/-readership professional in-print art critics; a fractional but influential cohort of academic "experts," such as art historians, mostly located in proximity to major art markets, where they also serve as consultants and sometime-critics; cultural commentators, who originate from a great variety of professional backgrounds and whose critical interests are likewise greatly various; hyphenated art writers who have multiple part-time art-professional occupations and -avocations, e.g., artist-curator-teacher-activist-parent, etc., whose art-centric writing may appear on blogs, in print, in artist catalogs and support materials, and so on; and, as a function of the Internet, a surging population of "outsiders," a few of whom may be celebrities in other fields. For all, the practical meaning - or lack of definition - for the the terms "art" and "artist" is important. A cursory review of art-industrial data shows that the art market annually generates tens of billions in sales worldwide, which suggests the value of what art is or is not ought indeed be a poignant definitional matter, if only for the markets that sell "it." In large measure the diverse practices Mueller identifies as 4D in Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design are illustrated with samples from the top-tier art market. Those 4D practices identified by Mueller that are not market-friendly usually conform to the contemporary art discourse described above, by which they are to a great extent validated, if not funded. Their funding usually comes from a market-parallel funding scheme, a hybrid of patrons, state agencies, foundations, non-profits and so on. The remainder derive from the design world, or the commercial arts, which span a variety of creative media, including the big-ticket fashion, "luxury," film, recording, digital game and app industries, even the military. "Clients" pay for these. Both the design and art worlds, if we consider their industrial architectures as such, over the past few decades have evidenced tremendous change, even radical reformation. Macro-economic trends in both industries (commercial and fine arts) synch with global trends. Key characteristics of these trends are consolidation (management, exchanges), privatization (especially for arts), top-down determination (of expenditures, and consequently "success"), increased virtuality (networks, representation), massive circuitry (expensive, complex, opaque, with highly controlled processes - as in art fairs), and enforced obsolescence models, to name a few. The "winners" in both fields (and many others) are proportionally reduced, and the paths to winning are diminishing. And yet, as Sholette points out, the supply of artists and designers burgeons. Could this phenomenon be a consequence of obfuscation and accession, with respect to the meaning and/or definitions of "art" and "artist?"

Ostensibly, Mueller's text is intended to serve both students of art and design. In "The Truth of Art" Boris Groys writes:

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The central question to be asked about art is this one: Is art capable of being a medium of truth? This question is central to the existence and survival of art because if art cannot be a medium of truth then art is only a matter of taste. One has to accept the truth even if one does not like it. But if art is only a matter of taste, then the art spectator becomes more important than the art producer. In this case art can be treated only sociologically or in terms of the art market—it has no independence, no power. Art becomes identical to design.
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One need not concur with this and any of the other provisions Groys assigns art in order to recognize that "art and design" and "artists and designers" are not necessarily linked in 4D by definition. To precipitate a divergence of the two focal disciplines Mueller addresses in Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design, we may however delve into other historical references that illustrate the autonomy of art as a 4D medium. For this purpose we might recall a time in the not-so-distant past when art was reducible technically to painting and sculpture, and even suggest, for the sake of argument, that it is still so, whatever anyone, Groys included, might otherwise assert. After all, painting and sculpture predate philosophical "truth" by tens of thousands of years, a fact testified to in the caves of Lascaux and in the figurine known as the "Woman of Willendorf," and thousands of other examples from around the globe. While it is valid to point out that the massive aggregate of prehistorical "art" is also pre-"art," and -artists (-philosophers, -aesthetics, etc.), as such, what such examples as the surviving, ancient cave paintings, petroglyphs, pictographs and 3D artifacts demonstrate is man's natural or inherent expressive tendencies to paint and sculpt, a priori the nominal and numerical systematic - as far as anyone living knows. People painted before they signed names to what they painted, which means people painted absent associated word-self identification. They did not, so far as anyone can attest with certainty, name any of their creations. Nor did they, our ancestors, formally organize (as in categories) their creations, in the way we do (as in genre, e.g., still life). Perhaps they did define their creations, but not in the way we think of. As a speculative association, we might refer to Australian Aboriginal "dreamtime" paintings, some of which are active, still maintained as a tribal function, if we care to scratch the surface of the dimensional relation between our "contemporary art" and the painting and dimensionally expressive poly-crafts of our tribal "other."

Before redirecting the platform for 4D proposed by Mueller to a dimensional art history that decidedly includes painting and sculpture (and drawing, which is where art and design actually coincide, along with most production-based endeavors), let us consider an alternate definition of 4D. The fourth dimension is the interstitial zone that connects the material and immaterial aspects of the universe we inhabit. The fourth dimension is "where:"

> the visible and invisible "meet"
> sense-derived data and our reaction to that data (inclusive of interpretation, and then, as second-order response, repulsion, attraction, etc.) converge
> the physical and metaphysical commingle, on an "equal footing"
> the finite and infinite transition
> and so on

As a conjecture, this model for 4D better accommodates the many applications that are currently in play in the 4D domain, not just in art, but across a spectrum of disciplines and activities, inclusive of both "old" and "new" technologies, and emergent and networked technological hybrids. In this framework, Heidegger's assertion in Time and Being, "True time is four-dimensional,"[8] situated in a medium of giving, can be addressed with more clarity, even if it flips Mueller's script for "time" and 4D, and the general notions of both. A radical reevaluation of time is thus, in and through 4D practice and theory, enabled. Time can, for instance, in 4D "space" and objects, with the help of projection and other instrumentation, be re-imagined outside of man-made constraints of all kinds (while the "re-imagining" production itself remains operative entirely within the architecture of human interaction). Or, in another example, time can, as a kind of object-oriented thought game or speculation, be de-linked from specific nominal/numerical systems that connect directly to agreeable targets: wrong-headed artificial, manmade constructs (e.g., command-control, property, extraction/exploitation, etc.), which be construed as existential threats to our collective survival.

What such a 4D platform offers the artist is essential relevance, provisioning an answer to the question, "What is art for?" so not to deny an artist being for any- or nothing else, in addition to art's "for-". In conjunction with other 4D reformations, the "new" old/new platform could enable - who knows? - interstellar travel, eradication or amelioration of poverty and war, and so on. Art in its artist-activist-visionary (4D) mode, may be potentiated by us to help save the world, if only from ourselves. Or that struggle/mission/task could be left to the artist as an avocational pursuit. It should come as no surprise that Buckminster Fuller explored 4D substantively, and even sketched a 4D color palette, for use, one would assume, by 4D artists... and designers. In Fuller's redemptive prescription for solving big problems, 4D conceptualization is a valuable tool. And can anyone objectively deny Fuller's multivalent capacity? Or the continued value of his visionary practicum, which is applied on a cyclic basis in the Challenge bearing Fuller's name?

Now, a skeptic might deny such claims (4D art/artist as world rescuer, etc.) outright, as cliched, pie-in-the-sky hyperbole or worse. A sobering response to that naysayer might entail one's pointing out that a variety of 4D processes, applications, theory and technologies already are utilized to enable massive surveillance projects, weapons systems, communications and analysis tools for the financial sector, and so on. 4D is even evident in construction and operations/usage available as "features" in the average late-model minivan, which comes equipped with GPS, advanced com-connectivity, remote-to-local entertainment nodes with feedback options, on-board computing, diagnostics and so on, all functioning while the vehicle is transporting passengers from point A-B, and (for now) still directed by a human driver/conductor. As Mueller's text indicates, artists are on an individual and collective basis potentially available as a counterbalance to the destructive inclinations of civilization, as such, and 4D art can be applied to that end, too. It is already happening. One might recall that Occupy Wall Street was at one point critically discussed in terms of performance art, and many significant "happenings" and dimensional "art" projects arose or were integrated into Occupy actions. As a cautionary note, we can refer to the US Presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who also has been described in terms of performance art, and whose candidacy (like Bernie Sanders') inspired a surge of artist participation in the political process. 4D art need not, however, assign itself to a limited role in any sector of society. Quite the contrary, as the lavishly patronized MIT Media Lab demonstrates, art and science, for instance are not mutually exclusive formations, a concept that tracks back to Leonardo da Vinci. The convocational mode of 4D practices invites collaboration among disciplines where applicable. As MIT-ML PR points out, projects produced or "born" via Media Lab were well represented in the most recent Venice Biennale. And with respect to da Vinci, the "story" of the creation of Vitruvian Man is definitely a case study in 4D production, starting with a sketch, involving appropriation, modification, combinative practices and applications, and eventually the fabrication of a "simple" working (robotics) model, or actualization/presentation of findings. In short, 4D art is not "new," unless we make it so in an imaginary narrative. Then, if one accepts this proposition, the driving question becomes, "What are we (4D artists) doing, now - and why?" David Joselit puts it this way:

4D art reveals itself to having to having many "moving parts," or facets, extending to the artist, to art and social networks, institutions, projects and so on. Today, the "viewer" of art will be hard-put to "assemble" those parts into anything like a whole "art world," as Joselit points out elsewhere in the interview cited above. He recommends a collaborative approach to address the scale of the mass of art. Now that we are confronting the "why" of (4D) art, we can see how analytic tactics - historically the academic purview of science and philosophy in their rigorous component studies (starting with logic) - complement the memetic impulse for art and artist [("what is this a mirror of/for" and "who/what am I to this", and the production impetus for art and artist (not just "why" but also "why this" art)]. For 4D art, the ongoing interrogation of art's reason(-ing) sustains the enterprise itself, critically; meaning, at certain vital points (e.g., in production), without consuming the enterprise in its entirety. Reason interjected at critical junctures in production (i.e., problem solving) outperforms critical reasoning positioned as art's immaterial "other" in opposition to actualization of the object art. Given art's object basis, and the production component of art's process - without which art is not art but concept, idea and an inducted (elemental or instrumental) form of philosophy, ideology, thinking or another "virtual" discipline - the (4D) art and artist is compelled in order to exhibit something to reconcile the immaterial and material for use, to create, as Joselit frames it, "opportunities or circulation," or as Seth Price outlined it, "dispersion." Dispersion of "pure" virtual production is, as Joseph Nechvatal's work implies, an immersion into noise, a phenomenon not of aura but of situational ambiance. Or the "artist" can display an empty architecture, a la Abramovich, proposing nothing more than conceptual "performance" as art. This is not 4D+, but the wholesale 4D- negation of it, a false signature of artistic will infusing communal space with nihilism as a pervasive expression of singularity, an echoing neo-colonialistic praxis in the art-industrial complex. This is art as syllogistic event:

Maria is an artist.

The Serpentine is an art gallery.

Whatever Maria does there is art.

[Note the manner in which (artificial) time is co-opted to legitimize/endorse the project.]

The 4D art reconciliation project {LIFE>[immaterial (interstitial "art") material]<ART} in the interstices between actual and virtual "art" is a synthetic "site" occurring in a circular/concentric formation that is not cybernetic, by virtue of its object output, the sign of art-life. In 4D art location itself becomes an opportunity for processing, which to put it another way involves protocol, or the reliance on ordering guidelines, which, in turn(-ing) implies another time-based layer in the practicum. The form of 4D art adopts the movement of spheres (all-directional) while anchoring to the real simple, the square, the cube, and then the hypercube, to represent time, motion, space, place, etc., but also - via the superstructure of the form - as meta-sharing, as gift exchange in the social domain, as public phenomenon, the exposition - to communicate the art-life content we add through experience, reflection, being, etc. The art object is still integral in the format of 4D, unlike the case described above.

Mueller's text contains a plethora of technical practices, which require protocols, procedures, ordering processes. Those of painting and traditional sculpture methods are established and well documented. In 4D we have the choice to add synthetic guidelines from a massive database of sources - to make the integration(s) of diverse multidisciplinary practice teachable, comparable, and conventionally meritorious, rather than meretricious. In 4D, which is as Heidegger framed it/Time, in the language of the gift: art need not extract/exploit to succeed; nor does art need to extract/exploit from other disciplines to add value to the project. As a measure of conceptual quality/-ative control, the artist may invent his and her own schema, a development that owes much to Jackson Pollock. Steve Roden, who routinely generates rule-sets for series of paintings and other works, and who is referenced in Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design, is a fine example, and another also cited in Mueller's text is Matthew Barney. But unlike Pollack, these "artists" interject foamy layers of dumb irony (Roden) and luxury, athletics (displacing aesthetics) and abjection (Barney) into their art "work." MIT philosophy student and painter Rebecca V. Millsop represents a formal-synthetic case worth noting for its coherent rationale: the befuddled art student who turns to logic/philosophy and then science to generate an adapted, plausible and workable definition for art; with which Millsop has returned to the studio to put into actual practice (making paintings).[10] In essence what can be inferred by these cases - of which there are as many to draw from as there are artists - is the viability of the adoption of "measures" in the progressive practice of art-making that expresses itself in what we proposed above as a 4th dimension for art. By measures, we not only mean the material sort Mueller recognizes in her initial definition of 4D, but also measures one can take to achieve an ends (product, object, art), which is to say, "repeatable procedures with a specific objective," a loose translation of the scientific method that translates to artistic method, a method that incidentally, eschews ideology for an ideal methodology that embraces mistakes, errors, and misperception/-interpretaton as procedural routine occurrences to be collaboratively minimized. For a referent tutorial in this vein, a sort of productive "thing" factorial embodied in serial-progressive thought we can look - back, again - to Hegel.

Through the lens of 4D, a unique text like the introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit can be re-animated, afforded a renewed synthetic purpose: to answer the "why" question in practical terms that "work" for both art and life. Thus, we find a thorough (pre-)response to, for instance, Groys' superimposition of "Truth" on art, as a weaponized critical exercise, as well as other suspect critical suppositions, mapped as derivative or related super- or supra-authorial concerns, in Groys' "Truth of Art." And we find additional clues for the formulation of a 4D art that is compatible with both philosophy and science, and other ordering options. The technical is situated on the borders, or as a consequence of, the negotiation of art and science co-methodology. In his introduction to Phenomenology Hegel characterizes the method as "The Science of the Experience of Consciousness," which, as a proposition, is transferable operationally to/for 4D art-life. Especially if artists allow ourselves the freedom to "curate" methodology from artwork to artwork, project to project, etc., and/or within an artwork or project, as long as the synthesizing method is communicable, functional, logical, or whatever (in shorthand, "scientific"). Hegel posits "a new object" thereby deriving, "seen to have come about by a transformation or conversion of consciousness itself," and the promise of a profound project within which object and consciousness "meet" to great effect.

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The experience which consciousness has concerning itself can, by its essential principle, embrace nothing less than the entire system of consciousness, the whole realm of the truth of mind, and in such wise that the moments of truth are set forth in the specific and peculiar character they here possess — i.e. not as abstract pure moments, but as they are for consciousness, or as consciousness itself appears in its relation to them, and in virtue of which they are moments of the whole, are embodiments or modes of consciousness. In pressing forward to its true form of existence, consciousness will come to a point at which it lays aside its semblance of being hampered with what is foreign to it, with what is only for it and exists as an other; it will reach a position where appearance becomes identified with essence, where, in consequence, its exposition coincides with just this very point, this very stage of the science proper of mind. And, finally, when it grasps this its own essence, it will connote the nature of absolute knowledge itself.
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Hegel provides a rich 4D pretext, which can by extension be logically linked to a method of "verifying" in reverse, the opposite of recursion. Reorienting contemporary art to pre-existing dimensionalproduction models in 4D dispenses with arguments that attack inter-generational/-cultural connectivity for anti-/non-art purposes (i.e., political agitation, psy ops, etc). This is vital for art's sustainability in the 4D age. A 4D artist can therefore gain much practical information by studying Wagner's historical multi-disciplinary enterprise, the Ring Cycle. The 4D approach does not subvert the linkages of site-/architecture-specific art/text/object/project/production/exhibition + performance. It re-opens the discourse on a combinative, convergent field of arts, merging things with the idea-thing. It is no coincidence that the latest tech surge pushes an Internet of Things, a prototypical 4D projection. 4D methodological form encourages re-evaluation of precursory instances of 4D, which, taken in part and whole, comprise a progressive, unifying narrative for human expression over time, inclusive of what is made now, and what is possible to make in the future. The 4D narrative is a sort of true fiction, close to science fiction, which with time becomes science fact. The methodological 4D as modality is compatible with object-based art, which itself parallels time-based narrative. The narrative may take sequential form, which infers linear communion of cultural phenomena across time and space, but also in objects, theory, texts, performance, etc. To illustrate, one might ask, is the Ring Cycle possible without the Greek Dionysian festivals, and would either production resonate in the absence of foundational and historical "myths (e.g., Wotan, Valkyries, et al., Electra)," and can we not point to a thousand derivative forms of "cultural production" arising subsequently from these comprehensive, synthetic phenomena (the Ring Cycle at Bayreuth, Dionysian festivals)? From Jungian psycho-analytic theory to Record Companies (Elektra), from globe-trotting Ring fans to Burning Man, from movies to performance art, the echoes of these cultural phenomena, two of many, appear and fade but hover as presences, Zeitgeist, for each generation of artists and thinkers to re-animate. 4D, as such, bolsters a practical definition of consciousness evidencing invisible linkages among immaterial phenomena, which can however (by the artist-producer) be manifested, be made visible, be narratively linked, thought of together, and so on. In a way 4D presumes intuition and inspiration but leaves it to the artist to translate those notional sensations into the formal exercise "show and tell," which involves the object as anchor for the presentation of the imaginary in "real life."

Actually, this is already happening in art writing, when the topic is not only various incidences of dimensional practice, but the theoretical threads (4D+) underpinning them. In many cases, such topical writing requires the revelation of the author's predispositions - even biases or prejudices (for instance, against the art object and its associative histories), in order to accurately relate, project or reflect the subject-scenarios, so that in the writing's second order state, the subjective interest in the scenario is reflexively revealed to the the writer and/or her reader. Consider a recent rumination on 4D in e-flux Journal, in which Ana Teixeira Pinto wonders, after selectively creating a curiously oriented "history" for 4D (to Lacan and feminist theory), "Is the fourth dimension a mathematical hypothesis or a sexual phantasm?" And even though Pinto's narrative focuses on 4D as a math proposition, citing Poincare, even, she neglects to mention Grigori Perelman, whose incredibly important solution of the Poincare conjecture proof has opened up dynamic, practical, scientific and mathematical enterprise in research and development. 4D math, we can see, is alive and well, thanks to Perelman's gift. If the implications for art are not apparent immediately, neither are Pinto's observations particularly relevant. It is worth noting that Pinto's speculation is published in a leading art journal (e-flux), but pushes a 4D narrative practically bereft of art, and certainly not oriented to the art-object, as such. Yet Pinto's data points ought not, from a 4D point of view, be rejected as not pertinent to 4D art. On the contrary her narrative has all the markings of a good show concept. The formulation is essentially additive.

What is 4D art? It is a non-recursive, non-negating (or double-negating, not-just-art, not-just-4D) question of scale plus scenario, orientation and derivation, motion, time, place and space, happening in the middle of things. In a field of infinite choices, presupposed by 4D and verified by science and humanities alike, anything we can imagine, all our experiences, every sensation, all iterations of phenomena we witness and interpretations of them we entertain, are fair game. None of this precludes the object, as art, a free thing we give each other. The 4D object links the infinite field to the finite thing in the medium of gift-sharing, as exchange.

A review by Dorian Batycka covering Tino Sehgal's latest work at the Palais Garnier, for Hyperallergic affords us another excellent case study in-the-round. The reader is encouraged to consider the article in its entirety, but also to keep in mind this is a post-Occupy inverted simulation of 4D art. Occupy upped the ante for 4D intervention, and shortly after OWS was dispersed, institution-enabled post-Occupy inverted simulations began to appear with some regularity. The phenomenon occurred during the occupation, but artists attempting to "co-opt" the direct action/dimensional art space established by Occupy frequently did so with unexpected consequences, including action-enabled re-co-optation. Martha Rosler's post-OWS MoMA expo/garage sale was indicative of the class, if somewhat a special instance, since Rosler has long operated as an "activist-artist," and her strategic ties to OWS made her "flipping sides" (inversion) complicated for those who might have attacked or called out the move. Returning to Sehgal, et al., what follows is an extract that is indicative of Batycka's advocacy:

>>
Sehgal is an artist whose work eviscerates any boundary between dance, choreography, human social relations, sculpture, and political economy, in the process forging new ground as one of the world’s most relevant, provocative, and puzzling cultural producers of our time. He has helped breathe new life into contemporary art by deascensioning it away from material-object-oriented culture, creating famously objectless works — what curator Jens Hoffmann famously called a “museum of dance.” His tailor-made projects investigate how myriad social relations can form the substance of an artwork beyond any static or strictly material essence. It’s a type of socially engaged practice that I have come to really appreciate in recent years, but one that Sehgal did not invent. Since the 1950s, well-known groups such as Fluxus and the Situationists, as well as more underground collectives like “Museum,” began to change how artworks could be seen as per the formatively gestural. An interesting and little-known example is the work of Raivo Puusemp, whose radical experiments with group dynamics and sociopolitical processes as a conceptual artist in 1970s eventually led him to become mayor of Rosendale, NY, whereby a lifelong project saw art fully dissolve into politics so as to become indefinable from one another. Sehgal, however, is much more subtle. He is neither strictly an artist, dancer, choreographer, or theatre-maker, and his work is increasingly difficult for curators and critics to define. This is really what I like most about his work. It’s what curator Mouna Mekouar describes as Sehgal’s ability to encompass numerous “hybrid” characteristics.
<<

To perform a thorough 4D analysis on Batyka's Sehgal review is beyond the scope of this essay. In fact a whole course could easily be generated from the Batyka article. We could discuss the notion of breathing "new life into contemporary art by deascensioning [(sic) - probably Batyka meant 'de-accessioning,' which is an interesting choice of terms in this context] it away from material-object-oriented culture, creating famously objectless works." On this line alone, one could focus an hour of interchange. We could spend a day on Batyka's Agamben citation, which itself is rich with im-/material, including a fantastic double negation in which art's absence is as notable as Occupy's absence in Batyka's evocation of the political in situational "art." Batyka makes a terrific referential leap to "Rite of Spring," and the ballet's connection to total war. There is much more. However, 4D analysis is not critique, nor does it infer any ratification of content in its recommendation-by-referral. We can accept the beauty in Batyka's review, and even assume that beauty reflects a certain beauty in Sehgal's effort, without certifying either "work's" authenticity as 4D art, per se. We can, however, asymmetrically link both to another essay, Baudrillard's "Precession of Simulacra," which acts in this capacity as a predictive post-mortem:

>>
Only the allegory of the Empire, perhaps, remains. Because it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction...It is all metaphysics that is lost. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept...By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself - such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrance of models for the simulated generation of differences.[12]
<<

Or, as Sean Patrick Joseph Carney, rephrases it, in the Americanized "translation" of Baudrillard's seminal text, which gave us that marvelous and horrifying phrase, "the desert of the real:"

>>
And you can forget about reality now being something rational, because there’s nothing rational to measure it against. It’s basically operational—readymade reality, if you will...So now that we’re in this space where nothing is real, simulation begins by murdering the shit out of anything that references the real world. And what’s worse, all we’re left with is a system of signs which are even more gooey than meaning itself. A sign that represents a concept now represents everything associated with that concept.[13]
<<

The Sehgal production is not so much an extravagant spectacle as it is an appearance of one. Batyka's write-up of it is not so much a contextual verification of spectacle, as it is a mentioning image, one which descends like an entry in a chronological blog into the archive for cross-reference by search. Set together they still disappear, like the value of a new sports car leaving the sales lot. Costs for art's object absence accrue to contingency in the displacing, moving presence of not-quite-something-itself through the absence of the real, into a nether region, database-as-limbo. At the end of the evening, the hype dissolves and what remains is that read-y-made value a celebratory text gives good-quality atmospheric photos designed to capture absence (yours), couple it with FOMO, to foment remote desire, the voyeuristic urge, the growing seed of art-porn conflated with being (there) in the moment. It is all artsy fantasy. An ostentatious social content churn, as potent as a tweet-click in call-response media blast heralds little more than a momentary victory for sign-icism, in effect. The non-performance/performance is wholly contingent on opulent setting for validation, because the art on display is not free. A review of Frank Stella's essay "Working Space" punctures the hyperbole of both Sehgal's event and Batyka's story.

