The Image and Imagination of the Fourth Dimension in Twentieth-Century Art and Culture

One of the most important stimuli for the imaginations of modern artists in the twentieth century was the concept of a higher, unseen fourth dimension of space. An outgrowth of the n-dimensional geometries developed in the nineteenth century, the concept predated the definition of time as the fourth dimension by Minkowski and Einstein in relativity theory. Only the popularization of relativity theory after 1919 brought an end to the widespread public fascination with the supra-sensible fourth dimension between the 1880s and 1920s. initially popularized by figures such as E. A. Abbott, Charles Howard Hinton, Claude Bragdon, and R D. Ouspensky (as well as science-fiction writers), the fourth dimension was a multivalent term with associations ranging from science, including X-rays and the ether of space, to idealist philosophy and mystical "cosmic consciousness." This essay focuses on the differing approaches to higher spatial dimensions in the cubism of Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, the suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, and The Large Glass project of Marcel Duchamp in the early twentieth century. It concludes by examining contemporary artist Tony Bobbin's thirty-year engagement with the mathematics of four-dimensional geometry and computer graphics, as well as his current work with knot theorist Scott Carter.Art Histor

A Feeling for History? Bakhtin and `The Problem of Great Time'

‘Great time’ has usually been seen as a ‘late term’ of Bakhtin’s. However, although it occurs most frequently in works written in the 1960s and 1970s, there is one known instance of its use in the 1940s. This confirms the close association between the notion and Bakhtin’s dominant concerns of the 1930s and 1940s, in particular the ‘becoming’ that he associates with the novel in general and the Bildungsroman in particular. ‘Great time’ thus needs to be examined in the context of the connections between his thought and Hegelian antecedents, as well as his of his approach to time in terms of other models, both philosophical and anthropological

Relativistic Effects for Time-Resolved Light Transport

We present a real-time framework which allows interactive visualization of relativistic effects for time-resolved light transport. We leverage data from two different sources: real-world data acquired with an effective exposure time of less than 2 picoseconds, using an ultra-fast imaging technique termed femto-photography, and a transient renderer based on ray-tracing