The thing to be mourned is not the object itself, which will persevere, if in no other form than its market commodity version. The tragic in the farce is "created" by the lack of moral synthesis in the construct of objective absence. To exclude painting and sculpture from 4D discourse is to deny it the hard-earned freedom "art" gained over centuries, millennia, which in truth extends to the artist, and the "art lover:"

> freedom from
>> architecture
>> patronage (kings, church, etc.)
>> style (the vernacular of the Court, extending to the academy)
>> property regimes (commissions)
>> language-based fictional narratives
> freedom to
>> exist on its own terms
>> be itself, what it is, in a dedicated space (i.e., the "white cube," which is architecture denuded of the trappings of Empire)
>> "create" its own "history" (ontology, non-/narrative, lineage, references, mythos, craft tradition, etc.)
>> remember itself to itself
>> be selfless, to serve, to give
>> choose

1. Ellen Mueller, Elements & Principles of 4D Art & Design, Oxford, U.K. , Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 161
2. Mueller, ibid, p. xix
3. Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art: Action Art to Pop to Earthworks., Chicago, IL, The University of Chicago Press, 1972
4. Walter Benjamin. See "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, In: Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, from the 1935 essay, New York, NY, Schocken Books, 1969; and also "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man," which first appeared in English in Reflections, New York, NY, Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1978; the opening paragraph in that essay puts forth a definition of art (and "Every expression of human mental life") as linguistic phenomenon.
5. As in: Boris Groys, "The Truth of Art," New York, NY, E-Flux Journal, #71, March, 2016, http://www.e-flux.com (accessed 21 March, 2016)
6. Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, London, U.K., Pluto Press, 2011, p. 126-7
7. See Victor A. Ginsburgh and David Throsby (eds.), Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, Volumes 1 and 2, Oxford, U.K., North-Holland/Elsevier, 2006/2013-2016
8. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, translated by Joan Stambaugh, New York, NY, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1972, p. 15
9. "David Joselit with Greg Lindquist," The Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn, NY, June 2013, http://www.brooklynrail.org (accessed 17 October, 2016)
10. See: Catherine Curro Caruso, "Seeking big answers: PhD student Rebecca Millsop uses philosophy to take on contentious questions about how we define art," MIT News, Caimbridge, MA, 2016, news.mit.edu (accessed 16 September, 2016)
11. Dorian Batyka, "Tino Sehgal Dances Across the Line Between Art and Life: Sehgal’s latest work will likely go down as one of the 21st century’s most interesting hybrids between contemporary art and dance," Hyperallergic, 16 October, 2016, http://www.hyperallergic.com (accessed 16 October, 2016)
12. Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," Simulacra and Simulation, English translation by Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 2-3

FOUR: ox-3000-4-2 (31 October, 2016)

A common definition of the fourth dimension (4D) is "time." In Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design, author Ellen Mueller states, "The three dimensions - height, width, and depth - are augmented in 4D design by time. It is the fourth dimension. Although we all have a basic understanding of time, there are many different definitions of this term depending on the field from which one approaches it. For our purposes, we will say that *time* is the progression of events and existence from the past, through the present, and into the future. One could even simply say that time refers to change." [1] Over the past several decades those who for a variety of reasons combine discussion of art with 4D have settled on "time-based," a designation covering diverse practices and activities, including, writes Mueller, "online videos, animated GIFs, the opening titles of a movie, flash mobs, video games, websites, and so on."

Linking time, 4D and art "disrupts" - to use a trendy verb - the now-unserviceable notion that art is a categorical set of framed, painted "pictures" and what architect James Wines snarkily identified as "'plop' art" (meaning sculpture, especially certain know-it-when-you-see-it public sculpture), even if Merriam-Webster disagreed a century ago (art = painting + sculpture). Art has long stymied those inclined to comprehensive, recursive classification. Maybe art's tendency to confuse and confound superimposed limits owes to one of its early apps being a formal "being" word (as in "thou art"), the is-ness of which owes to the recognition by an Other. If we imagine an original coder for "art" we might well come to the conclusion that definitional elasticity was hardwired into the prototype. Art itself may be a technical hack of the epistemological.

"An item is a work of art at time t, where t is a time not earlier than the time which the item is made, if and only if (a) either it is in one of the central art forms at t and is made with the intention of fulfilling a function art as at t or (b) it is an artifact that achieves excellence in fulfilling such a function, whether or not it is in a central art form and whether or not it was intended to fulfill such a function." To some extent this formulation owes its underpinning narrative to post-Einsteinian physics' notion of event - a point in space-time.

Hacking art is not new, whether one refers to vandalism, Fontana, or any other kind of "hack." Plato trolled artists in his Republic. Since then, all manner of folk have contributed their "two cents" on art and artists, their value (social, political and economic), utility, and so forth. Proclaiming what art and which artists are great, bad, mediocre or whatever, with or without explanation, has been an open subject for ages. Over the centuries, conjecture and analysis on the mechanics of art has originated from all fields, spanning both sciences and humanities, economics and politics, too. Critics range among the religious (e.g., anti-image Protestants and Muslims), the political (Nazis to Jesse Helms and Rudy Giuliani) and theorists of many descriptions and interests (Hegel, Benjamin, McEvilley, Graeber...), and their various cures for art are as diverse as their plentiful criteria and diagnoses. "Artists," themselves, in recent times have done much to muddy the "art" waters. Beuys, Warhol and many others have subverted any hope that the makers would play a determinant role in creating a master-definition for art. At this point, a student in an art academy may be so confused by art status quo that she feels compelled to quit art-making and study philosophy and science to come up with a satisfactory rationale for artistic production today. [See: Catherine Curro Caruso, "Seeking big answers: PhD student Rebecca Millsop uses philosophy to take on contentious questions about how we define art," MIT News, 2016, ]

Management guru Peter Drucker, a collector of Japanese art, wrote a brief essay titled "A View of Japan through Japanese Art." He concluded, in his typical cryptic way, "The most important thing to say about Japan as viewed through its art may well be that Japan is perceptual." One way to translate this rather banal conclusion to an analysis of 4D-plus-art-plus-time, for us, is to say, "We are perceptual - and so are they (4D/Art/Time), as far as we can tell." Problematically, 4D and Time also exist outside one's perceptual range. Is 4D art an "app" that "solves" a cross-cultural "problem" of the comparative perceptual in expressive practice?

∞

"Art," as a defined term, has undergone a century or so of unusually significant change, prior to the "mainstreaming" of time/4D as a contingent factor for art in its discourses and pedagogy. Art, having been structurally liberated from iconographic architectures, enjoyed a somewhat autonomous definitional phase, during which "art" meant framed paintings on a wall and more or less "freestanding" sculpture. Painting and sculpture connected for various reasons over time to a constellation of media, including drawing and sketches (pre-production), and tapestries, ceramics, miniatures, prints, photos, and eventually, digital images (post-production). "Art" before that was but one practical element in a schema typically demonstrative of the urge to wonder. Think of the nascent era of Old Worm. Some of the listed media evolved to satisfy viewer curiosity in more specialized or refined artistic processes, clarifying the nature of the "artistic eye" and "hand" (drawing/sketches) and their expressive communion. Others eventually emerged as sub-forms in distributive eco-hierarchies, to facilitate popular image dispersion, ameliorate market considerations on price points for originals/derivatives and so on (via post-production media). The cumulative effect of decades and centuries of "art" reformation-by-multimedia, compounded by significant theoretical pressure and other technological/cultural/political/economic trends (i.e., so-called ubiquity, democratization, multi-disciplinarity, de-skilling, etc.), blurred the concept of art into more abstract territories (context, content, media, etc.), eventually absorbing performance and most domains of design, production, or technical endeavor. Now, "art" applies to practically any human enterprise or activity. "The art of ____" has become a catch-all phrase that promotes a Cartesian craft hierarchy for whatever enterprise or activity (e.g, plumbing, kissing, alibis) at the pinnacle of which is an "art of." Googling this phrase demonstrates how diffuse the definition of art is currently, in general usage. Art has been further displaced by notions like creativity, innovation, inspiration and so on.

If only for the sake of argument, can we assume that art is valuable? From a market perspective, art still constitutes a vital market value. Millions of people the world over claim to be artists. The human urge to paint and sculpt is ancient, pre-historical and pre-dating civilization, as we now think of it, evidenced by artifacts and pictographs tens of thousands of years old. These facts alone suggest good reason to focus on the meaning of art, its utility and worth.

Likewise, "4D," despite its resistance to recursion, gains traction across many disciplines, including art, where it has been in play at least as long as the modern "identity crisis" for "art." Are the phenomena related. For the individual who claims to be a 4D artist, or one who wishes to study 4D, the definition of 4D as time, and the lack of definition for art in general, combine to pose problems in several areas of art production and analysis. Workable conceptions for 4D, for time and art would help alleviate confusion now and moving forward, not least in the matters of artist qualification and the purpose(s) of art. In the following essay, we will briefly propose such a remedy.

The main components of the proposal consist of: 1) an alternative definition for 4D; 2) a reevaluation of time; 3) a rational approach to defining "art" that takes into account our propositions for 4D and time; and the introduction of a basic theoretical model for 4D art production that reconciles art and its time-aspects, among other "things."

FIVE: ox-3000-4-3 (5 November, 2016)

The publication of Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design by Ellen marks a substantial advance in the pedagogy for students inclined toward multidisciplinary, multimedia creative practice. The text serves as an excellent introduction to the subject, surveying modes and means of production, with examples that adequately illustrate the applications of dimensional methodology currently in play. The inclusion of classroom exercises, glossary, key concepts and technical tips will certainly prove useful in the classroom. Mueller's Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design effectively frames the discussion of a very complex discourse with both clarity and inspiration. She opts for a holistic approach that effectively balances the collaborative and individuated facets of process, output and feedback. In sum, Mueller's 4D art and design primer is a worthwhile effort with much to recommend it.

Still, the foundation of the book - Mueller's definitions for 4D, 4D art, and her combining art and design as 4D equivalencies - is problematic. She writes, "The three dimensions - height, width, and depth - are augmented in 4D design by time. It is the fourth dimension. Although we all have a basic understanding of time, there are many different definitions of this term depending on the field from which one approaches it. For our purposes, we will say that *time* is the progression of events and existence from the past, through the present, and into the future. One could even simply say that time refers to change."

After referencing the Bauhaus school of art and design, Mueller continues:

Is the 4th dimension time? Is Mueller's summary explanation of time sufficient? Why should practical discourse for 4D art and design coincide in an academic manual?

SIX: ox-3000-4-4-1 (8 November, 2016)

PREFACE

The following is a dimensional presentation, containing several proposals. The form of the piece itself serves as a proposal. It presents the content [(findings, resulting from a contextual field analysis composed of other pieces, whose content relates in some relevant manner or contributes to a combinative discourse on art, 4D, time, the object, and more)] in the mode of performative true, or truth-bearing fiction. The dramatic quality of fiction-as-performance is conveyed, not through performance, but text, although it is feasible that the content be performed, as an actual production. The drama does not carry over into the supporting Notes section, however. Both of these formal constructs comprise their own autonomous proposals. The object of the piece in its entirety, therefore, unites the survey function with the creative potential of a performable script, verified through selected resonant samples, attached to the "body" of the dramatic narrative. The interstices - an intermission for the transmission(s), if you will - contains basic proposals for fundamental components of the discourse platformed in the body of the essay-story (i.e., art, 4D, time, the object). These true-fictional "definitions" are submitted to the reader/user as discursive points-of-origin, or conversation-starters, which methodologically is consistent with the piece, in its entirety. Finally, the dramatic/authorial personae DIM TIM and Milo Santini are themselves true-fictions, with both material and immaterial aspects, not all of which are revealed in the piece, but which are available elsewhere, in text, art, or anecdotal oral history only accessible to the reader via the original, actual author, in real time, face-to-face conversation. Which is also a proposal.

DIM TIM: Especially, in the emergent discourse of 4D art, the case is being made, in some art- and/or theory-centric circles attendant to art, that art's precessional form(s) express(-es) creative obsolescence. Whether the "real" data supports any such (presumptive) conclusion, or another conclusion, or none, since evaluation depends on sufficiency of data for the purpose of conclusion, is a considerable topic. To talk about [4D] plus art, productively is possible if the terms the "talkers" share (in the "square" or "box" - a commons exchange) possess commonality of meaning for the collective, the "circle." What if art is, in the new 4D reality, overwhelming the apparatus of perceptual conclusion, so that "meanings" (of art, 4D) defy sufficient recursion to yield definition? What if the "shape" of art and/or 4D can't be traced, outlined, due to art and 4D's refusing to stand still for the purpose of recursive analysis, much less determination? Like the butterfly that will not be pinned (dead, but preserved) to the framed velvet, explanatory categorical note attaching, and displayed in the Natural History Museum or "fine art" gallery and/or museum, or collector's residence - for amplification, see Damien Hirst. Where does this leave the 4D artist, the 4D art ideologian and the "viewer" [all of whom are trying to make sense of it all, trying to "catch the (art)wave," even 'surf' it], in this pivotal moment?

INTERLOCUTER [Translation]: Now, in art, as in journalism, academics, industries of every description, in politics, law and war, in what we might call "personhood," even in "nature" as such, we encounter instability at depth. Precarious conditions call into question common presumptions about the "normal" relations that heretofore have shaped our reality. "Things," the meanings and values we attach to them, which in turn reveal much, not only about collective priorities, but about ourselves - fail to fulfill our expectations of thing-ness. "Self" assumes a strobing, multi-faceted affect. Perhaps most significantly, the volatile scenario developing undermines the trustworthiness of the perceptual itself, the main tool for relative self-formulation, since the dimensional means by which we normally evaluate what we perceive indicate impending collapse, and the additive pressure to the senses disables self-rationalizing mechanisms one by one or en masse. Experience is uncertain. We transfer the uncertainly from the singular, particular, granular ontology of self to the Universal, the world and everything in it. The cosmos appears all at once fungible, unmoored. The grid warps, revealing layers of twisted, entwined, convulsing grids. A veritable worm hole wherein one's/our notions of truth writhe and undulate, horrifically, not seductively. The narrative binding experience to assessment dissembles. The point of the entire project blurs. Spectacle overwhelms causation. The existential rationale splits into interstitial inertia and entropy. A trip to the beach becomes a crisis of consciousness. What next? Choice is displaced by the appeal of escape, but also by the symptoms of purposelessness, such as paralysis, madness. The Seven Deadly Sins manifest in the social as all-directional projections. The moon abandons its role in wave generation and embraces lunacy as its inductive mission. Crazy takes control of the utilitarian symbolic, even at the level of the celestial, which is as near to the divine as modern science to date will permit people to travel. Surfing must be out of the question. The first-order casualty of lost cause is freedom as aspiration. Surveillance and managed constriction in the operational manifold become mundane attachments to disrupted reality. Technology abandons its promise as time-saver and agent of future promise for humanity, instead taking on the role of Monster, and ghost, or worse, poltergeist. We accept the Panopticon as architecture for presence, or else, and this is truly the death of Vision, which is at the core of art. So, we stand at the turning point, in a scary, possibly Apocalyptic fiction (again), a virtual person-thing in flux, between shore and churning, turbulent waters, Leviathan, and wonder, "What is Art?" "Who is an Artist?" "What is art for, for whom?" As the moon falls from the sky (behind the horizon, which is not flat, but curving). - DIM TIM and Milo Santini, "We Make It Up As We Go: an un-produced, un-performed play in one act; ELECTION DAY USA," Brooklyn, NY, 8 November, 2016

∞

INTRODUCTION [Artist's Statement]

Google "Disruption creates opportunities for innovation and growth." The contents in the results combine to paint an altogether different picture from the one framed above. One person's (or a fabricated/fictional duo's) jittery, cataclysmic nightmare is another's (or an entire sector's) reason for materialist, Bernaysian optimism. Leave it to business folk to turn a few old proverbial lemons into (5-cent) lemonade, by watering the pulp down, and manufacturing a flashy pitch to a thirsty John Q. Public. Historically, actual thirst can be leverage in the production and management of consent. Hunger, too.

In the realms of the sensual and the "real," we stick to desire and satisfaction, too. Google "the art of" and this user generated 220,000,000 "results" in .81 seconds. That is a lot of art(s) of ______. Yes, there is "the art of kissing," and, of course, "The Art of the Deal." Apparently, whichever kind of art one searches for, the probability of finding some "art" that fits the search is pretty darn good. Approximately two of every three Americans can search and find her or his own, unique "art of" something.

If the methodology for our analysis of the diffuse state of the arts lacks clarity by definition - Fine. Who among the experts on art can say conclusively what art today is? Assuming expert X and a straightforward definition for art Y. Can we expect that everyone searching for or making art (of _____) websites will agree to expert X's definition Y?

When one's field - in this case, of vision - is in definitive disarray, having been disrupted, at the level of a major DDoS hack, a proper post-critical survey of the field might be in order. "A field of vision" is a poetic definition of art, but a doable one, if just to serve this essay's purpose of origination. Let us proceed with measured optimism to the task. After all, art is dimensional. Or to word it another way , if all else perceptual fails, start measuring stuff, until you can get your wits about you again.

∞

PROPOSITIONS

In the following essay we will survey a spectrum of qualified analysis that aggregate to form a snapshot view of the art topology. We will focus on several features with currency in contemporary art discourse:

1. Art, by definition: PAINTING & SCULPTURE
2. 4D: The zone wherein the material and immaterial transact
3. The object: liberated of the subject in all its explicit and implicit "behaviors," including those previously contingent on the-, a- or any- (commanding) object; in other words, the object, absent command; which describes
4. Time [the only object]; which as Heidegger framed it, constitutes "true" time, which is 4D*

* 4D art addresses in itself each of the "terms" 1-4, and serves as an open "answer" or solution to the question or problem of "What is Art?"
"Open" refers to the 4D method that welcomes practically any available "best means" by which the terminological/terminal questions [e.g., what is art; who is an artist; what is art for, for whom (?) etc.] of art may be answered. Obviously this (4D) method indicates a complementary individual- and collaborative/collective-participant interplay, involving application/deployment of actual and virtual "tools"]. Proficiency is encouraged, as a practical given.

Our survey will be oriented to the artist, to the art theorist, and to the art "user." To begin we can assert some provisional ideas to inform the procedure. Each is rudimentary.

SEVEN: ox-3000-4-4-2 (21 November, 2016)

The publication of Ellen Mueller's Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design by Oxford University Press marks a significant moment in the legitimization of 4D as a technical, aesthetic proposition. Like any primer for an emergent field of study, the text contains material that will likely be revised with time and usage. In this case, however, the fundamental notions upon which the 4D practicum is assembled are premature and/or problematic.

The orientation section in Mueller's manual, containing definitions of 4D, art and time, are not extensive. Mueller's descriptions of 1-3D are standard (height, weight and depth). Her equivalence of 4D and time is not an uncommon one. She goes on to equate time with change, as a linear progression (past, present, future), i.e., as in "a timeline." She asserts we all share a time-sense. The historical origins of 4D Mueller attributes summarily to the Bauhaus school. Are these positions adequate for a primer?

A primer is an introductory pedagogical tool. How useful can a primer be, if the basic information it contains is misinformation? It is not probably a fair expectation that 4D's first substantive manual make concrete orthodoxy. In the interests of the user, however, a review of Mueller's premises does seem fair.

Suppose a pre-logic for 4D that is more or less geometric, as Mueller does. Why abandon geometry past the third dimension? Time, as a phenomenon, is not entirely reducible to the geometric. When Mueller defines 4D as time, given the definition of 1-3D (height, weight, depth), isn't her assumption a non-sequitur? The 1-3D progression is spatial and volumetric, a key technical means for translating abstract models into material objects.

Shifting dimensional progression from formal geometrical architecture to another disciplinary region (space-time) ignores the fact that geometry does offer us a progressive 4D path that does not necessarily involve time or change. Both time and change inarguably are not minor concerns for humanity, and many a sage has devoted study to one and/or the other - and to art. Reflections on 4D span math, science, spirituality have "gone viral" on a limited scale, since the second half of the 19th Century, but only relatively recently has the study of 4D achieved "serious" practical acknowledgment. Some datamining algorithms are hypercubic. Grigori Perelman proof for the Poincare Conjecture indicates a mathematic "reality" for 4D behavior of geometric objects, with significant technological implications. Wikipedia is an N+1 software, which is to say, an additive dimensional application.

We now have theory and verifiable evidence supporting a claim that time, art and change all evidence 4D characteristics themselves. For instance, Heidegger held, in Being and Time, that true time is 4D. Heidegger's mysterious, subtle statement does not necessarily remedy Mueller's idea of 4D being time. Does that remediation matter to a beginner student of 4D? Painter Max Beckmann discussed the 4th Dimension in terms of spirituality, and this was important to his art practice. How? Charles Sirota

Dali's hypercubic Crucifiction is a famous one. Another, less obvious case is Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. Although the sketched image of the multi-limbed figure drawn by da Vinci is one of European art's best known, the story informing it is much less so. In that progressive story, which we will not detail here, the 4D narrative that results in Vitruvian Man unfolds. To summarize; Da Vinci appropriated another artist's technical project and made a very important modification, a subtle relative shift, which yielded an improved proportional ratio for the human figure, which ratio has proved valuable to figural students ever since. That minor adjustment - involving a combined, integrative rectangularity and circularity applied to the human body - represents a (4D) solution, with practical implications. Da Vinci's model gave him the tool he need to create essentially, a functional robot.

EIGHT: ox-3000-4-4-3 (25 November, 2016)

Time for the 4D Art Thing
By Paul McLean

So much of the uncertainty evident in Western art discourse over time circuits through a deep, pervasive distrust of the veracity of the object among thinkers. Today, this profound suspicion accorded the thing manifests in the emergent analysis of virtuality, and its effects on our worldly perception, and by extension, our capacity to discern true from false, and to prioritize or "make sense" of information. It is a mistake to ascribe newness to the phenomenon and its components. By various means, technology and its output are being managed perfunctorily via the numerical and the nominal, even as technical means threaten to surpass their limitations. The machine, as much as it is still an object, is overwhelming the narratives by which it is determined to be the subject of its maker. The problem is compounded by data overload, exceeding human apprehension, undermining our ability to convert knowledge into sound action. We see this occur, for instance, in the expansion of the databases of the surveillance state, whose contents are too massive for analysts to utilize effectively. The issue is not only waste, but wasted opportunity, inferring strategic failure by management, whom we suspect may be too cross-purposed. After all, one man's waste, to paraphrase the aphorism, is another's riches - and power. However, the question of parametric porosity suffuses all social sectors similarly, and the "art world" - i.e., art, artists, art theorists, curators, collectors, viewers, objects, institutions, markets, press, academies, etc. - is not exempt. Consider: the 2015 Turner Prize, and its winner, architecture collective Assemble; Gregory Sholette's seminal text, Dark Matter; Banksy's New York City "residency;" and the profile of MIT doctoral student and artist Rebecca Millsop. The entire art "ecosystem," if we can imagine such a thing, now, when art is clearly an international, transcultural phenomenon, is operating without any settled notion of what art is. Yet staggering amounts of currency are spent on "it" annually, millions of people identify themselves as artists, art production proceeds at unprecedented levels, art writing proliferates, and so on. The dilemma is not only definition for art. It is practical. What can a beginning art student make of the state of the arts? What does she do to distinguish herself among her peers? Is that even a valid artist-objective anymore?

Illusionism as a trope of artistic virtuosity for Plato was cause enough to excommunicate the artist from the Republic. What is the issue, if not the false object, or the image that falsely represents the substrate. The rejection of the icon in the church of the Reformation is simply a rewording of the animus of the thinker for the maker. Benjamin's, and now Groys echoing Benjamin, intervention against art amount to an ordinary campaign of displacement of the actual, original object by a politically acceptable proxy. The disdain, underpinned by fear of popular incitement, expressed in these assaults on art belie a lack of confidence in the word and thought over the thing. If there is a medium connecting word and thought and thing, it is sensory. Word and thought produce interpretation. Object constitutes representation, and its relative, realism. Any resolution of the tension among word/thought and object unfortunately resides within the system of narrative, which is to say, fiction. Belief and preference are relegated to the margins of the subjective, which is where science and math (the objective mind) figure in the picture overall.

Things not being what or where they appear to be - this is more than a quandary of physics, today. Humanity, and its art occupy a parallax space that blurs on close inspection, because the real object is mutable, if not fungible. It is pointless to pretend that consideration of the object as such may truly be dislocated, isolated or restricted from the economy, the transactional, the material exchange. The property regime not only consumes everything, it consumes thought itself. The intellect, the search, the idea and concept are all sublimated to an overarching ownership model that is enforceable by law. The abstraction of the object proceeds beyond reproduction, image capture, and cloning into the pre-production of anything. We are experiencing a crisis not of actuality, but of actualization. Shared value of the object is indistinguishable from the object's enslavement to command and control complexes, before, during and after "it" (the object) appears. The hand of the artist has supposedly been rendered invisible - by Pop! - and the risk aversion inherent to the management of people, places and things ensures the shallowness of artistic motivation. Creativity may be encouraged. Innovation may be celebrated. Disruption may be promoted. In the end, though, it is the bottom line that matters to the prime beneficiaries.

Obviously, the program for relegating the object to a stylistic mode is itself illusory. The status quo exists naturally nowhere. The artificial person is not art, as such. The artificial person's corporate life is impossible, as infinitude. It is the impasse between natural human and artificial personhood that is the present illusion putting us all at existential risk. How can art help us see, or otherwise sense, this overwhelming, self-imposed condition in which we find ourselves? Further, is art sufficiently utile to increase humanity's survival odds? If this line of inquiry seems obtuse, or worse, a false alarm, consider the Trump Presidency. Trump exemplifies the fourfold virtual persona(e). He is actual. He is governmental (.gov). He is a foundation (.org). He is incorporated (.com). Like Bloomberg - on the smaller stage of NYC - before him, Trump is a [4]dimensional manifestation, whose activities, objectives, internal processes threaten to make the world's inhabitants his/its subjects, over the next four years, and potentially eight years, or beyond. At least that is the fearful narrative permeating the media sphere. Do we notice a pattern emerging?

What can art and artists do, in times like these? Surprisingly, it would seem, more than one would think!

NINE: ox-3000-4-4-4 (27 November, 2016)

Time for the 4D Art Thing
By Paul McLean

If anything is certain today in the "art world," it is this: nothing is clearly defined. The following essay is a cursory 4D(+) scan of the field, with emphasis on several important facets of current practical and theoretical concerns for artists and those concerned with contemporary art. The latter cohort's interest in art is diverse, complicated and expresses itself variously. Our initial analytic presumption is that art now is a manifold proposition. In other words, art is a dimensional thing. To question "What is art?" for our purposes will serve as a discursive point of origin whose myriad answers are multi-directional, if not omni-directional. This essay will track a sample of narratives for art that lead to and from the original inquiry "What is art?" An urge to expand parameters for the initial presumption ordinarily points to correlating questions, like "Who is an artist?" "What is art for, and for whom is it made?" "What is the value of art, and what does art mean?" These are fundamental questions attaching to art from antiquity through the present day. This essay will focus on four-plus facets of art discourse, which show signs of being immediately relevant, and with the exception of 4D, have longevity as important topics for artists throughout art history.

1. art, and narrative
2. the object
3. time
4. 4D

A first-order difficulty for contemporary art is lack of definition. Witness the award of the 2015 Turner Prize to an architecture collective, Assemble, whose winning project involved rehabilitation of a run-down neighborhood. The "art world" displayed resistance to one of its most prestigious, if routinely controversial, international citations of artistic merit going to a group of young people who did not out-of-hand identify themselves as artists and their efforts as art. In this case, a curator designated the Assemble project to be art, or at least worthy of "art world" recognition and the general attention the Turner Prize affords its recipients. This episode is only one of the more recent in a trend properly outlined in Harold Rosenberg's The De-definition of Art, a collection of essays first published in 1972. If Rosenberg's text is useful in summarizing a variety of emergent subversions of a universal notion of art among practitioners and "users," Walter Benjamin's seminal essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which achieved significant reach at roughly the same time (although Benjamin's essay was written in 1935), has since become ubiquitous in contemporary art discourse, owing to advocacy by many critics, artists and academics. The 20th Century produced many assertions about art and artists that have substantially disrupted art's settled definition. Many players have argued for reformation of the art domain, using a great variety of strategies and tactics to that end. Duchamp, Warhol and Beuys are routinely cited as influential, prominent artistic figures whose claims upon the artistic enterprise caused widespread re-evaluation of art and artist traditions in the West. The Situationists are one of many artist collectives that enacted anti-art ideas in conjunction with political, economic and social movements reacting to a status quo that, by their assessment, demanded creative, public opposition. The radicalization of art in service of "revolutionary" contradiction to powers-that-be has proved a difficult objective. The economic dimension of "the art world" tends to complicate the radical anti-art ideal at the points of social and material exchange, which include the public square and private markets for art, especially in scenarios dependent on art's object-form, but leveraging popularity and timeliness. Think of "protest-art for sale," such as a Banksy stencil-mural, carved out of building and re-contextualized at an art fair, or on offer at an art auction house. Art has to an extent become an arena in which broader social conflicts play out. Issues of identity have developed constituencies in "the art world," and in the constellation of sites and institutions for art, from the studio to the academy, press, gallery and museum. Discourse on race, gender and sexuality has commingled with aesthetic discourse and artist practice. A scan of College Art Association conference programming affirms this, as does a glance at a glossy art monthly's features and reviews (e.g., Artforum), and so on. Over time institutional critique and art-critical methodology blur in the medium of currency, but within the infrastructure for contemporary art we see change-agents adopt and adapt to shifting conditions in the topology for art, and, in so doing, they repeatedly upend "art world" measures of "success." Until the measures become meaningless. Wasn't that the point all along? For examples, we can look to artists such as Hans Haacke, Judy Chicago, and collective projects such as the Guerrilla Girls, ABC No Rio and many others, who tend to inspect the validity of art through the lens of social justice, and share their conclusions via intervention. Technological developments have added layers to the confusion swirling around a generally accepted definition of art. Some technologies, like still and moving image cameras and audio recording devices - now embedded in most phones - have greatly affected art and art discourse for over a century, on many levels. The personal computer, the Internet and ubiquitous social media arguably have impacted art and art theory as significantly as anything in history. The nature of that impact has yet to be adequately addressed, in part because the effects are dynamic, accelerating and resistant to recursion - in short, the effects of the digital age on art are dimensional, encompassing the spectrum of art-disruption briefly mapped above, adding to it, compressing and flattening it, and re-presenting it as a new genre - called "art." Again.

Before we proceed, I will sketch a prospective platform for the rest of the survey. The first move will briefly distinguish art of and for Civilization from its precursors, such as what we see in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet, in ancient tribal pictographs, petroglyphs, carvings, figurines, etc., which predate art and philosophy and any defining injunctions thereof by tens of thousands of years. Pre-historical "art" is referentially vital for our general project, but to specifically discuss art and the four facets listed above, we will begin by accepting the terms of art that have been established, and have evolved, more or less since Classic Greece. To do otherwise in an examination of how art may or may not be changing entails equating art essentially with its own negation, and, absent a second negation, abandoning art's synthetic potential (4D+).

[PLATFORM]
I. The cyclic progression of Civilization and art's place in it: A) Exploration; B) Discovery; C) Conquest/Conversion; D) Extraction/Exploitation; E) Rationalization/Justification; Technological Advance/Enabling. Repeat. Art is most useful in phase E.

II. A crude definition of 4D: the interstitial dimension connecting the material and immaterial [potentiating systematic "transformaction" with post-Boolean strategies]

III. A recursive + inversion definition for art: painting and sculpture, inclusive of drawing for design purposes for art (models)

IV. A speculation on time: Time is the only object; note - there is no subjective hierarchy necessarily relative to this configuration of time.

The reader is encouraged to regard the platform with temporarily suspended judgement. Hopefully, the reasoning will be clarified in due course. For instance, the definition of art is not meant to be provocative, as in a Stuckist protestation. Rather, in the 4D methodology, art-as-painting/sculpture + drawing permits us, for example, to analyze how digital media translate art objects for virtual environments, which in turn provides entry into a broader analysis of objects and immaterial or virtual context. The platform posits a framework for the essay that situates the content less in the domain of argument, and more in the spirit of ongoing discussion. Basically, the text belongs to a more-than binary exchange system, with the characteristics of continuum (4D). The definition of time connotes a new, similarly expanded, dimensional quality of object-subject relations internalized by time, an approach that owes its structure to math-oriented thinking by Badiou on infinity-finitude, the void, etc. The synopsis of Civilization is my own, and, whether it applies generally to civilization, as in "all civilization," is presented as an open question. Additional characteristics of the fourth dimension are covered in my dissertation thesis.

∞

1/I. art, and narrative; Civilization

For art, interplay with language is a central theme, intersecting core tenets of the civilization we know. In contemporary art, whether we are contemplating the works of word-artists (Jenny Holzer), or artists whose work depends on attached narratives to be accessed by the viewer (e.g., conceptual artists like Marina Abramovic), or writer-artists (Liam Gillick), the presence of the word is palpable. Agamben has of late investigated Command, and his findings have implications for art and artist. Commandment is word-action combining initiation with force and dominion. Western civilization encodes the Genesis narrative, especially "In the Beginning was the Word," in its (Civilization's) life cycle, and art is relegated to a supporting role in that cycle historically (think of David's iconic Napoleon Crossing the Alps). In considering a definition of art, it perhaps is worth acknowledging that defining art is itself an act of appropriation, a blatant contextualizing of the thing (art) in the frameworks of the word (logos). The inference is a linkage, cosmology, sited not in the seen, but in the divinely empowered ruling voice, and later the made-visible dictation, the written word-document, as in order. When I describe tribal art above as "referentially vital," here is where it is so. Clearly, other cosmologies - and humanity has many - do not adhere to the notion of command as the universal progenitor. It would seem an impossibility for one coming from a command-created civilized world to comprehend, much less accept on its own terms, the "art" of non-command-based culture. The annals of imperial and colonial conquest and cultural conversation prodigiously document encounters of this kind. More recent instances might be ISIS and Taliban destruction of monuments and archaeological sites produced by cultures and religions other than the Islamists' own. Ironically, these actions have been condemned as uncivilized by the "world community," although they conform to historical precedents for global civilization processes. For the moment, imagine an art absent command. What would it look like? There is another command-sense available to art, and it is present in craft, in the artist's technical proficiency. Temporarily deflecting the rigors of procedure may inform recent ideas prescribing art's "de-skilling," but fail to address the need for art to be recognizable as such for the viewer, absent an attaching narrative explication. The quandary of art, representing itself as art, in order for it to be viewable as such, invites intervention by the linguistic interpreter, who may or may not use the opportunity to exploit art for purposes other than what we may purport art's original purpose to be: namely the dimensional, objectifying of cosmology, by not-word-dependent means. Which is not to say that conversation need be prohibited around art. Quite the contrary. In this (imaginary?) scenario, words may amplify and clarify art and enable the transmission of art-technology among practitioners, and for others curious about the "how" of art. As a functional matter, this is the point where the practical spans the disciplinary. In a modern scenario, this is the point where science and art converge, where the artist practice intersects chemistry, for instance (on the matter of "paint"), but also optics, physics and so on. So, to begin to develop the art free of command, etc., the contemporary artist must endeavor to an awareness of superimpositions affecting her practice. At the same time, the artist benefits from the pursuit of open-craft learning. On the former count, for instance, it pays to read Benjamin's "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man," when one reads "The Work of Art...," but it is also important to read Boris Groys' "The Truth of Art" and Paul Valery's "The Conquest of Ubiquity" - if one (an artist) wishes to entertain the prospect of making command-free "original" art. On the latter count, the artist may consider a show like "Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age" a valuable reference, even if, now that that exhibit only exists as documentation, one must "see" it virtually, and/or rely on the curator ("the show's third organizer") Manuela Ammer's language-based artifacts attached to the exhibit, to frame the content, in the correlating ARTnews article:

"The recent interest in painting coincides with an evermore-increasing rise of the digital, and I don't think that's a coincidence...I think there's a certain causal relationship between those two things. I do think that painting is one means to drag what has become so abstract into a human realm, so to speak - painting as a praxis that negotiates between the body and images and makes things graspable that are very hard to grasp, [such as] how our social relations change, how subjectivity changes, how our relationship with the world, really, changes."

Does that help? Researching further, another curator of "Painting 2.0," David Joselit reveals (maybe) the thinking underwriting the exhibit, its appearance, its selections, its form, etc. - in short, his curatorial motivation. The following quotes are extracted from Joselit's conversation with Greg Lindquist for the Brooklyn Rail, a conversation preceding "Painting 2.0" by a couple of years:

"I think that in many ways what I’m trying to do is to understand the form of networks as they are aggregated or concentrated in objects. Objects and networks are not separable, they’re linked in a variety of ways, and I wanted to think about how they intersect, very materially, in various kinds of contemporary art practices. In “Painting Beside Itself,” I write about the most traditional sort of art object, and some would say the most market-corrupted, which is painting. In terms of how conceptual art’s notion of the circulation of propositions, the dematerialization of work, and the understanding of how meaning migrates could be folded back into that object status. So, in a way, After Art is a kind of expansion of a set of themes within painting to a broader economy of art practice."

[...]

"What I’m interested in asking is, what is the form? What are the forms that a network can assume? And that may or may not be addressed when one is actually using such networks. Sometimes it might be better to use an outmoded medium, like painting, to think about multitudes of images or populations of images in some way."

2/II. the object; 4D

In Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design, Ellen Mueller sets forth a practicum for the emergent field. Her text is the first 4D manual, and as such is a welcome addition to the scant literature on the subject. Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design covers a range of creative methods, techniques, tools, terminology, and applications. Mueller outlines a variety of classroom exercises that no doubt will prove helpful for both students and teachers. She also provides many case studies of 4D art and design, informed by the makers' commentaries on their work. In many of its aspects, Mueller's book is excellent.

TEN: ox-3000-4-4 (7 November, 2016) [Chronologically displaced fragment/version - PJM]

To propose a representative imaginary for the current art and attaching discourse

A survey of relevant discussions of art, artists, 4D and time suggests a promising development. The idea of "New"-ness is not new for aesthetics, and carries its own worn baggage. Nonetheless, in the domain of perceptual phenomena connecting the concerns of artists (as autonomous agents and otherwise), art (variously de-defined, fungible, de-skilled and everything), 4D (misrepresented recursively as contemporary) and time (itself manifestly in flux, both ending and ever-insufficient as a management proposition), the movement towards something like a NEW unified field, a practical and theoretical hybrid with all-directional potential seems on the verge of appearing. The form, if one believes the seductive subterranean whispers, connects the effective thing with affect. The "world," the pitch goes, is ready - the art/4D/time/artist[theory] field has been properly processed, prepared, and the growth model predicts accelerated kernel-to-bloom-to-consumption outcomes with the exact-right amounts of waste and entertainment. We can envision the movement as a choreographed dance abstracted from an actuality. The oracles are arrayed in a circular fashion, facing outwards, reading signs, reviewing the old data, and backing into a common solution. It looks like a bicycle wheel seen from above, this motion, with the rim being the collective starting line, the spokes the players' trajectories, and the hub the nexus of realization. Unfortunately, we can't be sure that the product of this massive integration won't be World War 3, financial/political/climate collapse, or the dawn of culture-as-salvation uber alles. We just don't know. And causation apparently is broken, anyway.

ELEVEN: ox-3000-4 (12 October, 2016) [Another one. - PJM]

Making It Up As [We] Go: Some thoughts on the state of play in the domains of 4D + art
By Paul McLean

Introduction

The following essay is not intended to be a conclusive survey of developments mapping a comprehensive field of fourth dimensional-plus (4D+) phenomena. Nor is it meant to provide the reader an inclusive overview on instances in which art, as a sui generis domain, is impacted by 4D+ phenomena. The subject of 4D+ at this point is already too massive to be properly addressed in any essay 3000 words or less. Rather, this essay is intended to serve, at minimum, as a good point of origin for further analysis and discourse on 4D+ in general and 4D+ in art today. The cited instances contained herein, of 4D+ practices and theory, operate as a curated set, selected for the purpose of demonstrating 4D+ art to be a viable, even vital, focus for artists, aestheticians and others with interests that require some comprehension of the pervasive perceptual reformation affecting the art enterprise, which arise at intersections of 4D+ and art, as such. Because this particular development (the systemic emergence of 4D+ in art) connects to broader trends in all sectors of society, the essay references some notable 4D+ phenomena outside the "art world," which in one way or another observably intertwine with art: in artistic practice and art-centric theory; at the macro-levels of the art world, e.g., in art institutions, markets, academies, criticism, funding ; and so on. Finally this essay is meant to show that the convergence of art and 4D+ is not so much reducible to any single event, but is itself a trackable, logical, organic phenomena, which has occurred over time, and will continue to do so.

In Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design, author Ellen Mueller states, "The three dimensions - height, width, and depth - are augmented in 4D design by time. It is the fourth dimension. Although we all have a basic understanding of time, there are many different definitions of this term depending on the field from which one approaches it. For our purposes, we will say that time is the progression of events and existence from the past, through the present, and into the future. One could even simply say that time refers to change." [1]

In matters pertaining to "a" or "the" 4th dimension, simplicity is rarely simple at all. The same is true for matters pertaining to art and time, especially those matters that require definitions. Recursion as a categorical mechanism for simply describing art, time or 4D is insufficient. Too much is happening at once. Too much has happened already. Even the most sophisticated predictive tools are failing. How did your weather forecaster do this month?

Art, time and 4D share an existentially uncertain conditional status with the weather. If this complex comparison (art/time/4D and the weather) seems initially hyperbolic and/or facile, consider the current "job" profile of the weatherman, in the era of climate change, which is to say, in a weather-crisis. Then ponder the polyvalent, multi-disciplinary task(s) generally assigned to "the artist," especially the professional artist navigating the "contemporary art world," which by many experts' estimation is also in an ongoing "crisis" on many fronts, whether we address art as a craft medium, an art-critical subject, a commodity for exchange, etc. Then attend to the notions of time and 4D at play across a spectrum of fields, spanning the Arts and Humanities, Science and Technology, Commerce, Government, etc.

At the personal level, how many of us are not facing a "time-crunch," a crisis we feel internally, or experience as an environmental effect, an externality, superimposed upon by a force or entity beyond our capacity to control? How many would explain that feeling is mainly a symptom of perceptual man's transition into 4D "reality?" How many people recognize the 4D systems and applications that are substantially affecting our lives (e.g., the surveillance apparatus in place in most advanced societies)? How many people know about hypercubic algorithms for data-mining? Holograms? Who's reading Faulkner these days? If 4D isn't everywhere, what is?

Simplicity is a rarity indeed, unless one intentionally brackets the scope of one's operation, whatever it might be, to exclude relevant or related, active phenomena that may not be visible unless one knows where to look. What is one seeing? How does one know how to read the "signs" for visionary meaning? Seeing and believing, much less, knowing, have never been this confused and complicated. In networked reality, which appears to be accelerating, the dynamics of simplicity are changing all the time. Our net-definitions for art reflect this condition, but it is important to recognize that what we call "art" today comprises only one facet of the human social-ordering matrix expressing dimensional change. Basically, everything we can think of, from our understanding of the cosmos to our relationships with our bodies and "selves" is undergoing profound reconfiguration, from one moment to the next. Our perspectives, our interpretive powers, whether directed at the universal or the "granular" instance, have assumed a dimensionality that dramatically extends beyond height, weight and depth into a variant abstract "space," a space in which time doesn't behave the way we presume it should, a space where even Nothing is not simply nothing. Art, too has its own Dark Matter, and it consists of the "space" in which the art world is suspended, and the great proportion of art-things and -people who are not the "stars" in the art universe, as such, are moving, living and dying, invisibly, mostly.

Humanity seems to be testing, or at least questioning, the ideations that derive from our "archive" or "database" of sense-experience accumulating from interaction with "things" over time (immemorial)- and forming new ideations. [Which hardly seems like anything out of the ordinary, process-wise. It's the lingo that's "fresh." - Milo] "Virtuality" is one such new ideation. To understand what is happening holistically, we must accept that a new dimensional ideation, such as virtuality, is also a mode, and this combinative idea-function represents a prevalent simultaneity, indicative of 4D+ phenomena. We must recognize this 4D+ quality in order to maximize the potential benefits of 4D+ as a change-force, whether we are considering 4D+ in art, for time, or the weather. Why? If we believe science, if we believe in art, a thorough analysis of our shared (present) condition indicates that our collective survival depends on our choices, individual and collective, and that those choices express change in the space connecting the past and future. And that change expresses the anthropocentric desire to survive, and concern for the quality of that survival. What kind of art, then, we may speculate, is up to that task? Can we propose an art that combines with dimensional, multidisciplinary efforts to ensure the prospects of humanity in time unfolding? Are we proposing, if not an art to "save the world" - since "the world" may or may not need/want saving at all, given the limits of our understanding of planetary processes, but recognition that planets don't share our urgency and urges - then are we conjuring an art to save ourselves in the world? Is this proposal one that facilitates the art world and the "real" world finally converging, or perhaps, re-convening for the benefit of all? If that is the case, as a reality-check, we might acknowledge that most people evidently have little faith in art's potential as a world-saver, currently. We live in a time when the President of the United States/aka "leader of the free world" neglects to visit the nation's premier public art institutions in any political or ceremonial/symbolic capacity, and US public funds for art are maintained at the subsistence level, if at all. Art is more or less operating in a public vacuum, even as its privatized, celebrity status variants consume the domain. So, in a spirit of realistic humility, can we at least recognize that for art to realize its potential as a dimensional change-agent, for art to change anything at all, including the ordinary, some things will have to change.

"Time" is a common answer to the question, "What is the fourth dimension?"

1. Ellen Mueller, Elements & Principles of 4D Art & Design, Oxford, U.K. , Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 161
2. Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, London, U.K., Pluto Press, 2011

TWELVE: ox-3000 (14 November, 2016) [One more. - PJM]

PREFACE

MAKE IT UP AS [WE] GO

CHORUS: The "art world," like many other complex sectors of society, is undergoing substantial, even radical or fundamental, platform-spanning change. Looking at art in the rearview mirror - a nod to Marshall McLuhan - art has in its history only periodically been a settled proposition, but the changes occurring in the field over, say, the past century, and then the past few decades, then the past few years, represent something of a "total" systems hack, accelerating, threatening the very notion of art as a phenomenon unfolding in a continuum, proceeding moment to moment, movement to movement, era to era, medium to medium in an orderly-ish linear pattern, like ocean waves hitting a beach. Whether the art-waves periodically grow in size, intensity - as waves do during a storm - or diminish, and, as waves tend to do on a placid day, when the swell of waters reduce to a gentle glassy calm surface motion (benign matter with fluid qualities), the ocean [of art] is still the ocean, the beach the beach, waves waves [ALL-ART]. The moon in its gravity (a centralizing sphere of proximal world "externalities," i.e. current events, general trends) forcefully affects art-wave cycles, and so do micro-weather events and conditions ("local" dynamics), as a function of topology. In the "space" of our art/wave metaphor, we envision parallel phenomena correlating in conjunction with an expansive-/ing list of factors and effects. Various elements in our set of "things" operative in art's present, but prevalent and unfolding *crisis* express (as expressive "elements") distinct qualities of either materiality (visible, tangible) or what we think of as the immaterial (invisible, intangible); further, we note elements expressive as hybrid qualities (real + virtual or abstract, etc. – e.g., the voice or representative sound made tangible as language or symbolic written word); and the total "mass" of the metaphor, or mess, if you like, or mash-up, the whole "thing" of art and whatever image of art we ascribe to art as an adequate representation, its substantiation as a project(-ion) of itself, expresses autonomously as its own element, expressive of itself, which we might describe as art and its waveform "art." Right now, art's waveform is apparent, but its original is to a degree being excluded from a working definition, "art." This anti-originality somehow translates into a status quo for the “art world.” Dimensional art, a definition that works, is being insufficiently framed as a negation of art’s object form. Mechanized, crowd-sourced “art” abandons itself as chronological objective process-phenomenon “created” through manifold 4D cause-effect systems and operators – lead by an artist. In so doing art resigns itself to the more banal practical pretenses of linear production models of managed innovation, linked inevitably to artificial time. Not only is art making itself as it goes, it is relocating, into its own parallel, distinct spatial simulacrum. It is simultaneously destroying itself, by defining its simulacrum as itself, while disappearing art’s original object form. Eventually, this art-machining scenario ends badly for us. The anti-object/Chrono-art machine will eventually consume the humanity in art, its visionary component, leaving us to pantomime practical management devoid of actual, original “content”-as-“art.” The machine-art wave is an electrified, colorless avalanche of plastic, metal, wires and waste, designed by accident to kill god and everything not-machine. Without a second negation machine is moving death-like-life, a zombie. Only with this understanding do half-right analyses of art conform to actual art trends (see Jerry Saltz plus droves of zombie-like derivatives). Vision will become only a projection of the external aspects of the anthropocene age, as a machine "muscle" memory, an artificial re-enactment of art-effects devoid of any internal quality, the humane cause of and for art. We will only have art with a meaningless time (code), and no human encoding for the project of art-making itself (as it & we go). Such is the end of the art world. And the beginning of the era of consumer-portable celebrity "art," whose extinction-ready "artists" include the likes of Drake, Mike Myers, Jay Z, Tim Burton, Bjork, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Lucy Liu, Johnny Depp, Jim Carrey, Nobel-Laureate Bob Dylan, James Franco, Rosie O'Donnell, Kim Kardashian, Marilyn Manson, Shia Labeouf, George W. Bush, Sylvester Stallone... [DRONE]

GHOST: True time is four-dimensional.

POLTERGEIST: Four-dimensional art and design refers to those practices that involve time, the fourth dimension, in some way. For the purposes of this book, we will define art as those practices whose products and experiences are to be appreciated mainly for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content, while design will be defined as practices that focus on users and work within constraints established by a client. Having noted this differentiation, it is important to immediately acknowledge the border between art and design is nebulous and overlaps a great deal in certain areas. Examples of 4D practices include motion graphics, film/video, performance art, social practice, sound art, installation, Internet art, game design, animation, and so on…[Bauhaus]…Fast-forward to the present day, and many of the most popular art and design practices - whether online videos, animated GIFs, the opening titles of a movie, flash mobs, video games, websites, and so on - embrace the use of time. The elements and principles of 4D art and design are central to our ability to create and critique contemporary art and design.

DIM TIM: Especially, in the emergent discourse of 4D art, the case is being made, in some art- and/or theory-centric circles attendant to art, that art's precessional form(s) express creative obsolescence. Whether the "real" data supports any such (presumptive) conclusion, or another conclusion, or none, since evaluation depends on sufficiency of data for the purpose of conclusion, is a considerable topic. To talk about [4D] plus art productively is possible, if the terms the "talkers-in-the-square" share possess commonality of meaning for the collective, the "circle." [See Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man register-shift + robot-build solutions for correlate.] What if art is in the new 4D reality, overwhelming the apparatus of perceptual conclusion, so that "meanings" (of art, 4D) defy sufficient recursion to yield definition? What if the "shape" of art and/or 4D can't be traced, outlined, due to art and 4D's refusing to stand still for the purpose of recursive analysis, much less determination? Where does this leave the 4D artist, the 4D art ideologian and the "viewer" [all of whom are trying to make sense of it all, trying to "catch the (art)wave," even 'surf' it], in this pivotal moment?

SPECTACLE: Sehgal is an artist whose work eviscerates any boundary between dance, choreography, human social relations, sculpture, and political economy, in the process forging new ground as one of the world’s most relevant, provocative, and puzzling cultural producers of our time. He has helped breathe new life into contemporary art by deascensioning it away from material-object-oriented culture, creating famously objectless works — what curator Jens Hoffmann famously called a “museum of dance.” His tailor-made projects investigate how myriad social relations can form the substance of an artwork beyond any static or strictly material essence. It’s a type of socially engaged practice that I have come to really appreciate in recent years, but one that Sehgal did not invent. Since the 1950s, well-known groups such as Fluxus and the Situationists, as well as more underground collectives like “Museum,” began to change how artworks could be seen as per the formatively gestural. An interesting and little-known example is the work of Raivo Puusemp, whose radical experiments with group dynamics and sociopolitical processes as a conceptual artist in 1970s eventually led him to become mayor of Rosendale, NY, whereby a lifelong project saw art fully dissolve into politics so as to become indefinable from one another. Sehgal, however, is much more subtle. He is neither strictly an artist, dancer, choreographer, or theatre-maker, and his work is increasingly difficult for curators and critics to define. This is really what I like most about his work. It’s what curator Mouna Mekouar describes as Sehgal’s ability to encompass numerous “hybrid” characteristics.

MONSTER [Trans., French>English>American]: And you can forget about reality now being something rational, because there’s nothing rational to measure it against. It’s basically operational—readymade reality, if you will...So now that we’re in this space where nothing is real, simulation begins by murdering the shit out of anything that references the real world. And what’s worse, all we’re left with is a system of signs which are even more gooey than meaning itself. A sign that represents a concept now represents everything associated with that concept.

INTERLOCUTER [Milo]: Now, in art, as in journalism, academics, industries of every description, in politics, law and war, in what we might call "personhood," even in "nature" as such, we encounter instability at depth. Precarious conditions call into question common presumptions about the "normal" relations that heretofore have shaped our reality. "Things," the meanings and values we attach to them, which in turn reveal much, not only about collective priorities, but about ourselves - fail to fulfill our expectations of thing-ness. "Self" assumes a strobing, multi-faceted affect. Perhaps most significantly, the volatile scenario developing undermines the trustworthiness of the perceptual itself, the main tool for relative self-formulation, since the dimensional means by which we normally evaluate what we perceive indicate impending collapse, and the additive pressure to the senses disables self-rationalizing mechanisms one by one or en masse. Experience is uncertain. We transfer the uncertainly from the singular, particular, granular ontology of self to the Universal, the world and everything in it. The cosmos appears all at once fungible, unmoored. The grid warps, revealing layers of twisted, entwined, convulsing grids. A veritable worm hole wherein one's/our notions of truth writhe and undulate, horrifically, not seductively. The narrative binding experience to assessment dissembles. The point of the entire project blurs. Spectacle overwhelms causation. The existential rationale splits into interstitial inertia and entropy. A trip to the beach becomes a crisis of consciousness. What next? Choice is displaced by the appeal of escape, but also by the symptoms of purposelessness, such as paralysis, madness. The Seven Deadly Sins manifest in the social as all-directional projections. The moon abandons its role in wave generation and embraces lunacy as its inductive mission. Crazy takes control of the utilitarian symbolic, even at the level of the celestial, which is as near to the divine as modern science to date will permit people to travel. Surfing must be out of the question. The first-order casualty of lost cause is freedom as aspiration. Surveillance and managed constriction in the operational manifold become mundane attachments to disrupted reality. Technology abandons its promise as time-saver and agent of future promise for humanity, instead taking on the role of Monster, and ghost, or worse, poltergeist. We accept the Panopticon as architecture for presence, or else, and this is truly the death of Vision, which is at the core of art. So, we stand at the turning point, in a scary, possibly Apocalyptic fiction (again), a virtual person-thing in flux, between shore and churning, turbulent waters, Leviathan, and wonder, "What is Art?" "Who is an Artist?" "What is art for, for whom?" As the moon falls from the sky (behind the horizon, which is not flat, but curving). - Dim Tim and Milo Santini, "We Make It Up As We Go: an un-produced, un-performed play in one act; ELECTION DAY USA," Brooklyn, NY, 8 November, 2016

∞

INTRODUCTION [Artist's Statement]

In the realms of the sensual and the "real," we stick to desire and satisfaction, too. Google "the art of" and this user generated 220,000,000 in .81 seconds. That is a lot of art(s) of ______. Yes, there is "the art of kissing," and, of course, "The Art of the Deal." Apparently, whichever kind of art one searches for, the probability of finding some "art" that fits the search is pretty darn good. Approximately two of every three Americans can search and find her or his own, unique "art of" something.

If the methodology for our analysis of the diffuse state of the arts lacks clarity by definition - Fine. Who among the experts on art can say conclusively what art today is? Assuming expert X and a straightforward definition for art. Can we expect that everyone searching for or making art (of _____) websites will agree to expert X's definition?

∞

PROPOSITIONS

Our survey will be oriented to the artist, to the art theorist, and to the art "user." To begin we can assert some provisional ideas to inform the procedure. Each is rudimentary.

THIRTEEN: Fictional-Predictability (29 November, 2016) [Back on track. - PJM]

Fictional Predictability: Civilizing {Time for the 4D Art Thing}
By Paul McLean

Introduction

In his 18 November, 2016 lecture at the Christ Church Upper Library at Oxford University, Dr. Allan Chapman spoke about the attraction of predictability for Middle Ages man, given the prevalence of the Unpredictable in most other aspects of life in that time. Dr. Chapman’s compelling analysis provides a plausible explanation for the sensation attending astronomy, which proved effective not only in measuring time, but in more accurately ordering the relative place of Earth in the universe, and explaining heavenly phenomena to the earthly spectator.

The backward-looking speculative observation and assessment by Dr. Chapman may provide clues for an artist trying to make sense of the contemporary “art world.”

FOURTEEN: Paul-McLean-Ox-EssayBETA (3 December, 2016)

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

By Paul McLean

Part ONE

1

The enduring allure of astronomy has its ancient origins in man’s urge to create predictability in a frighteningly unpredictable world, itself situated in a largely unfathomable, even chaotic-seeming, cosmos.1 Throughout history, and prior to the historical, man has invested significantly in developing sense-supplementing technologies that rationalize for man the mechanics of the universe, which we tend to render in architectural narratives.2 Measurement and calculation have proved indispensable to that end, as have the linked exercises of naming and categorization, in the service of narratives sustained by pattern recognition and consequently assigned to narrative complexes.3 Thus we have a predictable sunrise and sunset, marking with great accuracy the transit points between Night and Day, either of which (Night and Day) and both together have deep, diverse, and rich associative-narrative qualities – meaning - for people. Measurement and calculation facilitate formulation, and thus, thanks to astronomy we have a reliable planetary time-construct, a global calendar. The shared calendar makes a host of activities possible, from plane flights to skype-dates. Temporal predictability aggregates into something like comprehensive functionality, enabling global, contemporary community, and therefore, a shared consciousness rooted in timeliness. Predictable time is key to serviceable communication, movement, and production, connecting people and places separated by distance (or “space”). Establishing working “real-time” models for the various needs of people and products, networking them into integrated need-fulfilling systems, and managing efficient, “user”-satisfying outcomes (the corporate “face”) for those systems is the overarching narrative of the 20th and 21st century. 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 points back to astronomy and the “creation” of predictable time.

2

Names and categories populate and structure the database. The interplay between form and database, among other uses, fosters rationalizing and justifying narrative, which also, like calculable time, serves to order the universe, and thereby make it less fearsome, or more interesting, 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. Each zone has its own nominal, categorical qualities and propositions. For instance, future history is speculative. The past blurs, beyond some point. The present is history-happening. Yet, we can apply prediction to each zone, with varying measures of success. The database for history, if it is not identical to history, at least provides history the “motor” for memory function, in points and parameters. Persons, places, things, plus events compose the grist of more complex second-order action, such as comparison, juxtaposition, and so on, in the interests of generating utile relativity within broad narratives. Accurate analysis is dependent on the constitution of database content and the logic of 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. Lev Manovich has mapped this procedure in his data visualization practice, but the conceptual foundation is the graphical user interface (GUI), which is operationally integrative in user-machine computational processes. An astronomical precursor is the constellation, providing an opportunity for our imaginations to settle on a shared narrative. 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.”

3

The astronomical time-data instrumental in shaping historical, cultural and collective psychological narratives operates differently for science. Astronomical time is science, a product of science, a generating data for science to study, a multi-purposed factor in science’s manifold narratives, which are actually technical projects with narrative propositions and time-based proofs. The science-story of how we came to an accurate concept of ourselves relative to Earth, as one “body” in the Heavens, is a still-unfolding, clarifying Genesis-tale. Thus we have Einstein predicting black holes in 1915, and John Wheeler in 1967 applying the term to “observable” collapsed celestial bodies (- thanks, Astronomy). One element to consider, illustrating the variance between history and science narratives, is light. Is there a history of light? Certainly, the historical database for the scientific study of light is massive, vital and spans theoretical and applied wings of science. Light as a scientific subject exists on a continuum, which is not the same as an historical timeline, even if both liberally benefit from the triangulating astronomical-time. One consistent feature of all three frameworks in this configuration or model (historical and scientific, relative to astronomical time) is “the urge to make predictable.” Considering astronomical time-data as a continuum “creates” an opportunity to think of the Enlightenment as a metaphor relative to a knowledge of light subject to change with each additional bit of light-science. This proposed discourse extends to art, especially on topics like “New (electrified, or light-emitting) Media” and “Old” or “analog” art (light-reflecting).

4

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. 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 of 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 have come a long way over time. “Dimensional” can be used to indicate that something is complex in its composition and effects. Peter Drucker applied the term to society in that manner. There are other dimensions of the dimensional that can cause cross-disciplinary confusion. For instance, 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 facts, using arbitrary systems. 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 absorption and containment. What does this mean for art?

Part TWO

5

In the politics of the US and UK, 2016 was a bad year for predictability. The election of Donald Trump as President and the “Brexit” referendum represent outcomes that 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 is that the failure to accurately predict these important political events has increased skepticism for political expert/poll-based prediction generally, and the bad turn for prediction as such has produced a general state of chaotic anxiety in the affected populations. A concurrent meme, pushed by President-elect Trump during his campaign, is that the system is rigged, a meme that resonated with voters. We do have fairly recent, interesting, if not exact analogs for the scenario, in the domains of digital-time and calendar-time, with respect to predictive failure. One is “Y2K,” and the other is the End of the World/Mayan Calendar (December, 2012). Both of these episodes 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 thought – incorrectly, as it turned out - predicted the date and time of the world’s and therefore our demise. Such incidents reinforce the notion that man tends to make idiosyncratically apocalyptic projections, based on misapprehensions of machine time and “time machines” - a calendar in this case. Also, systemic social breakdown is exacerbated by predictive failure. Moreover, at critical moments, our reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may have the side effect of producing anxiety in people, whether the outcome(s) were as-predicted, or not, as with “deadlines.”

6

A painting or sculpture is a kind of time machine. The argument for this assertion is fairly complex, but also self-evident. Consider the Ghent Altarpiece, through a 4D analytic lens, and we have a prototypical case supporting the assertion. Thanks to a wealth of data, gathered over centuries, attaching to the famous multi-panel painting, we have numerous angles by which we can conduct a 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 the art and artist(s). We can discuss the changes that occur in a painting over time, a discussion enriched due to the conservation program the Ghent Altarpiece is currently undergoing. Because of the antiquity of the painting, we can discuss the morphology of symbolism over time, with respect to meaning for the viewer at different points in a painting existence. In the metaphysical discourse on painting, we may confront the idea of timelessness for art, or a painting’s spectral qualities of contemporaneity. Further, in the domain of media theory, we can site a discussion of digital and camera-based versions of the original altarpiece, and 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 time for the altarpiece. We could create a number of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on appearances of its image over time on the web. And so on.

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)

Earlier in the lecture:

            “But may we take Being, may we take time, as matters? They are not matters if “matter” means: something which is. The word “matter,” “a matter,” should mean for us now what is decisively at stake in that something inevitable is concealed within it. Being – a matter, presumably the matter of thinking.” (p. 4/15)

8

In “Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts,” Dean Keith Simonton states, on the subject of temporal stability:

“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, as a function of individuals combining to form collective, as a particular body in a body-like group formulation, is the urge to novelty. The second urge is more like a need, an urge with a driving sense of urgency. In art markets, we find evidence of strategies and tactics designed to satisfy both urges consecutively, and in more complex, hybridic types of art, simultaneously. 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.” Real time, digital time, clock-time, timelines, deadlines, end-times, etc., can be made visible in nodes, within individual object-forms, in vignettes. Operative time can invisibly determine format of the seen, as in the projected film, which can co-exist in a space that contains “traditional” light-reflecting objects. In art today, the novel and the predictable can appear – and disappear – together, if the exhibition is re-assigned to the hypercubic modality of continuum, absent a negation of the first three dimensions and their means for representation and reciprocal translation. This phenomenal development is actually mainstreamed at the Venice Biennale in a fair percentage of its pavilions, and more or less by accident at major art fairs. However, best practices are still located in less-sprawling environments, presenting the work of advanced 4D-practitioners and collectives. The better examples transcend the correlates of predictability and novelty, which are risk aversion (fear) and the aggressive venting of pent-up fear, expressed as a reaction against superimposed predictability (fear-management).

9

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.

So, we come to what’s at stake: the inevitable collapse of the database, as a binary-mechanical replacement for history; but more to the point, the failure of predictability and novelty as a cyclic container for fear of the for now not-known and unknowable. Essentially, this failure is the failure of language and narrative to create a useful, practicable fiction that is more powerful than the Real, as a cosmic function affecting each of us in particular, often painfully, unexpectedly. 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. Art and artist do not have to play along, and realism is a proper means by which art and artist can approach experience. The medium for this artistic intervention is the gift-exchange, which is a kind of time-release device. Fortunately this modus operandi permits artists to collaborate with scientists on a service basis, that is approximately formal equality. We see this occurring in the academy, e.g., at MIT Media Lab and in other types of programs, including Oxford DPhil in Fine Art, but this is simply a reframing of the ancient project of art-science, which converges in architecture and in mechanical design. The Parthenon is on a 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 precursors throughout the past century. “Equality” in that context is more an ethically-blurry ellipsis-fiction, but the promise for the future of man, as McLuhan and Fuller indicated, is real. There are many, many more benign examples outside the macro-narratives of art-tech, relegated to dark matter of promotional history. Possibly mankind’s only hope for survival exists in a humane collaboration of art and science, moderated by enlightened neo-philosophy. Beyond the arc of fear-driven civilization, and its addiction to predictability and novelty, art-science-philosophy may manage to sketch a horizon that connects the real and imaginary, to form a cosmos that agrees with the one we inhabit. At which point we may choose to conduct our affairs in conjunction with our vision of everything, and quit wasting time on fallible, false versions of the original. This is the proper practicum for virtuality and impetus for hybrid – actual + artificial – systems, especially expressive ones.

10

Author’s Note:

The text above has all the makings of a good 4D collective art project. Such a project could integrate material from each of the resources referenced into a range of new media and analog formats, in surprising ways. In short, 4D art practice offers a proven-better alternative to the inevitable, fearsome collapse of massive, predictive data-systems, which are undermined by the “user’s” demand for novelty. The imaginary scenario attaching to absorption, which is a close relative of out-of-control consumption, is the cyclic programmatic crisis of civilization [the predictable End]. The architecture for 4D art is the multi-use facility, which is actually “self-aware” in its proper disposition for its network of things [infinite(ly) beginning(s)]. It is the safer alternative to “the Internet of Things,” which is susceptible, as we witnessed recently to massive breakdown with serious implications for society, from a security perspective. The 4D model can only be hacked in the most benevolent meaning of that tech-term. 4D art exists to be enjoyably hacked, cracked, copied, redeployed, etc. It is the ultimate aspiration-expression of the open-source idea. When (or if) the “art world” embraces 4D, the destructive code of civilization can effectively be overwritten. It will be a viral thing. At that point art will not be traded like a slave anymore. That is how we will know it happened already. The event, a turning point, will have not occurred in the same phenomenological hemisphere as the predictable. It will have lived past its novelty before anyone noticed. And people will enjoy it, because apprehension will not have attended the opening. Or, that is the conjecture - which can and has been proved, true.

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.

FIFTEEN: Paul-McLean-Ox-EssayBETA1 (4 December, 2016)

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

By Paul McLean

Part ONE

1

The enduring allure of astronomy has its ancient origins in man’s urge to create predictability in a frighteningly unpredictable world, itself situated in a largely unfathomable, even chaotic-seeming, cosmos. Throughout history, and prior to the historical, man has invested significantly in developing sense-supplementing technologies that rationalize for man the mechanics of the universe, which we tend to render in architectural narratives. Measurement and calculation have proved indispensable to that end, as have the linked exercises of naming and categorization, in the service of narratives sustained by pattern recognition and consequently assigned to narrative complexes. Thus we have a predictable sunrise and sunset, marking with great accuracy the transit points between Night and Day, either of which (Night and Day) and both together have deep, diverse, and rich associative-narrative qualities – meaning - for people. Measurement and calculation facilitate formulation, and thus, thanks to astronomy we have a reliable planetary time-construct, a global calendar. The shared calendar makes a host of activities possible, from plane flights to skype-dates. Temporal predictability aggregates into something like comprehensive functionality, enabling global, contemporary community, and therefore, a shared consciousness rooted in timeliness. Predictable time is key to serviceable communication, movement, and production, connecting people and places separated by distance (or “space”). Establishing working “real-time” models for the various needs of people and products, networking them into integrated need-fulfilling systems, and managing efficient, “user”-satisfying outcomes (the corporate “face”) for those systems is the overarching narrative of the 20th and 21st century. 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 points back to astronomy and the “creation” of predictable time.

2

Names and categories populate and structure the database. The interplay between form and database, among other uses, fosters rationalizing and justifying narrative, which also, like calculable time, serves to order the universe, and thereby make it less fearsome, or more interesting, 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. Each zone has its own nominal, categorical qualities and propositions. For instance, future history is speculative. The past blurs, beyond some point. The present is history-happening. Yet, we can apply prediction to each zone, with varying measures of success. The database for history, if it is not identical to history, at least provides history the “motor” for memory function, in points and parameters. Persons, places, things, plus events compose the grist of more complex second-order action, such as comparison, juxtaposition, and so on, in the interests of generating utile relativity within broad narratives. Accurate analysis is dependent on the constitution of database content and the logic of 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. Lev Manovich has mapped this procedure in his data visualization practice, but the conceptual foundation is the graphical user interface (GUI), which is operationally integrative in user-machine computational processes. An astronomical precursor is the constellation, providing an opportunity for our imaginations to settle on a shared narrative. 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.”

3

The astronomical time-data instrumental in shaping historical, cultural and collective psychological narratives operates differently for science. Astronomical time is science, a product of science, a generating data for science to study, a multi-purposed factor in science’s manifold narratives, which are actually technical projects with narrative propositions and time-based proofs. The science-story of how we came to an accurate concept of ourselves relative to Earth, as one “body” in the Heavens, is a still-unfolding, clarifying Genesis-tale. Thus we have Einstein predicting black holes in 1915, and John Wheeler in 1967 applying the term to “observable” collapsed celestial bodies (- thanks, Astronomy). One element to consider, illustrating the variance between history and science narratives, is light. Is there a history of light? Certainly, the historical database for the scientific study of light is massive, vital and spans theoretical and applied wings of science. Light as a scientific subject exists on a continuum, which is not the same as an historical timeline, even if both liberally benefit from the triangulating astronomical-time. One consistent feature of all three frameworks in this configuration or model (historical and scientific, relative to astronomical time) is “the urge to make predictable.” Considering astronomical time-data as a continuum “creates” an opportunity to think of the Enlightenment as a metaphor relative to a knowledge of light subject to change with each additional bit of light-science. This proposed discourse extends to art, especially on topics like “New (electrified, or light-emitting) Media” and “Old” or “analog” art (light-reflecting).

4

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. 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 of 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 have come a long way over time. “Dimensional” can be used to indicate that something is complex in its composition and effects. Peter Drucker applied the term to society in that manner. There are other dimensions of the dimensional that can cause cross-disciplinary confusion. For instance, 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 facts, using arbitrary systems. 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 absorption and containment. What does this mean for art?

Part TWO

5

In the politics of the US and UK, 2016 was a bad year for predictability. The election of Donald Trump as President and the “Brexit” referendum represent outcomes that 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 is that the failure to accurately predict these important political events has increased skepticism for political expert/poll-based prediction generally, and the bad turn for prediction as such has produced a general state of chaos, anxiety in the affected populations. A concurrent meme, pushed by President-elect Trump during his campaign, is that the system is rigged, a meme that resonated with voters. We do have fairly recent, interesting, if not exact analogs for the scenario, in the domains of digital-time and calendar-time, with respect to predictive failure. One is “Y2K,” and the other is the End of the World/Mayan Calendar (December, 2012). Both of these episodes 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 thought – incorrectly, as it turned out - predicted the date and time of the world’s and therefore our demise. Such incidents reinforce the notion that man tends to make idiosyncratically apocalyptic projections, based on misapprehensions of machine time and “time machines” - a calendar in this case. Also, systemic social breakdown is exacerbated by predictive failure. Moreover, at critical moments, our reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may have the side effect of producing chaos in society and anxiety in people, whether the outcome(s) were as-predicted, or not, as with “deadlines.”

6

A painting or sculpture is a kind of time machine. The argument for this assertion is fairly complex, but also self-evident. The Ghent Altarpiece, through a 4D analytic lens, is a prototypical case supporting the assertion. Thanks to a wealth of data, gathered over centuries, attaching to the famous multi-panel painting, we have numerous angles by which we can conduct a 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 the art and artist(s). We can discuss the changes that occur in a painting over time, a discussion enriched due to the conservation program the Ghent Altarpiece is currently undergoing. 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 the metaphysical discourse on painting, we may utilize the altarpiece to confront the idea of timelessness for art, orpainting’s spectral quality of contemporaneity, and its inherent memory bias. Further, in the domain of media theory, we can site a discussion of digital and camera-based versions of the original altarpiece, and 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 time for the altarpiece. We could create a number of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on image-appearances over time on the web. And so on.

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)

Earlier in the lecture:

            “But may we take Being, may we take time, as matters? They are not matters if “matter” means: something which is. The word “matter,” “a matter,” should mean for us now what is decisively at stake in that something inevitable is concealed within it. Being – a matter, presumably the matter of thinking.” (p. 4/15)

8

In “Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts,” Dean Keith Simonton states, on the subject of temporal stability:

“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, as a function of individuals combining to form collective, as a particular body in a body-like group formulation, is the urge to novelty. The second urge is more like a need, an urge with a driving sense of urgency. In art markets, we find evidence of strategies and tactics designed to satisfy both urges consecutively, and in more complex, hybridic types of art, simultaneously. 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.” Real time, digital time, clock-time, timelines, deadlines, end-times, etc., can be made visible in nodes, within individual object-forms, in vignettes. Operative time can invisibly determine format of the seen, as in the projected film, which can co-exist in a space that contains “traditional” light-reflecting objects. In art today, the novel and the predictable can appear – and disappear – together, if the exhibition is re-assigned to the hypercubic modality of continuum, absent a negation of the first three dimensions and their means for representation and reciprocal translation. This phenomenal development is actually mainstreamed at the Venice Biennale in a fair percentage of its pavilions, and more or less by accident at major art fairs. However, best practices are still located in less-sprawling environments, presenting the work of advanced 4D-practitioners and collectives. The better examples transcend the correlates of predictability and novelty, which are risk aversion (fear) and the aggressive venting of pent-up fear, expressed as a reaction against superimposed predictability (fear-management).

9

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.

So, we come to what’s at stake: the inevitable collapse of the database, as a binary-mechanical replacement for history; but more to the point, the failure of predictability and novelty as a cyclic container for fear of the for now not-known and unknowable. Essentially, this failure is the failure of language and narrative to create a useful, practicable fiction that is more powerful than the Real, as a cosmic function affecting each of us in particular, often painfully, unexpectedly. 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. Art and artist do not have to play along, and realism is a proper means by which art and artist can approach experience. The medium for this artistic intervention is the gift-exchange, which is a kind of time-release device. Fortunately this modus operandi permits artists to collaborate with scientists on a service basis, that is approximately formal equality. We see this occurring in the academy, e.g., at MIT Media Lab and in other types of less-formal, but still effective, interdisciplinary programs, including Oxford DPhil in Fine Art, but this is simply a reframing of the ancient project of art-science, which converges in architecture and in mechanical design. The Parthenon is on a 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 precursors throughout the past century. “Equality” in that context is more an ethically-blurry ellipsis-fiction, but the promise for the future of man, as McLuhan and Fuller indicated, is real. There are many, many more benign examples outside the macro-narratives of art-tech, relegated to dark matter of promotional history. Possibly mankind’s only hope for survival exists in a humane collaboration of art and science, moderated by enlightened neo-philosophy. Beyond the arc of fear-driven civilization, and its addiction to predictability and novelty, art-science-philosophy may manage to sketch a horizon that connects the real and imaginary, to form a cosmos that agrees with the one we inhabit. At which point we may choose to conduct our affairs in conjunction with our vision of everything, and quit wasting time on fallible, false versions of the original. This is the proper practicum for virtuality and impetus for hybrid – actual + artificial – systems, especially expressive ones.

10

Author’s Note:

The text above has all the makings of a good 4D collective art project. Such a project could integrate material from each of the resources referenced into a range of new media and analog formats, in surprising ways. In short, 4D art practice offers a proven-better alternative to the inevitable, fearsome collapse of massive, predictive data-systems, which are undermined by the “user’s” demand for novelty. The imaginary scenario attaching to absorption, which is a close relative of out-of-control consumption, is the cyclic programmatic crisis of civilization [the predictable End]. The architecture for 4D art is the multi-use facility, which is actually “self-aware” in its proper disposition for its network of things [infinite(ly) beginning(s)]. It is the safer alternative to “the Internet of Things,” which is susceptible, as we witnessed recently to massive breakdown with serious implications for society, from a security perspective. The 4D model can only be hacked in the most benevolent meaning of that tech-term. 4D art exists to be enjoyably hacked, cracked, copied, redeployed, etc. It is the ultimate aspiration-expression of the open-source idea. When (or if) the “art world” embraces 4D, the destructive code of civilization can effectively be overwritten. It will be a viral thing. At that point art will not be traded like a slave anymore. That is how we will know it happened already. The event, a turning point, will have not occurred in the same phenomenological hemisphere as the predictable. It will have lived past its novelty before anyone noticed. And people will enjoy it, because apprehension will not have attended the opening. Or, that is the conjecture - which can and has been proved, true.

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.

SIXTEEN: Paul-McLean-Ox-EssayBETA2 (4 December, 2016)

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

By Paul McLean

Part ONE

1

The enduring allure of astronomy has its ancient origins in man’s urge to create predictability in a frighteningly unpredictable world, itself situated in a largely unfathomable, even chaotic-seeming, cosmos.1 Throughout history, and prior to the historical, man has invested significantly in developing sense-supplementing technologies that rationalize for man the mechanics of the universe, which we tend to render in architectural narratives. Measurement and calculation have proved indispensable to that end, as have the linked exercises of naming and categorization, in the service of narratives sustained by pattern recognition and consequently assigned to narrative complexes.2 Thus we have a predictable sunrise and sunset, marking with great accuracy the transit points between Night and Day, either of which (Night and Day) and both together have deep, diverse, and rich associative-narrative qualities – meaning - for people. Measurement and calculation facilitate formulation, and thus, thanks to astronomy we have a reliable planetary time-construct, a global calendar. Synchronization makes a host of activities possible, from plane flights to skype-dates. Temporal predictability aggregates into something like comprehensive functionality, enabling global, contemporary community, and therefore, a shared consciousness rooted in timeliness. Predictable time is key to serviceable communication, movement, and production, connecting people and places separated by distance (or “space”). Establishing working “real-time” models for the various needs of people and products, networking them into integrated need-fulfilling systems, and managing efficient, “user”-satisfying outcomes (the corporate “face”) for those systems is the overarching narrative of the 20th and 21st century. 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 points back to astronomy and the “creation” of predictable time.

2

Names and categories populate and structure the database. The interplay between form and database, among other uses, fosters rationalizing and justifying narrative, which also, like calculable time, serves to order the universe, and thereby make it less fearsome, or more interesting, 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. Each zone has its own nominal, categorical qualities and propositions. For instance, future history is speculative. The past blurs, beyond some point. The present is history-happening. Yet, we can apply prediction to each zone, with varying measures of success. The database for history, if it is not identical to history, at least provides history the “motor” for memory function, in points and parameters. Persons, places, things, plus events compose the grist of more complex second-order action, such as comparison, juxtaposition, and so on, in the interests of generating utile relativity within broad narratives. Accurate analysis is dependent on the constitution of database content and the logic of 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. Lev Manovich has mapped this procedure in his data visualization practice, but the conceptual foundation is the graphical user interface (GUI), which is operationally integrative in user-machine computational processes. An astronomical precursor is the constellation, providing an opportunity for our imaginations to settle on a shared narrative. 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.”

3

The astronomical time-data instrumental in shaping historical, cultural and collective psychological narratives operates differently for science. Astronomical time is science, a product of science, a generating data for science to study, a multi-purposed factor in science’s manifold narratives, which are actually technical projects with narrative propositions and time-based proofs. The science-story of how we came to an accurate concept of ourselves relative to Earth, as one “body” in the Heavens, is a still-unfolding, clarifying Genesis-tale. Thus we have Einstein predicting black holes in 1915, and John Wheeler in 1967 applying the term to “observable” collapsed celestial bodies (- thanks, Astronomy). One element to consider, illustrating the variance between history and science narratives, is light. Is there a history of light? Certainly, the historical database for the scientific study of light is massive, vital and spans theoretical and applied wings of science. Light as a scientific subject exists on a continuum, which is not the same as an historical timeline, even if both liberally benefit from the triangulating astronomical-time. One consistent feature of all three frameworks in this configuration or model (historical and scientific, relative to astronomical time) is “the urge to make predictable.” Considering astronomical time-data as a continuum “creates” an opportunity to think of the Enlightenment as a metaphor relative to a knowledge of light subject to change with each additional bit of light-science. This proposed discourse extends to art, especially on topics like “New (electrified, or light-emitting) Media” and “Old” or “analog” art (light-reflecting).

4

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. 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 of 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 have come a long way over time. “Dimensional” can be used to indicate that something is complex in its composition and effects. Peter Drucker applied the term to society in that manner. There are other dimensions of the dimensional that can cause cross-disciplinary confusion. For instance, 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 facts, using arbitrary systems. 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 absorption and containment. What does this mean for art?

Part TWO

5

In the politics of the US and UK, 2016 was a bad year for predictability. The election of Donald Trump as President and the “Brexit” referendum represent outcomes that 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 is that the failure to accurately predict these important political events has increased skepticism for political expert/poll-based prediction generally, and the bad turn for prediction as such has produced a general state of chaotic anxiety in the affected populations. A concurrent meme, pushed by President-elect Trump during his campaign, is that the system is rigged, a meme that resonated with voters. We do have fairly recent, interesting, if not exact analogs for the scenario, in the domains of digital-time and calendar-time, with respect to predictive failure. One is “Y2K,” and the other is the End of the World/Mayan Calendar (December, 2012). Both of these episodes 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 thought – incorrectly, as it turned out - predicted the date and time of the world’s and therefore our demise. Such incidents reinforce the notion that man tends to make idiosyncratically apocalyptic projections, based on misapprehensions of machine time and “time machines” - a calendar in this case. Also, systemic social breakdown is exacerbated by predictive failure. Moreover, at critical moments, our reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may have the side effect of producing anxiety in people, and societal chaos, whether the outcome(s) were as-predicted, or not, as with “deadlines.”

6

A painting or sculpture is a kind of time machine. The argument for this assertion is fairly complex, but also self-evident. Consider the Ghent Altarpiece, through a 4D analytic lens, and we have a prototypical case supporting the assertion. Thanks to a wealth of data, gathered over centuries, attaching to the famous multi-panel painting, we have numerous angles by which we can conduct a 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 the art and artist(s). We can discuss the changes that occur in a painting over time, a discussion enriched due to the conservation program the Ghent Altarpiece is currently undergoing. Because of the antiquity of the painting, we can discuss the morphology of symbolism over time, with respect to meaning for the viewer at different points in a painting existence. In the metaphysical discourse on painting, we may confront the idea of timelessness for art, or a painting’s spectral qualities of contemporaneity. Further, in the domain of media theory, we can site a discussion of digital and camera-based versions of the original altarpiece, and 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 time for the altarpiece. We could create a number of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on appearances of its image over time on the web. And so on.

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)

Earlier in the lecture:

            “But may we take Being, may we take time, as matters? They are not matters if “matter” means: something which is. The word “matter,” “a matter,” should mean for us now what is decisively at stake in that something inevitable is concealed within it. Being – a matter, presumably the matter of thinking.” (p. 4/15)

8

In “Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts,” Dean Keith Simonton states, on the subject of temporal stability:

“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, as a function of individuals combining to form collective, as a particular body in a body-like group formulation, is the urge to novelty. The second urge is more like a need, an urge with a driving sense of urgency. In art markets, we find evidence of strategies and tactics designed to satisfy both urges consecutively, and in more complex, hybridic types of art, simultaneously. 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.” Real time, digital time, clock-time, timelines, deadlines, end-times, etc., can be made visible in nodes, within individual object-forms, in vignettes. Operative time can invisibly determine format of the seen, as in the projected film, which can co-exist in a space that contains “traditional” light-reflecting objects. In art today, the novel and the predictable can appear – and disappear – together, if the exhibition is re-assigned to the hypercubic modality of continuum, absent a negation of the first three dimensions and their means for representation and reciprocal translation. This phenomenal development is actually mainstreamed at the Venice Biennale in a fair percentage of its pavilions, and more or less by accident at major art fairs. However, best practices are still located in less-sprawling environments, presenting the work of advanced 4D-practitioners and collectives. The better examples transcend the correlates of predictability and novelty, which are risk aversion (fear) and the aggressive venting of pent-up fear, expressed as a reaction against superimposed predictability (fear-management).

9

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.

So, we come to what’s at stake: the inevitable collapse of the database, as a binary-mechanical replacement for history; but more to the point, the failure of predictability and novelty as a cyclic container for fear of the for now not-known and unknowable. Essentially, this failure is the failure of language and narrative to create a useful, practicable fiction that is more powerful than the Real, as a cosmic function affecting each of us in particular, often painfully, unexpectedly. 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. Art and artist do not have to play along, and realism is a proper means by which art and artist can approach experience. The medium for this artistic intervention is the gift-exchange, which is a kind of time-release device. Fortunately this modus operandi permits artists to collaborate with scientists on a service basis, that is approximately formal equality. We see this occurring in the academy, e.g., at MIT Media Lab and in other types of programs, including Oxford DPhil in Fine Art, but this is simply a reframing of the ancient project of art-science, which converges in architecture and in mechanical design. The Parthenon is on a 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 precursors throughout the past century. “Equality” in that context is more an ethically-blurry ellipsis-fiction, but the promise for the future of man, as McLuhan and Fuller indicated, is real. There are many, many more benign examples outside the macro-narratives of art-tech, relegated to dark matter of promotional history. Possibly mankind’s only hope for survival exists in a humane collaboration of art and science, moderated by enlightened neo-philosophy. Beyond the arc of fear-driven civilization, and its addiction to predictability and novelty, art-science-philosophy may manage to sketch a horizon that connects the real and imaginary, to form a cosmos that agrees with the one we inhabit. At which point we may choose to conduct our affairs in conjunction with our vision of everything, and quit wasting time on fallible, false versions of the original. This is the practicum for virtuality and impetus for hybrid – actual + artificial – systems, especially expressive ones.

10

The “organ” separating the conjecture and its realization is a “skin.” The conceptual “project” is like a tattoo on that 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.

1. An obverse correlate, an intrinsic versus extrinsic phenomenon, would be Lascaux Cave, which extends to a reevaluation of the the Ideal in Plato's “Cave,” by that metaphysical construct's juxtaposition with Lascaux – or Chauvet, etc. - Cave itself, the paintings, the post-”discovery” interventions and the replication of the cave, which constitutes a simulation and simulacra, and the derivative media, with critical conjectures, interpretations (anthropological, archaeological, aesthetic, etc.), plus scientific data and attaching diagnostics and theories. For orientation, the author suggests K. Willsher, 'Hi-tech replica to bring prehistoric art of Lascaux within reach', The Guardian, 3 December 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/dec/03/hi-tech-lascaux-caves-prehistoric-sistine-chapel (accessed 3 December 2016) and J. Nechvatal, Immersion Into Noise, published by Open Humanities Press in conjunction with the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office. Ann Arbor. 2011, .pp. 65-89. Joseph's meditation, which at one point addresses Plato directly, informs a counterbalancing perspective on the time-related star-gazing vision mapped in this essay, a subterranean noise-vision co-existing with the outer-directed meaning-seeking of astronomers astro-physicists, etc. Nechvatal's analysis situates man's urges in a very different framework, one that complements the (external) cosmological allure with an underground, internal one, aligned with sonic/physical rather than visual/intellectual sense apparatuses. For a synthetic correlate, consider the September 2015 breakthrough via Advanced LIGO, which verified the existence of Einstein's speculation, proving that gravitational waves emitted when two black holes converge could be documented, a profound narrative of which can be found in Janna Levin's Black Hole Blues: And Other Songs From Outer Space. The urge-loop, intrinsic/extrinsic, sonic/visual eventually come together, a happening that is facilitated by a variegated “genius” that is collectivized in a multi-faceted scientific collective project.
2. “Time for the 4D Art Thing” has all the makings of a good 4D collective art project. Such a project could integrate material from each of the resources referenced into a range of new media and analog formats, in surprising ways. In short, 4D art practice offers a proven-better alternative to the inevitable, fearsome collapse of massive, predictive data-systems, which are undermined by the “user’s” demand for novelty. The imaginary scenario attaching to absorption, which is a close relative of out-of-control consumption, is the cyclic programmatic crisis of civilization [the predictable End]. The architecture for 4D art is the multi-use facility, which is actually “self-aware” in its proper disposition for its network of things [infinite(ly) beginning(s)]. It is the safer alternative to “the Internet of Things,” which is susceptible, as we witnessed recently to massive breakdown with serious implications for society, from a security perspective. The 4D model can only be hacked in the most benevolent meaning of that tech-term. 4D art exists to be enjoyably hacked, cracked, copied, redeployed, etc. It is the ultimate aspiration-expression of the open-source idea. When (or if) the “art world” embraces 4D, the destructive code of civilization can effectively be overwritten. It will be a viral thing. At that point art will not be traded like a slave anymore. That is how we will know it happened already. The event, a turning point, will have not occurred in the same phenomenological hemisphere as the predictable. It will have lived past its novelty before anyone noticed. And people will enjoy it, because apprehension will not have attended the opening. Or, that is the conjecture - which can and has been proved, true.

SEVENTEEN: Time for the 4D Art Thing (30 November, 2016) [Geez, sorry again. - PJM]

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

By Paul McLean

Part ONE

The enduring allure of astronomy has its ancient origins in man’s urge to create predictability in a frighteningly unpredictable world, itself situated in a largely unfathomable, even chaotic-seeming, cosmos. Throughout history, and prior to the historical, man has invested significantly in developing sense-supplementing technologies that rationalize for man the mechanics of the universe, which we tend to render in anthropocentric architectural narratives. Measurement and calculation have proved indispensable to that end, as have the linked exercises of naming and categorization, in the service of narratives sustained by pattern recognition and consequently assigned to flattening narrative complexes. Thus we have a predictable sunrise and sunset, marking with great accuracy the transit points between Night and Day, either of which (Night and Day) and both together have deep, diverse, and rich associative-narrative qualities – meaning - for people. Measurement and calculation facilitate formulation, and thus, thanks to astronomy we have a reliable planetary time-construct, a global calendar. The shared calendar makes a host of activities possible, from plane flights to skype-dates. Temporal predictability aggregates into something like comprehensive functionality, enabling global, contemporary community, and therefore, a shared consciousness rooted in timeliness. Predictable time is key to serviceable communication, movement, and production, connecting people and places separated by distance (or “space”). Establishing working “real-time” models for the various needs of people and products, networking them into integrated need-fulfilling systems, and managing efficient, “user”-satisfying outcomes (the corporate “face”) for those systems is the overarching narrative of the 20th and 21st century. 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 points back to astronomy and the “creation” of predictable time.

Names and categories populate and structure the database. The interplay between form and database, among other uses, fosters rationalizing and justifying narrative, which also, like calculable time, serves to order the universe, and thereby make it less fearsome, or more interesting, 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. Each zone has its own nominal, categorical qualities and propositions. For instance, future history is speculative. The past blurs, beyond some point. The present is history-happening. Yet, we can apply prediction to each zone, with varying measures of success. The database for history, if it is not identical to history, at least provides history the “motor” for memory function, in points and parameters. Persons, places, things, plus events compose the grist of more complex second-order action, such as comparison, juxtaposition, and so on, in the interests of generating utile relativity within broad narratives. Accurate analysis is dependent on the constitution of database content and the logic of 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. Lev Manovich has mapped this procedure in his data visualization practice, but the conceptual foundation is the graphical user interface (GUI), which is operationally integrative in user-machine computational processes. An astronomical precursor is the constellation, providing an opportunity for our imaginations to settle on a shared narrative. 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.”

The astronomical time-data instrumental in shaping historical, cultural and collective psychological narratives operates differently for science. Astronomical time is science, a product of science, a generating data for science to study, a multi-purposed factor in science’s manifold narratives, which are actually technical projects with narrative propositions and time-based proofs. The science-story of how we came to an accurate concept of ourselves relative to Earth, as one “body” in the Heavens, is a still-unfolding, clarifying Genesis-tale. Thus we have Einstein predicting black holes in 1915, and John Wheeler in 1967 applying the term to “observable” collapsed celestial bodies (- thanks, Astronomy). One element to consider, illustrating the variance between history and science narratives, is light. Is there a history of light? Certainly, the historical database for the scientific study of light is massive, vital and spans theoretical and applied wings of science. Light as a scientific subject exists on a continuum, which is not the same as an historical timeline, even if both liberally benefit from the triangulating astronomical-time. One consistent feature of all three frameworks in this configuration or model (historical and scientific, relative to astronomical time) is “the urge to make predictable.” Considering astronomical time-data as a continuum “creates” an opportunity to think of the Enlightenment as a metaphor relative to a knowledge of light subject to change with each additional bit of light-science. This proposed discourse extends to art, especially on topics like “New (electrified, or light-emitting) Media” and “Old” or “analog” art (light-reflecting).

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. 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 of 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 have come a long way over time. “Dimensional” can be used to indicate that something is complex in its composition and effects. Peter Drucker applied the term to society in that manner. There are other dimensions of the dimensional that can cause cross-disciplinary confusion. For instance, 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 facts, using arbitrary systems. 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 absorption and containment. What does this mean for art?

Part TWO

In the politics of the US and UK, 2016 was a bad year for predictability. The election of Donald Trump as President and the “Brexit” referendum represent outcomes that 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 is that the failure to accurately predict these important political events has increased skepticism for political expert/poll-based prediction generally, and the bad turn for prediction as such has produced a general state of chaotic anxiety in the affected populations. A concurrent meme, pushed by President-elect Trump during his campaign, is that the system is rigged, a meme that resonated with voters. We do have fairly recent, interesting, if not exact analogs for the current scenario, in the domains of digital- or machine-time and calendar-time, with respect to predictive failure. One is “Y2K,” and the other is the End of the World/Mayan Calendar (December, 2012). Both of these episodes 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 thought – incorrectly, as it turned out - predicted the date and time of the world’s, and therefore our, demise. Such incidents reinforce the notion that man tends to make idiosyncratically apocalyptic projections, based on misapprehensions of machine time and “time machines” - a calendar in this case. Also, systemic social breakdown is exacerbated by predictive failure. Moreover, at critical moments, our reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may have the side effect of producing anxiety in people, whether the outcome(s) were as-predicted, or not, as with “deadlines.”

A painting or sculpture is a kind of time machine. The argument for this assertion is fairly complex, but also self-evident. Consider the Ghent Altarpiece, through a 4D analytic lens, and you have a prototypical case supporting the assertion. Thanks to a wealth of data, gathered over centuries, attaching to the famous multi-panel painting, we have numerous angles by which we can conduct a time-and-art discourse, using the altarpiece as our prime, centralizing reference, or point of origin. For instance, we can talk about the relative lifetimes of the art and artist(s). We can discuss the changes that occur in a painting over time, a discussion enriched due to the conservation program the Ghent Altarpiece is currently undergoing. Because of the antiquity of the painting, we can discuss the morphology of symbolism over time, with respect to meaning for the viewer at different points in a painting existence. In the metaphysical discourse on painting, we may confront the idea of timelessness for art, or a painting’s spectral qualities of contemporaneity. Further, in the domain of media theory, we can site a discussion of digital and camera-based versions of the original altarpiece, and 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 time for the altarpiece. We could create a number of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on appearances of its image over time on the web. And so on. [I fancy the Altarpiece as an encoded predictive metaphor for the election and inauguration of Donald Trump for US President – the source material for the next Tom Hanks/Robert Langdon film. -PJM]

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)

Earlier in the lecture:

“But may we take Being, may we take time, as matters? They are not matters if “matter” means: something which is. The word “matter,” “a matter,” should mean for us now what is decisively at stake in that something inevitable is concealed within it. Being – a matter, presumably the matter of thinking.” (p. 4/15)

In “Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts,” Dean Keith Simonton states, on the subject of temporal stability:

“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, as a function of individuals combining to form collective, as a particular body in a body-like group formulation, is the urge to novelty. The second urge is more like a need, an urge with a driving sense of urgency. In art markets, we find evidence of strategies and tactics designed to satisfy both urges consecutively, and in more complex, hybridic types of art, simultaneously. 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.” Real time, digital time, clock-time, timelines, deadlines, end-times, etc., can be made visible in nodes, within individual object-forms, in vignettes. Operative time can invisibly determine format of the seen, as in the projected film, which can co-exist in a space that contains “traditional” light-reflecting objects. In art today, the novel and the predictable can appear – and disappear – together, if the exhibition is re-assigned to the hypercubic modality of continuum, absent a negation of the first three dimensions and their means for representation and reciprocal translation. This phenomenal development is actually mainstreamed at the Venice Biennale in a fair percentage of its pavilions, and more or less by accident at major art fairs. However, best practices are still located in less-sprawling environments, presenting the work of advanced 4D-practitioners and collectives. The better examples transcend the correlates of predictability and novelty, which are risk aversion (fear) and the aggressive venting of pent-up fear, expressed as a reaction against superimposed predictability (fear-management).

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.

So, we come to what’s at stake: the inevitable collapse of the database, as a binary-mechanical replacement for history; but more to the point, the failure of predictability and novelty as a cyclic container for fear of the for now not-known and unknowable. Essentially, this failure is the failure of language and narrative to create a useful, practicable fiction that is more powerful than the Real, as a cosmic function affecting each of us in particular, often painfully, unexpectedly. 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. Art and artist do not have to play along, and realism is a appropriate means by which art and artist can approach experience. The medium for this artistic intervention is the gift-exchange, which is a kind of time-release device. Fortunately this modus operandi (technique) permits artists to collaborate with scientists on a service basis, that approximates formal equality. We see this occurring in the academy, e.g., at MIT Media Lab and in other types of programs, including Oxford DPhil in Fine Art, but this is simply a reframing of the ancient project of art-science, which converges in architecture and in mechanical design. The Parthenon is on a throughput that connects to da Vinci (e.g., in Vitruvian Man, etc.), to Muybridge-Eakins-Taylor, to the proliferating corporate creativity programs such as IBM Creatives with precursors throughout the past century. “Equality” in that context is more an ethically-blurry ellipsis-fiction, like the neo-vernacular “creativity” for corporate users, but the promise for the future of man, as McLuhan and Fuller indicated, is real. There are many, many more benign examples outside the macro-narratives of art-tech, relegated to the dark matter of promotional history. Possibly mankind’s only hope for survival exists in a humane collaboration of art and science, moderated by enlightened neo-philosophy. Beyond the arc of fear-driven civilization, and its addiction to predictability and novelty, art-science-philosophy may collaborate to sketch a horizon that connects the real and imaginary, to “form” a virtual cosmos that agrees, harmonizes with the one we actually inhabit. At which point we may choose to conduct our affairs in conjunction with our vision of everything, and quit wasting time on weaponized, fallible, false versions of the original. This is the proper practicum for virtuality and basic impetus for hybrid – actual + artificial – systems, especially expressive ones.

Author’s Note:

The text above has all the makings of a good 4D collective art project. Such a project could integrate material from each of the resources referenced into a range of new media and analog formats, in surprising ways. In short, 4D art practice offers an alternative to the inevitable, fearsome collapse of massive, predictive data-systems, which are consistently undermined by the “user’s” demand for novelty. The imaginary scenario attaching to absorption, which is a close relative of out-of-control consumption, plays out in the cyclic programmatic crisis of civilization [the predictable End]. The architecture for 4D art is the multi-use facility, which is actually “self-aware” in its rational – not rationalizing - disposition for any network of all-things [infinite(ly) beginning(s)]. It is the safer alternative to “the Internet of Things,” which (the IoT) is susceptible, as we witnessed recently, to massive breakdown with serious implications for society, from a security perspective. The 4D model can only be hacked in the most nostalgic, benevolent meaning of that once-wonky tech-term. 4D art exists to be enjoyably hacked, cracked, copied, redeployed, etc. It is the ultimate aspiration-expression of the open-source idea. When (or if) the “art world” embraces 4D, the destructive code of civilization can effectively be overwritten. It will be a viral thing. At that point art will not be traded like a slave anymore. That is how we will know it happened already. The event, a turning point, will have not occurred in the same phenomenological hemisphere as the predictable. It will have lived past its novelty before anyone noticed. And people will enjoy it, because apprehension will not have attended the opening. Or, that is the conjecture - which can and has been proved, true.

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 reflect freely on It-All, to think about It (in peace).

DRAFT TWO

EIGHTEEN: Paul-McLean-Ox3000-d2-1 (9 December, 2016)

At length, we have a predictable sunrise and sunset. Predetermination and prediction are not identical, however, and man confuses the two, maybe as an inevitable side-effect of knowing with great accuracy the transit points separating Night and Day. Perhaps this construct is a kernel of drama, both comic and tragic. Night/Day generationally collects a binary-association narrative – meaning – in the imagination. We have instincts for both. Measurement and calculation facilitate formulation, and thus, thanks to astronomy we have a reliable planetary time-construct, a global calendar. The shared calendar makes a host of activities possible, from plane flights to skype-dates. Temporal predictability aggregates into something like comprehensive functionality, enabling global, contemporary community, and therefore, a shared consciousness rooted in timeliness. Predictable time is key to serviceable communication, movement, and production, connecting people and places separated by distance (or “space”). Establishing working “real-time” models for the various needs of people and products, networking them into integrated need-fulfilling systems, and managing efficient, “user”-satisfying outcomes (the corporate “face”) for those systems is the overarching narrative of the 20th and 21st century. 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 points back to astronomy and the “creation” of predictable time.

2

Names and categories populate and structure the database. The interplay between form and database, among other uses, fosters rationalizing and justifying narrative, which also, like calculable time, serves to order the universe, and thereby make it less fearsome, or more interesting, 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. Each zone has its own nominal, categorical qualities and propositions. For instance, future history is speculative. The past blurs, beyond some point. The present is history-happening. Yet, we can apply prediction to each zone, with varying measures of success. The database for history, if it is not identical to history, at least provides history the “motor” for memory function, in points and parameters. Persons, places, things, plus events compose the grist of more complex second-order action, such as comparison, juxtaposition, and so on, in the interests of generating utile relativity within broad narratives. Accurate analysis is dependent on the constitution of database content and the logic of 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. Lev Manovich has mapped this procedure in his data visualization practice, but the conceptual foundation is the graphical user interface (GUI), which is operationally integrative in user-machine computational processes. An astronomical precursor is the constellation, providing an opportunity for our imaginations to settle on a shared narrative. 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.”

3

The astronomical time-data instrumental in shaping historical, cultural and collective psychological narratives operates differently for science. Astronomical time is science, a product of science, a generating data for science to study, a multi-purposed factor in science’s manifold narratives, which are actually technical projects with narrative propositions and time-based proofs. The science-story of how we came to an accurate concept of ourselves relative to Earth, as one “body” in the Heavens, is a still-unfolding, clarifying Genesis-tale. Thus we have Einstein predicting black holes in 1915, and John Wheeler in 1967 applying the term to “observable” collapsed celestial bodies (- thanks, Astronomy). One element to consider, illustrating the variance between history and science narratives, is light. Is there a history of light? Certainly, the historical database for the scientific study of light is massive, vital and spans theoretical and applied wings of science. Light as a scientific subject exists on a continuum, which is not the same as an historical timeline, even if both liberally benefit from the triangulating astronomical-time. One consistent feature of all three frameworks in this configuration or model (historical and scientific, relative to astronomical time) is “the urge to make predictable.” Considering astronomical time-data as a continuum “creates” an opportunity to think of the Enlightenment as a metaphor relative to a knowledge of light subject to change with each additional bit of light-science. This proposed discourse extends to art, especially on topics like “New (electrified, or light-emitting) Media” and “Old” or “analog” art (light-reflecting).

4

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. 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 of 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 have come a long way over time. “Dimensional” can be used to indicate that something is complex in its composition and effects. Peter Drucker applied the term to society in that manner. There are other dimensions of the dimensional that can cause cross-disciplinary confusion. For instance, 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 facts, using arbitrary systems. 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 absorption and containment. What does this mean for art?

Part TWO

5

In the politics of the US and UK, 2016 was a bad year for predictability. The election of Donald Trump as President and the “Brexit” referendum represent outcomes that 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 is that the failure to accurately predict these important political events has increased skepticism for political expert/poll-based prediction generally, and the bad turn for prediction as such has produced a general state of chaos, anxiety in the affected populations. A concurrent meme, pushed by President-elect Trump during his campaign, is that the system is rigged, a meme that resonated with voters. We do have fairly recent, interesting, if not exact analogs for the scenario, in the domains of digital-time and calendar-time, with respect to predictive failure. One is “Y2K,” and the other is the End of the World/Mayan Calendar (December, 2012). Both of these episodes 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 thought – incorrectly, as it turned out - predicted the date and time of the world’s and therefore our demise. Such incidents reinforce the notion that man tends to make idiosyncratically apocalyptic projections, based on misapprehensions of machine time and “time machines” - a calendar in this case. Also, systemic social breakdown is exacerbated by predictive failure. Moreover, at critical moments, our reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may have the side effect of producing chaos in society and anxiety in people, whether the outcome(s) were as-predicted, or not, as with “deadlines.”

6

A painting or sculpture is a kind of time machine. The argument for this assertion is fairly complex, but also self-evident. The Ghent Altarpiece, through a 4D analytic lens, is a prototypical case supporting the assertion. Thanks to a wealth of data, gathered over centuries, attaching to the famous multi-panel painting, we have numerous angles by which we can conduct a 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 the art and artist(s). We can discuss the changes that occur in a painting over time, a discussion enriched due to the conservation program the Ghent Altarpiece is currently undergoing. 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 the metaphysical discourse on painting, we may utilize the altarpiece to confront the idea of timelessness for art, orpainting’s spectral quality of contemporaneity, and its inherent memory bias. Further, in the domain of media theory, we can site a discussion of digital and camera-based versions of the original altarpiece, and 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 time for the altarpiece. We could create a number of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on image-appearances over time on the web. And so on.

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)

Earlier in the lecture:

            “But may we take Being, may we take time, as matters? They are not matters if “matter” means: something which is. The word “matter,” “a matter,” should mean for us now what is decisively at stake in that something inevitable is concealed within it. Being – a matter, presumably the matter of thinking.” (p. 4/15)

8

In “Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts,” Dean Keith Simonton states, on the subject of temporal stability:

“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, as a function of individuals combining to form collective, as a particular body in a body-like group formulation, is the urge to novelty. The second urge is more like a need, an urge with a driving sense of urgency. In art markets, we find evidence of strategies and tactics designed to satisfy both urges consecutively, and in more complex, hybridic types of art, simultaneously. 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.” Real time, digital time, clock-time, timelines, deadlines, end-times, etc., can be made visible in nodes, within individual object-forms, in vignettes. Operative time can invisibly determine format of the seen, as in the projected film, which can co-exist in a space that contains “traditional” light-reflecting objects. In art today, the novel and the predictable can appear – and disappear – together, if the exhibition is re-assigned to the hypercubic modality of continuum, absent a negation of the first three dimensions and their means for representation and reciprocal translation. This phenomenal development is actually mainstreamed at the Venice Biennale in a fair percentage of its pavilions, and more or less by accident at major art fairs. However, best practices are still located in less-sprawling environments, presenting the work of advanced 4D-practitioners and collectives. The better examples transcend the correlates of predictability and novelty, which are risk aversion (fear) and the aggressive venting of pent-up fear, expressed as a reaction against superimposed predictability (fear-management).

9

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.

So, we come to what’s at stake: the inevitable collapse of the database, as a binary-mechanical replacement for history; but more to the point, the failure of predictability and novelty as a cyclic container for fear of the for now not-known and unknowable. Essentially, this failure is the failure of language and narrative to create a useful, practicable fiction that is more powerful than the Real, as a cosmic function affecting each of us in particular, often painfully, unexpectedly. 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. Art and artist do not have to play along, and realism is a proper means by which art and artist can approach experience. The medium for this artistic intervention is the gift-exchange, which is a kind of time-release device. Fortunately this modus operandi permits artists to collaborate with scientists on a service basis, that is approximately formal equality. We see this occurring in the academy, e.g., at MIT Media Lab and in other types of less-formal, but still effective, interdisciplinary programs, including Oxford DPhil in Fine Art, but this is simply a reframing of the ancient project of art-science, which converges in architecture and in mechanical design. The Parthenon is on a 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 precursors throughout the past century. “Equality” in that context is more an ethically-blurry ellipsis-fiction, but the promise for the future of man, as McLuhan and Fuller indicated, is real. There are many, many more benign examples outside the macro-narratives of art-tech, relegated to dark matter of promotional history. Possibly mankind’s only hope for survival exists in a humane collaboration of art and science, moderated by enlightened neo-philosophy. Beyond the arc of fear-driven civilization, and its addiction to predictability and novelty, art-science-philosophy may manage to sketch a horizon that connects the real and imaginary, to form a cosmos that agrees with the one we inhabit. At which point we may choose to conduct our affairs in conjunction with our vision of everything, and quit wasting time on fallible, false versions of the original. This is the proper practicum for virtuality and impetus for hybrid – actual + artificial – systems, especially expressive ones.

10

Author’s Note:

The text above has all the makings of a good 4D collective art project. Such a project could integrate material from each of the resources referenced into a range of new media and analog formats, in surprising ways. In short, 4D art practice offers a proven-better alternative to the inevitable, fearsome collapse of massive, predictive data-systems, which are undermined by the “user’s” demand for novelty. The imaginary scenario attaching to absorption, which is a close relative of out-of-control consumption, is the cyclic programmatic crisis of civilization [the predictable End]. The architecture for 4D art is the multi-use facility, which is actually “self-aware” in its proper disposition for its network of things [infinite(ly) beginning(s)]. It is the safer alternative to “the Internet of Things,” which is susceptible, as we witnessed recently to massive breakdown with serious implications for society, from a security perspective. The 4D model can only be hacked in the most benevolent meaning of that tech-term. 4D art exists to be enjoyably hacked, cracked, copied, redeployed, etc. It is the ultimate aspiration-expression of the open-source idea. When (or if) the “art world” embraces 4D, the destructive code of civilization can effectively be overwritten. It will be a viral thing. At that point art will not be traded like a slave anymore. That is how we will know it happened already. The event, a turning point, will have not occurred in the same phenomenological hemisphere as the predictable. It will have lived past its novelty before anyone noticed. And people will enjoy it, because apprehension will not have attended the opening. Or, that is the conjecture - which can and has been proved, true.

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.

NINETEEN: Paul-McLean-Ox3000-d2 (9 December, 2016)

This is the problem of predictable fiction: analytic FOMO, a reaction to asymmetric narrative-shift producing systemic overwhelm, when the system is arbitrary in its organization around the concrete demands of stability and security.

4

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. 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 of 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 have come a long way over time. “Dimensional” can be used to indicate that something is complex in its composition and effects. Peter Drucker applied the term to society in that manner. There are other dimensions of the dimensional that can cause cross-disciplinary confusion. For instance, 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 facts, using arbitrary systems. 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 absorption and containment. What does this mean for art?

Part TWO

5

In the politics of the US and UK, 2016 was a bad year for predictability. The election of Donald Trump as President and the “Brexit” referendum represent outcomes that 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 is that the failure to accurately predict these important political events has increased skepticism for political expert/poll-based prediction generally, and the bad turn for prediction as such has produced a general state of chaos, anxiety in the affected populations. A concurrent meme, pushed by President-elect Trump during his campaign, is that the system is rigged, a meme that resonated with voters. We do have fairly recent, interesting, if not exact analogs for the scenario, in the domains of digital-time and calendar-time, with respect to predictive failure. One is “Y2K,” and the other is the End of the World/Mayan Calendar (December, 2012). Both of these episodes 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 thought – incorrectly, as it turned out - predicted the date and time of the world’s and therefore our demise. Such incidents reinforce the notion that man tends to make idiosyncratically apocalyptic projections, based on misapprehensions of machine time and “time machines” - a calendar in this case. Also, systemic social breakdown is exacerbated by predictive failure. Moreover, at critical moments, our reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may have the side effect of producing chaos in society and anxiety in people, whether the outcome(s) were as-predicted, or not, as with “deadlines.”

6

A painting or sculpture is a kind of time machine. The argument for this assertion is fairly complex, but also self-evident. The Ghent Altarpiece, through a 4D analytic lens, is a prototypical case supporting the assertion. Thanks to a wealth of data, gathered over centuries, attaching to the famous multi-panel painting, we have numerous angles by which we can conduct a 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 the art and artist(s). We can discuss the changes that occur in a painting over time, a discussion enriched due to the conservation program the Ghent Altarpiece is currently undergoing. 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 the metaphysical discourse on painting, we may utilize the altarpiece to confront the idea of timelessness for art, orpainting’s spectral quality of contemporaneity, and its inherent memory bias. Further, in the domain of media theory, we can site a discussion of digital and camera-based versions of the original altarpiece, and 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 time for the altarpiece. We could create a number of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on image-appearances over time on the web. And so on.

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)

Earlier in the lecture:

            “But may we take Being, may we take time, as matters? They are not matters if “matter” means: something which is. The word “matter,” “a matter,” should mean for us now what is decisively at stake in that something inevitable is concealed within it. Being – a matter, presumably the matter of thinking.” (p. 4/15)

8

In “Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts,” Dean Keith Simonton states, on the subject of temporal stability:

“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, as a function of individuals combining to form collective, as a particular body in a body-like group formulation, is the urge to novelty. The second urge is more like a need, an urge with a driving sense of urgency. In art markets, we find evidence of strategies and tactics designed to satisfy both urges consecutively, and in more complex, hybridic types of art, simultaneously. 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.” Real time, digital time, clock-time, timelines, deadlines, end-times, etc., can be made visible in nodes, within individual object-forms, in vignettes. Operative time can invisibly determine format of the seen, as in the projected film, which can co-exist in a space that contains “traditional” light-reflecting objects. In art today, the novel and the predictable can appear – and disappear – together, if the exhibition is re-assigned to the hypercubic modality of continuum, absent a negation of the first three dimensions and their means for representation and reciprocal translation. This phenomenal development is actually mainstreamed at the Venice Biennale in a fair percentage of its pavilions, and more or less by accident at major art fairs. However, best practices are still located in less-sprawling environments, presenting the work of advanced 4D-practitioners and collectives. The better examples transcend the correlates of predictability and novelty, which are risk aversion (fear) and the aggressive venting of pent-up fear, expressed as a reaction against superimposed predictability (fear-management).

9

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.

So, we come to what’s at stake: the inevitable collapse of the database, as a binary-mechanical replacement for history; but more to the point, the failure of predictability and novelty as a cyclic container for fear of the for now not-known and unknowable. Essentially, this failure is the failure of language and narrative to create a useful, practicable fiction that is more powerful than the Real, as a cosmic function affecting each of us in particular, often painfully, unexpectedly. 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. Art and artist do not have to play along, and realism is a proper means by which art and artist can approach experience. The medium for this artistic intervention is the gift-exchange, which is a kind of time-release device. Fortunately this modus operandi permits artists to collaborate with scientists on a service basis, that is approximately formal equality. We see this occurring in the academy, e.g., at MIT Media Lab and in other types of less-formal, but still effective, interdisciplinary programs, including Oxford DPhil in Fine Art, but this is simply a reframing of the ancient project of art-science, which converges in architecture and in mechanical design. The Parthenon is on a 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 precursors throughout the past century. “Equality” in that context is more an ethically-blurry ellipsis-fiction, but the promise for the future of man, as McLuhan and Fuller indicated, is real. There are many, many more benign examples outside the macro-narratives of art-tech, relegated to dark matter of promotional history. Possibly mankind’s only hope for survival exists in a humane collaboration of art and science, moderated by enlightened neo-philosophy. Beyond the arc of fear-driven civilization, and its addiction to predictability and novelty, art-science-philosophy may manage to sketch a horizon that connects the real and imaginary, to form a cosmos that agrees with the one we inhabit. At which point we may choose to conduct our affairs in conjunction with our vision of everything, and quit wasting time on fallible, false versions of the original. This is the proper practicum for virtuality and impetus for hybrid – actual + artificial – systems, especially expressive ones.

10

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.

TWENTY: Paul-McLeanOx3000-d3 (12 December, 2016)

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

By Paul McLean

Part ONE

1

The enduring allure of astronomy has its ancient origins in man’s urge to create predictability in a frighteningly unpredictable world, itself situated in a largely unfathomable, even chaotic-seeming, cosmos.1 Throughout history, and prior to the historical, man has invested significantly in developing sense-supplementing technologies that rationalize for man the mechanics of the universe, which we tend to render in architectural narratives. Measurement and calculation have proved indispensable to that end, as have the linked exercises of naming and categorization, in the service of narratives sustained by pattern recognition and consequently assigned to narrative complexes.2 Thus we have a predictable sunrise and sunset, marking with great accuracy the transit points between Night and Day, either of which (Night and Day) and both together have deep, diverse, and rich associative-narrative qualities – meaning - for people. Measurement and calculation facilitate formulation, and thus, thanks to astronomy we have a reliable planetary time-construct, a global calendar. Synchronization makes a host of activities possible, from plane flights to skype-dates. Temporal predictability aggregates into something like comprehensive functionality, enabling global, contemporary community, and therefore, a shared consciousness rooted in timeliness. Predictable time is key to serviceable communication, movement, and production, connecting people and places separated by distance (or “space”). Establishing working “real-time” models for the various needs of people and products, networking them into integrated need-fulfilling systems, and managing efficient, “user”-satisfying outcomes (the corporate “face”) for those systems is the overarching narrative of the 20th and 21st century. 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 points back to astronomy and the “creation” of predictable time.

2

Names and categories populate and structure the database. The interplay between form and database, among other uses, fosters rationalizing and justifying narrative, which also, like calculable time, serves to order the universe, and thereby make it less fearsome, or more interesting, 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. Each zone has its own nominal, categorical qualities and propositions. For instance, future history is speculative. The past blurs, beyond some point. The present is history-happening. Yet, we can apply prediction to each zone, with varying measures of success. The database for history, if it is not identical to history, at least provides history the “motor” for memory function, in points and parameters. Persons, places, things, plus events compose the grist of more complex second-order action, such as comparison, juxtaposition, and so on, in the interests of generating utile relativity within broad narratives. Accurate analysis is dependent on the constitution of database content and the logic of 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. Lev Manovich has mapped this procedure in his data visualization practice, but the conceptual foundation is the graphical user interface (GUI), which is operationally integrative in user-machine computational processes. An astronomical precursor is the constellation, providing an opportunity for our imaginations to settle on a shared narrative. 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.”

3

The astronomical time-data instrumental in shaping historical, cultural and collective psychological narratives operates differently for science. Astronomical time is science, a product of science, a generating data for science to study, a multi-purposed factor in science’s manifold narratives, which are actually technical projects with narrative propositions and time-based proofs. The science-story of how we came to an accurate concept of ourselves relative to Earth, as one “body” in the Heavens, is a still-unfolding, clarifying Genesis-tale. Thus we have Einstein predicting black holes in 1915, and John Wheeler in 1967 applying the term to “observable” collapsed celestial bodies (- thanks, Astronomy). One element to consider, illustrating the variance between history and science narratives, is light. Is there a history of light? Certainly, the historical database for the scientific study of light is massive, vital and spans theoretical and applied wings of science. Light as a scientific subject exists on a continuum, which is not the same as an historical timeline, even if both liberally benefit from the triangulating astronomical-time. One consistent feature of all three frameworks in this configuration or model (historical and scientific, relative to astronomical time) is “the urge to make predictable.” Considering astronomical time-data as a continuum “creates” an opportunity to think of the Enlightenment as a metaphor relative to a knowledge of light subject to change with each additional bit of light-science. This proposed discourse extends to art, especially on topics like “New (electrified, or light-emitting) Media” and “Old” or “analog” art (light-reflecting).

4

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. 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 of 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 have come a long way over time. “Dimensional” can be used to indicate that something is complex in its composition and effects. Peter Drucker applied the term to society in that manner. There are other dimensions of the dimensional that can cause cross-disciplinary confusion. For instance, 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 facts, using arbitrary systems. 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 absorption and containment. What does this mean for art?

Part TWO

5

In the politics of the US and UK, 2016 was a bad year for predictability. The election of Donald Trump as President and the “Brexit” referendum represent outcomes that 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 is that the failure to accurately predict these important political events has increased skepticism for political expert/poll-based prediction generally, and the bad turn for prediction as such has produced a general state of chaotic anxiety in the affected populations. A concurrent meme, pushed by President-elect Trump during his campaign, is that the system is rigged, a meme that resonated with voters. We do have fairly recent, interesting, if not exact analogs for the scenario, in the domains of digital-time and calendar-time, with respect to predictive failure. One is “Y2K,” and the other is the End of the World/Mayan Calendar (December, 2012). Both of these episodes 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 thought – incorrectly, as it turned out - predicted the date and time of the world’s and therefore our demise. Such incidents reinforce the notion that man tends to make idiosyncratically apocalyptic projections, based on misapprehensions of machine time and “time machines” - a calendar in this case. Also, systemic social breakdown is exacerbated by predictive failure. Moreover, at critical moments, our reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may have the side effect of producing anxiety in people, and societal chaos, whether the outcome(s) were as-predicted, or not, as with “deadlines.”

6

A painting or sculpture is a kind of time machine. The argument for this assertion is fairly complex, but also self-evident. Consider the Ghent Altarpiece, through a 4D analytic lens, and we have a prototypical case supporting the assertion. Thanks to a wealth of data, gathered over centuries, attaching to the famous multi-panel painting, we have numerous angles by which we can conduct a 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 the art and artist(s). We can discuss the changes that occur in a painting over time, a discussion enriched due to the conservation program the Ghent Altarpiece is currently undergoing. Because of the antiquity of the painting, we can discuss the morphology of symbolism over time, with respect to meaning for the viewer at different points in a painting existence. In the metaphysical discourse on painting, we may confront the idea of timelessness for art, or a painting’s spectral qualities of contemporaneity. Further, in the domain of media theory, we can site a discussion of digital and camera-based versions of the original altarpiece, and 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 time for the altarpiece. We could create a number of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on appearances of its image over time on the web. And so on.

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)

Earlier in the lecture:

            “But may we take Being, may we take time, as matters? They are not matters if “matter” means: something which is. The word “matter,” “a matter,” should mean for us now what is decisively at stake in that something inevitable is concealed within it. Being – a matter, presumably the matter of thinking.” (p. 4/15)

8

In “Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts,” Dean Keith Simonton states, on the subject of temporal stability:

“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, as a function of individuals combining to form collective, as a particular body in a body-like group formulation, is the urge to novelty. The second urge is more like a need, an urge with a driving sense of urgency. In art markets, we find evidence of strategies and tactics designed to satisfy both urges consecutively, and in more complex, hybridic types of art, simultaneously. 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.” Real time, digital time, clock-time, timelines, deadlines, end-times, etc., can be made visible in nodes, within individual object-forms, in vignettes. Operative time can invisibly determine format of the seen, as in the projected film, which can co-exist in a space that contains “traditional” light-reflecting objects. In art today, the novel and the predictable can appear – and disappear – together, if the exhibition is re-assigned to the hypercubic modality of continuum, absent a negation of the first three dimensions and their means for representation and reciprocal translation. This phenomenal development is actually mainstreamed at the Venice Biennale in a fair percentage of its pavilions, and more or less by accident at major art fairs. However, best practices are still located in less-sprawling environments, presenting the work of advanced 4D-practitioners and collectives. The better examples transcend the correlates of predictability and novelty, which are risk aversion (fear) and the aggressive venting of pent-up fear, expressed as a reaction against superimposed predictability (fear-management).

9

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.

So, we come to what’s at stake: the inevitable collapse of the database, as a binary-mechanical replacement for history; but more to the point, the failure of predictability and novelty as a cyclic container for fear of the for now not-known and unknowable. Essentially, this failure is the failure of language and narrative to create a useful, practicable fiction that is more powerful than the Real, as a cosmic function affecting each of us in particular, often painfully, unexpectedly. 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. Art and artist do not have to play along, and realism is a proper means by which art and artist can approach experience. The medium for this artistic intervention is the gift-exchange, which is a kind of time-release device. Fortunately this modus operandi permits artists to collaborate with scientists on a service basis, that is approximately formal equality. We see this occurring in the academy, e.g., at MIT Media Lab and in other types of programs, including Oxford DPhil in Fine Art, but this is simply a reframing of the ancient project of art-science, which converges in architecture and in mechanical design. The Parthenon is on a 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 precursors throughout the past century. “Equality” in that context is more an ethically-blurry ellipsis-fiction, but the promise for the future of man, as McLuhan and Fuller indicated, is real. There are many, many more benign examples outside the macro-narratives of art-tech, relegated to dark matter of promotional history. Possibly mankind’s only hope for survival exists in a humane collaboration of art and science, moderated by enlightened neo-philosophy. Beyond the arc of fear-driven civilization, and its addiction to predictability and novelty, art-science-philosophy may manage to sketch a horizon that connects the real and imaginary, to form a cosmos that agrees with the one we inhabit. At which point we may choose to conduct our affairs in conjunction with our vision of everything, and quit wasting time on fallible, false versions of the original. This is the practicum for virtuality and impetus for hybrid – actual + artificial – systems, especially expressive ones.

TWENTY-ONE: Paul-McLean-Ox3000-d4 (13 December, 2016)

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

By Paul McLean

Part ONE

1

The enduring allure of astronomy has its ancient origins in man’s urge to create predictability in a fraught, fearsome world and mysterious cosmos. Throughout history, and prior to the historical, man has invested significantly in developing sense-supplementing technologies that for man rationalize the universe, which we tend to consequently render in mechanical, architectural narratives. Measurement and calculation have proved indispensable to that end, as have the linked exercises of naming and categorization, provisioning systematic, cosmological narratives buttressed by pattern recognition. The output of the process are self-reinforcing, contextual narrative complexes that organize the universe in specific to general loops, within which humanity has a fear-modulating sense consciousness of orderly place and logical time. Thus we have a predictable sunrise and sunset, created by hybridized arts-science, marking with great accuracy the transit points between Night and Day, either of which and both together have associative-narrative qualities – i.e., imaginary meaning - for people living on a contingent basis. Measurement and calculation facilitate formulation, and thus, thanks to astronomy in collaboration with a consortium of disciplines over time, we have a reliable planetary time-construct, a global calendar. The shared calendar makes a host of contemporary activities possible, from plane flights to skype-dates. Temporal predictability aggregates into something like comprehensive functionality, enabling a peculiar type of global, contemporary, tech-enabled “community,” and therefore, a shared awareness cum “sharing economy” rooted in timeliness. Predictable time is key to serviceable communication, movement, and production, connecting people and places separated by distance (or “space”). Establishing working “real-time” models for the various needs of people and products, networking them into integrated need-fulfilling systems, and managing efficient, “user”-satisfying outcomes (the corporate “face”) for those systems is the overarching narrative of the 20th and 21st century. 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 points back to astronomy and the “creation” of predictable time, functions in the present as a contractual sublimation of our fear of uncertainly, and, looking ahead, embraces the powerful database. The “it” in “all of it” is a non- or artificial human-like object, which may or may not be art, depending on how we define or do not define “art.” Or – and this is an alternative “option” outside the binary conjunction – we can commit to art being itself, with the understanding that this radical assumption may upend the entire cosmology of conception, and/or simultaneously harmonize it.

2

Names and categories populate and structure the database. 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 make it less fearsome, albeit more 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. Each zone has its own nominal, categorical qualities and propositions. For instance, future-history is speculative. History in the past tense blurs, beyond some malleable, fungible point. The present is history-happening-now-& now-& now... Yet, we can apply prediction to each zone, with varying measures of success. 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 parameters. 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 comprehensive narratives. Accurate analysis “on the back-end” is dependent on the constitution of database content and the logic of 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. Lev Manovich has mapped this procedure in his data visualization practice, but the conceptual foundation for data-viz is the graphical user interface (GUI), which is integrative for computational processes and applications with soft-/hard-/wetware modality. An astronomical precursor is the constellation, an opportunity for our interpretive imaginations to configure a shared narrative organizing visual big-data. 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.” Is there a universal “image” that applies to and in all facets of these complex systems, including the user, and is the “image” Time? In this speculation, does time usurp the image and become the only use-Object?

3

This is the problem of predictable fiction: analytic FOMO, a reaction to asymmetric narrative-shift producing systemic overwhelm, when the system is arbitrary in its organization around the concrete demands of stability and security. Thus 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). From a 4D perspective, however, any such progressive narrative thread presents an opportunity for rupture of inherent linear illusions, sited at the point that predictive hindsight stipulates or purchases a factual territory for historical inevitability. To propose 4D rupturing discourse in history and science is to apply inertia on the matter of light extensive to art. Art reciprocally collaborates with science and history in the domain of objects and the objective. In the case of light, 4D art affirms light's reformation inclusive of the sonic, especially in the tense practical discourses on “New (electrified, or light-emitting) Media” and “Old” or “analog” art (light-reflecting) made congruent in sound-environments. 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. Are we leaving anything else out, if we don't turn out the lights and listen? [TIME]

4

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. 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 of 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 have come a long way over time. “Dimensional” can be used to indicate that something is complex in its composition and effects. Peter Drucker applied the term to society in that manner. There are other dimensions of the dimensional that can cause cross-disciplinary confusion. For instance, 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 facts, using arbitrary systems. 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 absorption and containment. What does this mean for art?

Part TWO

5

In the politics of the US and UK, 2016 was a bad year for predictability. The election of Donald Trump as President and the “Brexit” referendum represent outcomes that 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 is that the failure to accurately predict these important political events has increased skepticism for political expert/poll-based prediction generally, and the bad turn for prediction as such has produced a general state of chaos, anxiety in the affected populations. A concurrent meme, pushed by President-elect Trump during his campaign, is that the system is rigged, a meme that resonated with voters. We do have fairly recent, interesting, if not exact analogs for the scenario, in the domains of digital-time and calendar-time, with respect to predictive failure. One is “Y2K,” and the other is the End of the World/Mayan Calendar (December, 2012). Both of these episodes 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 thought – incorrectly, as it turned out - predicted the date and time of the world’s and therefore our demise. Such incidents reinforce the notion that man tends to make idiosyncratically apocalyptic projections, based on misapprehensions of machine time and “time machines” - a calendar in this case. Also, systemic social breakdown is exacerbated by predictive failure. Moreover, at critical moments, our reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may have the side effect of producing chaos in society and anxiety in people, whether the outcome(s) were as-predicted, or not, as with “deadlines.”

6

A painting or sculpture is a kind of time machine. The argument for this assertion is fairly complex, but also self-evident. The Ghent Altarpiece, through a 4D analytic lens, is a prototypical case supporting the assertion. Thanks to a wealth of data, gathered over centuries, attaching to the famous multi-panel painting, we have numerous angles by which we can conduct a 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 the art and artist(s). We can discuss the changes that occur in a painting over time, a discussion enriched due to the conservation program the Ghent Altarpiece is currently undergoing. 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 the metaphysical discourse on painting, we may utilize the altarpiece to confront the idea of timelessness for art, orpainting’s spectral quality of contemporaneity, and its inherent memory bias. Further, in the domain of media theory, we can site a discussion of digital and camera-based versions of the original altarpiece, and 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 time for the altarpiece. We could create a number of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on image-appearances over time on the web. And so on.

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)

Earlier in the lecture:

            “But may we take Being, may we take time, as matters? They are not matters if “matter” means: something which is. The word “matter,” “a matter,” should mean for us now what is decisively at stake in that something inevitable is concealed within it. Being – a matter, presumably the matter of thinking.” (p. 4/15)

8

In “Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts,” Dean Keith Simonton states, on the subject of temporal stability:

“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, as a function of individuals combining to form collective, as a particular body in a body-like group formulation, is the urge to novelty. The second urge is more like a need, an urge with a driving sense of urgency. In art markets, we find evidence of strategies and tactics designed to satisfy both urges consecutively, and in more complex, hybridic types of art, simultaneously. 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.” Real time, digital time, clock-time, timelines, deadlines, end-times, etc., can be made visible in nodes, within individual object-forms, in vignettes. Operative time can invisibly determine format of the seen, as in the projected film, which can co-exist in a space that contains “traditional” light-reflecting objects. In art today, the novel and the predictable can appear – and disappear – together, if the exhibition is re-assigned to the hypercubic modality of continuum, absent a negation of the first three dimensions and their means for representation and reciprocal translation. This phenomenal development is actually mainstreamed at the Venice Biennale in a fair percentage of its pavilions, and more or less by accident at major art fairs. However, best practices are still located in less-sprawling environments, presenting the work of advanced 4D-practitioners and collectives. The better examples transcend the correlates of predictability and novelty, which are risk aversion (fear) and the aggressive venting of pent-up fear, expressed as a reaction against superimposed predictability (fear-management).

9

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.

So, we come to what’s at stake: the inevitable collapse of the database, as a binary-mechanical replacement for history; but more to the point, the failure of predictability and novelty as a cyclic container for fear of the for now not-known and unknowable. Essentially, this failure is the failure of language and narrative to create a useful, practicable fiction that is more powerful than the Real, as a cosmic function affecting each of us in particular, often painfully, unexpectedly. 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. Art and artist do not have to play along, and realism is a proper means by which art and artist can approach experience. The medium for this artistic intervention is the gift-exchange, which is a kind of time-release device. Fortunately this modus operandi permits artists to collaborate with scientists on a service basis, that is approximately formal equality. We see this occurring in the academy, e.g., at MIT Media Lab and in other types of less-formal, but still effective, interdisciplinary programs, including Oxford DPhil in Fine Art, but this is simply a reframing of the ancient project of art-science, which converges in architecture and in mechanical design. The Parthenon is on a 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 precursors throughout the past century. “Equality” in that context is more an ethically-blurry ellipsis-fiction, but the promise for the future of man, as McLuhan and Fuller indicated, is real. There are many, many more benign examples outside the macro-narratives of art-tech, relegated to dark matter of promotional history. Possibly mankind’s only hope for survival exists in a humane collaboration of art and science, moderated by enlightened neo-philosophy. Beyond the arc of fear-driven civilization, and its addiction to predictability and novelty, art-science-philosophy may manage to sketch a horizon that connects the real and imaginary, to form a cosmos that agrees with the one we inhabit. At which point we may choose to conduct our affairs in conjunction with our vision of everything, and quit wasting time on fallible, false versions of the original. This is the proper practicum for virtuality and impetus for hybrid – actual + artificial – systems, especially expressive ones.

10

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.

TWENTY-TWO: Paul-McLean-Ox3000-d5 (13 December, 2016)

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

By Paul McLean
In the wee hours of November 9, after the Electoral College conferred a once unthinkable presidential victory on Donald J. Trump, many New Yorkers got a familiar sinking feeling. It can be described thusly: down is up, up is down, the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, there are no rules. By the time Trump delivered his acceptance speech, social media was awash with comparisons of two recent American watersheds—11/9 and 9/11. - Christian Viveros-Fauné, "How Donald Trump Has Hijacked Art," artnet news, 16 December, 2016

Part ONE

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. 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. 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 arequantities 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. 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 something like comprehensive functionality in the Social, enabling a peculiar type of planetary-contemporary, tech-enabled “community,” with signs of a shared awareness, plus the phasic “sharing economy” rooted in timeliness and imaginary benefits denuded of much actual cost. Predictable time is key to serviceable communication, movement, and production, connecting people and places separated by distance, or durational space. Establishing working “real-time” models for the various 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 narrative of the 20th and 21st century. 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: points back to astronomy and the evolutionary “creation” of predictable time; functions in the minutely-trackable, sequential present as a contractual sublimation of our fear of uncertainly; and, looking ahead, surrenders itself (and all of us, too) to adatabase as potent as any divinity – artificial personhood - ever conceived. 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.” I call my version Dim Tim – an abbreviation of dimensional time.

2

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 make 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. Each zone has its own nominal, categorical qualities and propositions. For instance, future-history is speculative. History in the past tense blurs, beyond some malleable, fungible, hard-to-specify point. The present is history-happening-now-& now-& now... Yet, we can apply prediction to each zone, with varying measures of success. 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. 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 comprehensive narratives. Accurate analysis “on the back-end” is dependent on the constitution of database content and the logic of 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. Lev Manovich has mapped this procedure in his data visualization practice, but the conceptual foundation for data-viz is the graphical user interface (GUI), which is timeline-integrative for computational processes and applications with soft-/hard-/wetware modality. An astronomical precursor is the constellation, an opportunity for our interpretive imaginations to configure a shared narrative organizing visual big-data. 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.” Is there a universal “image” that applies to and in all facets of these complex systems, including the user, and is the “image” Time? In this speculation, does time usurp the image and become the only encompassing, veritable, user-provisional Object?

3

This is the problem of predictable fiction: analytic FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), a reaction to asymmetric narrative-shift producing systemic overwhelm, when the system is arbitrary in its organization around the concrete demands of stability and security. The problem is only solved in the rear-view mirror. 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). From a 4D perspective, however, any such progressive narrative thread presents an opportunity for rupture of inherent linear 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 light extensive to art. Art reciprocally collaborates with science and history in the domain of objects and the objective. In the case of light, 4D art affirms light's reformation inclusive of the sonic, especially in the tense practical discourses on “New (electrified, or light-emitting) Media” and “Old” or “analog” art (light-reflecting) made congruent 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. Q.: Are we leaving anything else out, if we don't turn out the lights and listen? A: [TIME]

4

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. 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 of 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 have come a long way over time. “Dimensional” can be used to indicate that something is complex in its composition and effects. Peter Drucker applied the term to society in that manner. There are other dimensions of the dimensional that can cause cross-disciplinary confusion. For instance, 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 facts, using arbitrary systems. 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 absorption and containment. What does this mean for art that by its very nature leverages uncertainty for effect?

Part TWO

5a
And what is certain in the Contemporary, what is the “sure thing” now? In the politics of the US and UK, 2016 was a bad year for predictability. The election of Donald Trump as President and the “Brexit” referendum represent outcomes that 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 is that the failure to accurately predict these important political events has increased skepticism for political expert/poll-based prediction generally. The bad turn for prediction as such has contributed to subsequent societal chaos, anxiety in the affected populations. A concurrent meme, pushed by President-elect Trump during his campaign, is that the system is rigged, a meme that resonated with voters.
5b
We do have fairly recent, interesting, if not exact antecedents for the scenario, in the domains of digital-time and calendar-time, with respect to predictive failure. One is “Y2K,” and the other is the End of the World/Mayan Calendar (December, 2012). Both of these episodes 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 thought – incorrectly, as it turned out - predicted the date and time of the world’s and therefore our demise. Such incidents reinforce the notion that man tends to make idiosyncratically apocalyptic projections, based on misapprehensions of machine time and “time machines” - a calendar in this case. Also, systemic social breakdown is exacerbated by predictive failure. Moreover, at critical moments, our reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may have the side effect of producing chaos in society and anxiety in people, whether the outcome(s) were as-predicted, or not, as with “deadlines.”

∞
5a
And what is certain in the Contemporary, what is the “sure thing” now? In the sphere of geopolitics, for instance, 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 adds to instability in the aftermath. Fear of societal chaos increases, amping anxiety in the affected populations. A concurrent meme, pushed byTrump 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. Lapses in predictability, then, would seem to erode trust in democratic processes, one of central social-compacts binding diverse demographics. One might conjecture that this dynamic is linked to a popular opinion that Contemporary art is a con, given that the genre is so uncertain in all its characteristic aspects.
5b
It should be noted that “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 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 thought of as a tech-art hybrid. Its media are timing and certainty. By any measure, hedging is a true confidence game, a real Contemporary “art” and “science,” very creative and innovative, and disruptive. As the crash of 2008 illustrated, gaming risk creates risk, and sometimes, dispersive calamity.
5c
Predictive failure is not rare. Historical antecedents abound. In the domain of digital-time, one largely forgotten instance is “Y2K.” For calendar-time the un-happening End of the World/Mayan Calendar (December, 2012), serves as a recent exemplar. Both of these episodes 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 thought predicted the date and time of the world’s and therefore our demise. Fortunately, neither scenario materialized as forecast. Such incidents reinforce the notion that man is idiosyncratically prone to 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 congeal in mechanical-time-based projection. Our (over-?)reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may generate imaginary threats. An entire genre of Hollywood blockbusters co-opts and amplifies the psychic dread of time-breaking cataclysm. The medium of end-time “cinema” is effectively the “deadline,” which arrives (or doesn't, due often to some deus ex machina intervention). What are the implications ofthese 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 referendum on leaving Britain? Do all the phenomena described above belong to an inclusive, loosely configured, Contemporary art “form?”

6

A painting or sculpture is also a kind of time machine. The argument for this assertion is fairly complex, but also self-evident. The Ghent Altarpiece, 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 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 the art and artist(s). We can discuss the changes that occur in a painting over time, a discussion enriched due to the 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 the metaphysical discourse on painting, we may utilize the altarpiece to confront the idea of timelessness for art, or painting’s spectral attributes of contemporaneity, and its relative, inherent memory biases. Further, in the domain of media theory, we can site a discussion of digital and camera-based versions of the original altarpiece, and 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 time for the altarpiece. We could create a number of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on image-appearances over time on the web. And so on.

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)

8

In “Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts,” Dean Keith Simonton states, on the subject of temporal stability:

“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, as a function of individuals combining to form collective, as a particular body in a body-like group formulation, is the urge to novelty. The second urge is more like a need, an urge with a driving sense of urgency. In art markets, we find evidence of strategies and tactics designed to satisfy both urges consecutively, and in more complex, hybridic types of art, simultaneously. 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.” Real time, digital time, clock-time, timelines, deadlines, end-times, etc., can be made visible in nodes, within individual object-forms, in vignettes. Operative time can invisibly determine format of the seen, as in the projected film, which can co-exist in a space that contains “traditional” light-reflecting objects. In art today, the novel and the predictable can appear – and disappear – together, if the exhibition is re-assigned to the hypercubic modality of continuum, absent a negation of the first three dimensions and their means for representation and reciprocal translation. This phenomenal development is actually mainstreamed at the Venice Biennale in a fair percentage of its pavilions, and more or less by accident at major art fairs. However, best practices are still located in less-sprawling environments, presenting the work of advanced 4D-practitioners and collectives. The better examples transcend the correlates of predictability and novelty, which are risk aversion (fear) and the aggressive venting of pent-up fear, expressed as a reaction against superimposed predictability (fear-management).

9

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.

So, we come to what’s at stake: the inevitable collapse of the database, as a binary-mechanical replacement for history; but more to the point, the failure of predictability and novelty as a cyclic container for fear of the for now not-known and unknowable. Essentially, this failure is the failure of language and narrative to create a useful, practicable fiction that is more powerful than the Real, as a cosmic function affecting each of us in particular, often painfully, unexpectedly. 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. Art and artist do not have to play along, and realism is a proper means by which art and artist can approach experience. The medium for this artistic intervention is the gift-exchange, which is a kind of time-release device. Fortunately this modus operandi permits artists to collaborate with scientists on a service basis, that is approximately formal equality. We see this occurring in the academy, e.g., at MIT Media Lab and in other types of less-formal, but still effective, interdisciplinary programs, including Oxford DPhil in Fine Art, but this is simply a reframing of the ancient project of art-science, which converges in architecture and in mechanical design. The Parthenon is on a 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 precursors throughout the past century. “Equality” in that context is more an ethically-blurry ellipsis-fiction, but the promise for the future of man, as McLuhan and Fuller indicated, is real. There are many, many more benign examples outside the macro-narratives of art-tech, relegated to dark matter of promotional history. Possibly mankind’s only hope for survival exists in a humane collaboration of art and science, moderated by enlightened neo-philosophy. Beyond the arc of fear-driven civilization, and its addiction to predictability and novelty, art-science-philosophy may manage to sketch a horizon that connects the real and imaginary, to form a cosmos that agrees with the one we inhabit. At which point we may choose to conduct our affairs in conjunction with our vision of everything, and quit wasting time on fallible, false versions of the original. This is the proper practicum for virtuality and impetus for hybrid – actual + artificial – systems, especially expressive ones.

10

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.

TWENTY-THREE: Paul-McLean-Ox3000-d6 (18 December, 2016)

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

By Paul McLean
In the wee hours of November 9, after the Electoral College conferred a once unthinkable presidential victory on Donald J. Trump, many New Yorkers got a familiar sinking feeling. It can be described thusly: down is up, up is down, the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, there are no rules. By the time Trump delivered his acceptance speech, social media was awash with comparisons of two recent American watersheds—11/9 and 9/11. - Christian Viveros-Fauné, "How Donald Trump Has Hijacked Art," artnet news, 16 December, 2016

Part ONE

1
Before the ownership of clocks and watches became fairly widespread by the late 17th century, Nocturnals provided a quick and reliable way of finding the time of night: at least, whenever the sky was clear. Nocturnals come in varying states of decoration, from exquisite composite pieces in precious metals to simple wooden ones... The astronomical principle behind the nocturnal is straightforward. In the northern hemisphere, all the constellations appear to rotate around a point very close to the Pole Star: a star at the end of the tail of the Little Bear, or Ursa Minor... Around Ursa Minor rotates what is perhaps the best-know [sic] constellation in the sky: the Great Bear, or Ursa Major – a constellation also known as the 'Seven Stars', and in the USA, the 'Big Dipper', due to its resemblance to a ladle. - Dr. Allan Chapman, “Surveying the Heavens: Petrus Apianus, Tycho Brahe and Practical Navigation,” (p. 21—2), booklet for lecture given 18 November, 2016, Christ Church Upper Library

Fig. 1: [James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge, c. 1872-1875]

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. 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. 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 arequantities 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. 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 something like comprehensive functionality in the Social, enabling a peculiar type of planetary-contemporary, tech-enabled “community,” with signs of a shared awareness, plus the phasic, mythic “sharing economy” rooted in timeliness and imaginary benefits denuded of much actual cost. Predictable time is key to serviceable communication, movement, and production, connecting people and places separated by distance, or durational space. Establishing working “real-time” models for the various 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 narrative of the late 20th and early 21st century. 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: points back to astronomy and the evolutionary “creation” of predictable time; functions in the minutely-trackable, sequential present as a contractual sublimation of our fear of uncertainty; looking ahead, surrenders itself (and all of us, too) to adatabase as potent as any divinity ever conceived – the artificial personhood. 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.” I call my version Dim Tim – an anthropomorphic abbreviation of “dimensional time.” He says, “'‘Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig’.”

Fig. 2 [Dim Tim]

A surprise awaited me, however, in the library. When I pulled out the appropriate card catalog drawer, there was a collection of books under the heading “Fourth dimension (philosophy)” that had nothing to do with Einstein. The divider card bore an additional note: “under this heading are entered only philosophical and imaginative works. For mathematical works, see Hyperspace. See also Space and time.” The fourth dimension of these texts was not time but an extra suprasensible dimension of space, of which our three-dimensional world might be merely a section or boundary. The roots of this idea were apparent in the books on four-dimensional geometry filed under “Hyperspace.” Yet, it was the “philosophical and imaginative” implications of four-dimensional space – primarily as an invisible, higher reality – that had caught the attention of the general public by the turn of the twentieth century, as these books made clear. - Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art

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 make 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. Each 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 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 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. 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 comprehensive narratives. Accurate analysis “on the back-end” is dependent on the constitution of database content and the logic of 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. Lev Manovich has mapped this procedure in his data visualization practice, but the conceptual foundation for data-viz is the graphical user interface (GUI), which is timeline-integrative for computational processes and applications with soft-/hard-/wetware modality. An astronomical precursor is the constellation, an opportunity for our interpretive imaginations to configure a shared narrative organizing visual big-data. 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.”

DIM TIM: Is there a universal “image” that applies to and in all facets of these complex systems, including the user, and is the whole “image” Time? In this speculation, does time usurp the image and become the sole encompassing, veritable, user-provisional Object? Can “dead” data-matter (like light from a distant star, long extinguished) be re-animated (like that light reaching a person's optic apparatus) and – as revenant data - be user-active in imaginary space [space with the attributes of actionable reality (IRT, intersecting “real life” via wetware) but autonomously occupying/maintaining virtuality as a past event with present-characteristics], be performative, practicable, applicable to tasks (like navigation)?

Yes, but it's more complicated than all that.

Fig. 3 [Lev Manovich/data visualization]

3a

Four-dimensional art and design refer to those practices that involve time, the fourth dimension, in some way. For the purposes of this book, we will define art as those practices whose products and experiences are to be appreciated mainly for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content, while design will be defined as practices that focus on users and work within constraints established by a client. Having noted this differentiation, it is important to immediately acknowledge the border between art and design is nebulous and overlaps a great deal in certain areas. Examples of 4D practices include motion graphics, film/video, performance art, social practice, sound art, installation, Internet art, game design, animation, and so on.

...The three dimensions - height, width, and depth - are augmented in 4D design by time. It is the fourth dimension. Although we all have a basic understanding of time, there are many different definitions of this term depending on the field from which one approaches it. For our purposes, we will say that *time* is the progression of events and existence from the past, through the present, and into the future. One could even simply say that time refers to change.

...Fast-forward to the present day, and many of the most popular art and design practices - whether online videos, animated GIFs, the opening titles of a movie, flash mobs, video games, websites, and so on - embrace the use of time. The elements and principles of 4D art and design are central to our ability to create and critique contemporary art and design.

- Ellen Mueller, extracts from Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design

A tri-fold problem of predictable fiction, expressing as data-analyst-fear: A) Analytic FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), a reaction to asymmetric narrative-shift producing systemic overwhelm, when the system is arbitrary in its organization around the concrete demands of stability and security; B) Fear of being lost in “space,” a state of sensory disorientation in mediatic vastness – as when a diver cannot say 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. 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). Historical perspective supports the pretense that the hypothetical will be proved in 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. The third problem correlates in marketable electronic technology to the plight of BETA video. All three worries speak to the dilemma of the spy agency analyst trying to predict the next terrorist incident. The undercurrent, with respect to time in each of the problem's three facets, is entropic insufficiency. Whether her prediction proves correct with the passage of time, is consumed by massive data, or fails, whatever the explanation, the fictional predictor is actually situated in the precarious interstitial zones of linear time. Her 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.” Where is Einstein, a century after predicting black holes? In history the predictor is inevitably the subject of her prediction, whatever the prediction's object. The complex (time-sense) tenses in language reflect this condition for prediction, and are critical in the formation of predictive fiction. Once we realize this, we realize the fallacy inherent in the security predictability promises. [I will have been gone.]

Before going any further, I should stop to answer a question that some of you may be asking. If we’re going to think of time as a fourth dimension, does that mean that all the things we’ve said about the fourth dimension are really about time? The answer is no. Just as there is no one fixed direction in space that we always call “width,” there need be no one fixed higher dimension that is always called “time.” All our talk about the fourth dimension has enabled us to think of a variety of higher dimensions: a direction in which one can jump out of space, a direction in which space is curved, a direction in which one moves to reach alternate universes. We can, if we like, insist that the past/future axis of time is the fourth dimension. And then we pretty well have to say that the ana/kata axis out of space is the fifth dimension, and the sixth dimension is the direction to other curved spacetimes. But there’s no point being so rigid about it. Nobody goes around saying width is the second dimension and height is the third dimension. Instead we just say that height and width are space dimensions. Rather than saying time is the fourth dimension, it is more natural to say that time is just one of the higher dimensions. - Rudy Rucker, The Fourth Dimension

From a 4D perspective, however, any progressive narrative thread presents an opportunity for rupture of inherent linear 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 light extensive to art. Art reciprocally collaborates with science and history in the domain of objects and the objective. In the case of light, 4D art affirms light's reformation inclusive of the sonic, especially in the tense practical discourses on “New (electrified, or light-emitting) Media” and “Old” or “analog” art (light-reflecting) made congruent 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. Q.: Are we leaving anything else out, if we don't turn out the lights and listen? A: [TIME]

Although first published in 1936, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin took decades to embed in academic aesthetics. Benjamin opens the essay with a quote by Paul Valéry, from “Le Conquete de l’ubiquite” (1931). I would argue that of the two works, Valéry's is actually more accurate in its predictive assessments. Let's pick up where Benjamin left off:

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 imagines life in 2016! The rest of the essay primarily focuses on the conjunction of Music and Science. Benjamin is essentially engaged in producing weaponized aesthetic fiction for political-economic effect. Meanwhile in 1936 Paris, Charles Sirato was gathering the signatures of prominent artists for the Manifeste Dimensioniste. 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.”

4

One complexity is ever-present in every management problem, every decision, every action -- not, properly speaking -- a fourth task of management, and yet an additional dimension: time. - Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

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 of 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 have come a long way over time. “Dimensional” can be used to indicate that something is complex in its composition and effects. Peter Drucker applied the term to his idea of quadratic (sectored) society in that manner, but he also framed applied management in terms of dimensions. There are other dimensions of the dimensional that can cause cross-disciplinary confusion. For instance, 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 measurement diversity plus overabundant need-exchange (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 absorption and containment. What does this mean for art that by its very nature leverages uncertainty for effect?

Part TWO
And what is certain in the Contemporary? What is the “sure thing” now? ∞

Contemporary art endures. It survives because it is neither the product of a true academy nor an artist-critic-generated description of choice but rather a term that has for some time been a tolerable description for an increasingly wide range of art and artlike activity that cannot be completely captured by modernist or postmodernist accounts of visual art. Contemporary art is a leaky container that can accommodate many contradictory structures and desires. - Liam Gillick, Industry and Intelligence

In the sphere of geopolitics, for instance, 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. Lapses in predictability, then, would seem to erode trust in democratic processes, one of the central social-compacts binding diverse demographics bound by speculative or conjectural union. Which begs the question, what is the basis of the expectation that predictability and democracy are synthetically equitable, given the historical equation of the demos to “the mob” in certain prevalent “circles?” A 4D aesthetic conjecture might start by linking this dynamic query to a popular opinion (reportedly held by Trump, but also asserted by the likes of David Graeber) 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. Do we even know what art and artist are at the moment? What do we expect them to do?

Immersing art in life runs the risk of seeing the status of art – and with it, the status of artist – disperse entirely. - Seth Price, Dispersion

That 4D art-centric analysis might note, for the sake of gathering congruent cross-sector correlates, that “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 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 thought of as a tech-arts hybrid. Its media are timing and certainty. By any measure, hedging is a true confidence game, a real Contemporary “art” and “science,” very creative and innovative, and disruptive. As the crash of 2008 illustrated, gaming risk creates risk, and sometimes, dispersive calamity. Is inducing cataclysm tantamount to art?

Predictive failure is not rare. Historical antecedents abound. In the domain of digital-time, one largely forgotten instance is “Y2K.” For calendar-time the un-happening End of the World/Mayan Calendar (December, 2012), serves as a recent exemplar. Both of these episodes 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 thought predicted the date of the world’s and therefore our demise. Fortunately, neither scenario materialized as forecast. Such incidents reinforce the notion that man is idiosyncratically prone to 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 congeal in mechanical-time-based projection. Our (over-?)reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may co-incidentally generate imaginary threats, formulating as narrative patterns. For example, an entire genre of Hollywood blockbusters co-opts and amplifies the psychic dread of time-breaking cataclysm. The medium of end-time “cinema” is effectively the “deadline,” which arrives (or doesn't, due often to some deus ex machina intervention). What are the perceptual implications ofthese 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?

Do the phenomena sketched above belong to an inclusive, loosely configured, Contemporary art “form?” Or are they relevant as matters of content and context?

6a

A painting or sculpture 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 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 a painting over time, a discussion enriched due to the 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 the metaphysical discourse on painting, we may utilize the altarpiece to confront the idea of timelessness for art, or painting’s spectral attributes of contemporaneity, and the “accidental” but durable memory biases it consigns to its viewership. In the discourse of media theory, we can review digital and camera-based versions with the original altarpiece, 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 time for the altarpiece. We may create a series of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on image-appearances over time on the web. And so on.
[Does the singularity of this famous painting extend to art as a universal phenomenon? Is cloning the Altarpiece of Ghent an interstitial option (Is that what we just witnessed with regards the Lascaux simulation)]?

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?

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)

8

In “Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts,” Dean Keith Simonton states, on the subject of temporal stability:

“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, as a function of individuals combining to form a collective, as particular bodies in a body-like group formulation, impels the urge to novelty. The second urge is more like a need, a hyper-urge, an urge with a driving sense of urgency. In art markets, we find evidence of strategies and tactics designed to satisfy both urges consecutively, and in more complex, hybridic types of art, simultaneously. 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.” 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.” Operative time can invisibly determine format of the seen, as in the projected film, which can co-exist in a space that contains “traditional” light-reflecting objects. Sound, especially 3D sound, acts as a time-metaphor in the 4D array. In art today, the novel and the predictable can appear – and disappear – together, if the exhibition is re-assigned to the hypercubic modality of continuum, absent a negation of the first three dimensions and their means for representation and reciprocal translation. This phenomenal development is actually mainstreamed at the Venice Biennale in a fair percentage of its pavilions, and more or less by accident 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, focal architectures, sometimes called “labs,” selected or designed for 4D art purposes. The better examples transcend the correlation of predictability and novelty, and attendant modal risk aversion (fear) and ana-modal, aggressive venting of pent-up fear (ferocity), ostensibly as a reaction against superimposed predictability (fear-management).
[Authenticity, linkable to trust, is an observable casualty of causal conditioning. Linking systems in 4D arrays consistently represent this axiom in the inverse – proportionally, symbolically and otherwise, throughout the exhibit and thematic topologies. This is critical to the formation of the exhibit “message.”]

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.

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.

Art and artist do not have to play along, and realism is a proper, non-antidotal stylistic means by which art and artist can approach socialized experience-sharing. The medium for this non-fictional artistic intervention is the gift-exchange, which is a kind of time-release device for conditional acceptance. Fortunately this modus operandi permits artists to collaborate with scientists on a service basis, approximating and promoting transformational disciplinary equality as simultaneity. We see this occurring in the academy, e.g., at MIT Media Lab. Other programs encourage less-formal, but still effective, interdisciplinary praxis. In these productive exchange is more often granular. Oxford DPhil in Fine Arts is one such program, where the overarching institution's unique trans-culture promotes disciplinary porosity. Both 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 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 collective precursors emergent-then-maturing throughout the past century. 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 project to “run more like a business.” But the promise successful sci-arts efforts reveal for a possible future of man is real, and as McLuhan and Fuller indicated, necessary. 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.

I am not alone in positing that mankind’s only hope for survival exists in a humane collaboration of art and science, moderated by neo-(dimensionally)enlightened philosophy “of which we know nothing,” as Baudrillard puts it. Philosophy is to art and science as sound is to time in light/dark 4D arrays: a meaningful binder, which is the balance of metaphorical wisdom. Beyond the arc of fear-driven civilization, and its addiction to predictability and novelty, art-science-philosophy may co-sign a virtual horizon that connects the real and imaginary, demarcating an interstices connecting us via givings to a reciprocal cosmos – or multiverse - that harmonizes with the one(s) we inhabit now, collectively and individually. The metaphorical imaginary is a “blank canvas.” At any designated, pre-Apocalyptic, original moment, we may abandon ideological contingency, a simulacra as such, willfully choose to conduct our sense-affairs in conjunction with a renewable vision of every-thing, and quit wasting time on predictably fallible, false versions of reality, which are not actually “safe:” they are rather banal, derivative and inauthentic “expressions” of the twining urges for predictability and novelty, or camouflaged negations (such as the Groys quote above). What is needed immediately is a practicum for causal virtuality, revealing the impetus for proto-efficient casual 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.

10

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.

This suggests that the ties between the animated body and lived place are as thick as the flesh that connects them. A corollary of this same relationship is that place is not just something seen – as visuocentric models would imply – but something felt, sensed, undergone. A place is dynamically gained, and is in part generated, by the actions of the lived-moving body of the person or animal in that place. This contrasts with what happens in space in the various senses I spelled out earlier: there my bodily motions make no significant difference; they merely trace out my traversal of an indifferent stretch of space and make no difference to that space itself: they are like momentary flares in the void. In space, my lived-moving body is a contingent and momentary occupant; in place, it is the enlivening force, the anima mundi (soul of the world). Any putative symmetry or complementarity between place and space is here undermined: the two terms fall into disarray, dis-relation. - Edward Casey, “Space”

TWENTY-FOUR: Paul-McLean-Ox3000-d6_no-quotes (23 December, 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. - Derek Thompson, “A Brief Economic History of Time,” Atlantic Monthly, 21 December, 2016

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. 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. 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 arequantities 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, 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 narrative of the late 20th and early 21st century. 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. 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. I call my experimental, prototypical embodiment DIM TIM – an anthropomorphic abbreviation of “dimensional time.” He says, “'‘Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig’.”

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. 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 from practical – political, military, governmental economic, social – drivers, which aggregate the message from a host of actual/virtual locations into transit nodes and move us via our immaterial data toward the “Cloud,” a euphemism for data-prison, -mine, virtual Panopticon, etc. The attached fictional narrative promotes the concept of apparent, if semi-opaque, systematic global-apperception in a stable temporal trajectory 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 perceptual resources cyclically parallels and intertwines with the evolution and convergence of computational and astronomical navigation. The network today is virtually cosmological. The “new” cosmos echoes the one that fostered the post-middle ages' European colonial boom-times. “The difference is,” DIM TIM says, “we/All of It are Cerro Rico, now.”

DIM TIM: [DT:~] Is there a universal “image” that applies to and in all facets of these complex systems, inclusive of the user, and is the Uni-image Time? In this speculation, does conjunctive time eventually usurp the image through a process of absorption and become the sole encompassing, veritable, user-provisional Object? As such the figural of Timewould be unconditional and simultaneous in the possible.

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-activeimaginary space. In imaginary space (i.e., Mind) with imaginary meaning we learn to assign revenant data to actionable reality with purpose. This is the imaginary “feedback loop.” 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 response. 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 aspects of the process: As far as we know, the original event – in our example above, the light-emitting star – 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 therefore still occupies its own reality – and post-reality, in this instance. However, we can confer upon the star-once-upon-a-time-emitting-light and the light itself the attribute/quality of atemporal givingness (for us), since we do use the information as we would a gift given freely to us via the sense-apparatus (to use as we see fit, or as need be). Then, the interstices connecting us to the star we can imagine to be a 4D space, post-priori, via the givenness. The whole phenomenon is 4D systematic. The light itself maintains its virtuality, as a past event connected to present-characteristics in the medium of being-seen. 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. “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.” 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. Note the “Supplement 1969”:

In the sense of the last sentence, on (sic) can already read in Being and Time (1927) pp. 62-63: “it's (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.”

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.” 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). Historical perspective supports the pretense that the hypothetical will be proved in 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 opaque, recursive factory, employing people, management, users, etc. (the affectless “faceless” corporate syndication, the unimaginary in the schema implied here, an alt.demos/the field of demographics), i.e., a “dark cloud.” 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. 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. 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.” A related existential quandary is, e.g.: Where and what is Einstein, a century after predicting black holes, relative to consequent (revenant) usage of data he entered into the system? 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. 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. 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.

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.
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?

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. “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.”

Part TWO

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

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

...Add a layer, for the sake of gathering cross-sector congruencies. [~The 4D process encourage Kierkegaardian leap-taking.] “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]

DT:~...Toward an art of measured time.

...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 ofthese 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)?

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

[Interstices in the manner of Contemporary art-writing]

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: 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.

~...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).

~...Is a hedge fund executive an “artist?” Can a non-event be “art?” Do the phenomena sketched above in Section 5 belong to an inclusive, loosely configured, helix-like Contemporary art “form?” Or are they merely matters of content and context for something like “real” art and discourse, which we could alternatively predict is 4-dimensional? The recent assassination of a Russian ambassador by a radicalized Islamic policeman in a Turkish art gallery during an opening has generated “art world” theoretical conjecture in this vein. Such speculative fiction is derivative of pre-Contemporary (Avant garde) “revolutionary” Beuysian conceptions, i.e., that any-/everyone is an artist, everything is art... The fungible art/-ist praxis-idea blurs with the time-based, Warholian Factory artist-management profile of professional practice (i.e., “fifteen minutes of fame” “self-selecting” the celebrity-art franchisee), and even the confessional as performance-gesture at “exposure,” which has its own meaning in the art industrial complex.

~In The Clock, temporary movie “fame,” the persona in-scene and -seen, and our nostalgic/New attentiveness to “it all” is a manifold subject short-clipped together and flattened on the layered long-timeline of software. “It all” is “packaged” and then projected into the architecture of privileged leisure culture. The medium for presentation of The Clock signifies a notable shift in the production-presentation modality. The scenario for transmission is uprooted from the enforced architecture that positions the collective as a passive-receptor audience in the typical movie theater, which is roughly modeled on an education-variant of the phalanx. The Clock, with its comfortable furniture interior design schema, strangely conflates Valéry's vision of “home delivery of Sensory Reality” with a public version conducted in the safety of theatrical darkness. But all in all The Clock is nothing more than a clock telling artificial time in dimensional imaginary space(s). The Clock is data visualization/GUI – for what exactly? Or is it an ad for “sampling-as-Contemporary-'art'?”

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 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 the metaphysical discourse on painting, we may utilize the Altarpiece to confront the idea of timelessness for art in a multiplicity of frames, or painting’s spectral attributes of contemporaneity, and the “accidental” but durable memory biases it consigns to its viewership in an iconic case that is also an instance of antiquity surviving to the present day, and our ubiquitous art-selfies. In the discourse of media theory, we can review digital and camera-based versions with the original Altarpiece (inclusive of its now-restored sections), 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 may create a series of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on image-appearances over time on the web. And so on.

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?

Part THREE

DT:~”I am a creative-genius corporate-database (avatar).” = signature (Xeffect)

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 the optional. “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 – as in the symbolic Ouroboros. All of it is fictional, though, and that fact-axiom may be suggestive of viable options on the macro-/micro-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.

To diffuse the urgent function cyclic predictability-novelty, individuals combine to form a collective, a proposition stipulating, unique or at least particular bodies in a mega-body. The 4D version of this movement is a response to prevalent markets rooted in the predictability-novelty imaginary complementing the modal satisfaction of fantastic, or fictional, desire. 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, 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 system, which is itself a symbolic project of command and control. As such, the schema is obviously 4D-.

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. 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) Theprogrammatic 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).

It is easy to say one is “working in 4D.” It becomes easy to see whether the claim is valid, or not. Authenticity, linkable to trust, is an observable casualty of causal conditioning. Linking systems in 4D arrays consistently represent this axiom in the inverse – proportionally, symbolically and otherwise, throughout the exhibit and 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 and simultaneously is the collective project performed by artist, viewer and art. 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 be banished, 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.

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.

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.

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 the possible man as 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 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 they lead 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 themselves and doing what they would do anyway that works best. By pursuing autonomous, sci-aesthetic excellence they can devote themselves 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.

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 philosophy 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 the real and imaginary, demarcating an interstices connecting us via givings to a reciprocal cosmos – or multiverse - that harmonizes with 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 accidental 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, willfully choose to conduct our sense-affairs in conjunction with a renewable vision of every-thing. 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.

10

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.

TWENTY-FIVE: Section Improvements (12-18 December, 2016)

[section 1]

1

The enduring allure of astronomy has its ancient origins in man’s urge to make predictable the fearsome, mysterious cosmosand deadly, fraught world we inhabit. Throughout history, and prior to the historical, man has invested in sense-supplementing technologies for rationalizing the universe. We tend to consequently 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 systematic, cosmological narratives buttressed by pattern recognition. The output of the process are self-reinforcing, contextual narrative complexes that organize 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 predictable by 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. Measurement and calculation facilitate formulation, and today we have a reliable global calendar with objective attributes. The shared calendar makes a host of contemporary activities possible, from plane flights to Skype-dates. Temporal predictability aggregates into something like comprehensive functionality in the Social, enabling a peculiar type of planetary-contemporary, tech-enabled “community,” with signs of a shared awareness, and the phasic “sharing economy” rooted in timeliness. Predictable time is key to serviceable communication, movement, and production, connecting people and places separated by distance, or durational space. Establishing working “real-time” models for the various needs of people and products, networking them into integrated need-fulfilling systems, and managing efficient, “user”-satisfying outcomes (the corporate “face”) for those systems is the overarching narrative of the 20th and 21st century. 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 points back to astronomy and the “creation” of predictable time; functions in the present as a contractual sublimation of our fear of uncertainly; and, looking ahead, surrenders itself (and all of us, too) to adatabase as potent as any divinity. The “it” in “all of it” is a non- or artificial human-like object, which may or may not be art, depending on how we define or do not define “art.”

The enduring allure of astronomy has its ancient origins in man’s urge to make our world and cosmos predictable. Time is a dimensional proposition, and the measures humanity takes to reduce universal all-at-once-ness to the operational tick-tock precision of the metronome produce side-effects. Time-management is a response to anxiety associated with deadlines, fear of missing out (FOMO) a by-product of all-at-once-ness leaking through the membrane of social-temporal order.

Or – and this is an alternative “option” outside the binary conjunction – we can commit to art being itself, with the understanding that this radical assumption may upend the entire cosmology of conception, and/or simultaneously harmonize it.

[section 3]

This is the problem of predictable fiction: analytic FOMO, a reaction to asymmetric narrative-shift producing systemic overwhelm, when the system is arbitrary in its organization around the concrete demands of stability and security. Thus 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). From a 4D perspective, however, any such progressive narrative thread presents an opportunity for rupture of inherent linear illusions, sited at the point that predictive hindsight stipulates or purchases a factual territory for historical inevitability. To propose 4D rupturing discourse in history and science is to apply inertia on the matter of light extensive to art. Art reciprocally collaborates with science and history in the domain of objects and the objective. In the case of light, 4D art affirms light's reformation inclusive of the sonic, especially in the tense practical discourses on “New (electrified, or light-emitting) Media” and “Old” or “analog” art (light-reflecting) made congruent in sound-environments. 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. Are we leaving anything else out, if we don't turn out the lights and listen? [TIME]

FULL UNEDITED VERSION

The astronomical time-data instrumental in shaping historical, or mass-psychological, narratives is the same informatic operating differently for science. Astronomical time is science-in-the-making, a product of science, a scientific resource, a multi-purposed factor in science’s manifold narrative. “Space” is a multi-faceted entity-object that science stylistically deconstructs in technical projects with narrative propositions and time-based proofs. The science-story is a conventional dogma skeptically prescribing man's predominant existential questions - how, what, when, where and then, why – within the fictional architecture of a universe that does not require man to exist. This modern mode of scientific species-classification, embedded in a general narrative, informs the literature of science, balancing authority with conjecture, in reliably-styled Classical storytelling, with chorus, characters, drama, and so on. Through the lens of science, vision is framed as precarious speculation informed by accumulating content, with a massive all-consuming database giving contextual plausibility to the interpretation of technical data. Thus 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). From a 4D perspective, however, any such progressive narrative thread presents an opportunity for rupture of inherent linear illusions, sited at the point that predictive hindsight stipulates or purchases a factual territory for historical inevitability. Take the slow “discovery” of a newly sonic cosmos. Will the added data motivate a systemic reevaluation of invisibility, the “dark” element that exposes the variance between history and science narratives in their dualistic emphasis on light? Is there a realistic, intrinsic neo-history of light possible in a forcefully reductive system overly reliant on extrinsic Night and Day biases? Clearly, the historical database for the scientific study of light is massive, vital and spans theoretical and applied wings of science, so entropy is a valid issue. Light as a scientific subject persists in a data-continuum, which is not to be confused with “light” on any historical timeline, even if both versions of light liberally benefit from the triangulating presence of astronomical-time. One consistent feature of all three frameworks in this configuration or model (historical and scientific, relative to astronomical time) is “the urge to make predictable.” Considering astronomical time-data as a continuum “creates” an opportunity to think of the Enlightenment as a metaphor relative to a knowledge of light, subject to change with each additional bit of light-science. To propose 4D rupturing discourse in history and science is to apply inertia on the matter of light extensive to art. Art reciprocally collaborates with science and history in the domain of objects and the objective. In the case of light, 4D art affirms light's reformation inclusive of the sonic, especially in the tense practical discourses on “New (electrified, or light-emitting) Media” and “Old” or “analog” art (light-reflecting) made congruent in sound-environments. 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. Are we leaving anything else out, if we don't turn out the lights and listen?

[section 5a]

5a
And what is certain in the Contemporary, what is the “sure thing” now? In the politics of the US and UK, 2016 was a bad year for predictability. The election of Donald Trump as President and the “Brexit” referendum represent outcomes that 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 is that the failure to accurately predict these important political events has increased skepticism for political expert/poll-based prediction generally. The bad turn for prediction as such has contributed to subsequent societal chaos, anxiety in the affected populations. A concurrent meme, pushed by President-elect Trump during his campaign, is that the system is rigged, a meme that resonated with voters.
5b
We do have fairly recent, interesting, if not exact antecedents for the scenario, in the domains of digital-time and calendar-time, with respect to predictive failure. One is “Y2K,” and the other is the End of the World/Mayan Calendar (December, 2012). Both of these episodes 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 thought – incorrectly, as it turned out - predicted the date and time of the world’s and therefore our demise. Such incidents reinforce the notion that man tends to make idiosyncratically apocalyptic projections, based on misapprehensions of machine time and “time machines” - a calendar in this case. Also, systemic social breakdown is exacerbated by predictive failure. Moreover, at critical moments, our reliance on time-based ordering of societal affairs may have the side effect of producing chaos in society and anxiety in people, whether the outcome(s) were as-predicted, or not, as with “deadlines.”

[section 7-clip]

Earlier in the lecture:

“But may we take Being, may we take time, as matters? They are not matters if “matter” means: something which is. The word “matter,” “a matter,” should mean for us now what is decisively at stake in that something inevitable is concealed within it. Being – a matter, presumably the matter of thinking.” (p. 4/15)

TWENTY-SIX: Paul-McLean-Oxford-essay (3 January, 2017)

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
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.   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. 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, 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. 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. I call my experimental, prototypical embodiment DIM TIM – an anthropomorphic abbreviation of “dimensional time.” He says, “'‘Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig’.”
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. 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. The emergence of Cloud cyclically parallels and intertwines with the evolution and convergence of computational and astronomical navigation. The network today is virtually cosmological.
2b
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) with productive imaginary meaning we learn to assign revenant data to actionable reality with purpose. This is the imaginary “feedback loop.” 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. Heidegger's work Time and Beingitself (the original lecture, translations/interpretations, later performance, publication, etc. - plus our citation here) performs and encapsulates the 4D time-based program described above beautifully. 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.”
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.” 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). 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.”
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, and “Howl, howl, howl, howl!” 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.
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. “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
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
...Add a layer, for the sake of gathering cross-sector congruencies. “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
...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
[Interstices in the manner of Contemporary art-writing]
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: 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.
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 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 the metaphysical discourse on painting, we may utilize the Altarpiece to confront the idea of timelessness for art in a multiplicity of frames, or painting’s spectral attributes of contemporaneity, and the “accidental” but durable memory biases it consigns to its viewership in an iconic case that is also an instance of antiquity surviving to the present day, and our ubiquitous art-selfies. In the discourse of media theory, we can review digital and camera-based versions with the original Altarpiece (inclusive of its now-restored sections), 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 may create a series of data visualization projects for the Ghent Altarpiece, based on image-appearances over time on the web. And so on.
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 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 the optional. “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 – as in the symbolic Ouroboros. All of it is fictional, though, and that fact-axiom may be suggestive of viable options on the macro-/micro-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.
8b
To diffuse the urgent function cyclic predictability-novelty, individuals combine to form a collective, an actualizing imaginary stipulating unique or at least particular bodies in a 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, or 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, 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 system, which is itself a symbolic project of command and control. As such, the schema is obviously (given observation over a duration) 4D-.
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. 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 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. 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 the possible man 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 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 they lead 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 themselves and doing what they would do anyway that works best. By pursuing autonomous, sci-aesthetic excellence they can devote themselves 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 philosophy 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 the real and imaginary, demarcating an interstices connecting us via givings to a reciprocal cosmos – or multiverse - that harmonizes with 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 accidental 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, willfully choose to conduct our sense-affairs in conjunction with a renewable vision of every-thing. 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.

TWENTY-SEVEN: footnotes (6 January, 2017)

D. Thompson, “A Brief Economic History of Time,” The Atlantic Monthly, December, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com, (accessed 21 December, 2016).

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

E. Casey, 'Space', in S. Luft and S. Overgaard (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, Routledge, London, Books by Marquette University Faculty, Book 127, 2011, p. 202.

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.

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.

Trustees of Dartmouth Coll. v. Woodward, 17 U.S. 518 (1819).

S. MacLean, 'Hallaig', Scottish Poetry Library, [website], http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk, (accessed 12 December, 2016).

M. Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh, New York, NY, Harper Torchbooks, 1977, p. 82.

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

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).

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

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

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

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

M. DeLanda, 'On Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason', 9 June 2011, [lecture/book launch], Eyebeam, in conjunction with the exhibit 'BIORYTHM: Music and the Body', 2 June-6 August, 2011.

DIM TIM:

2a: 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?

2b: 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?

3c: 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?

“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.”

5a: DT:~ And what is certain in the Contemporary? What is the “sure thing” now? ∞

5b: DT:~4D analysis is ad infinitum... Within the focal finite.

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

5c: DT:~...Toward an art of measured time.

5d: DT:~4D analysis also can loops, spiral, etc., i.e., performs circuitously within the given frame.

6a: 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?

8a: DT:~”I am a creative-genius corporate-database (avatar).” = signature (X-effect)

DRAFT THREE

TWENTY-EIGHT: Paul-McLean-essay-PT1 (10 January, 2016)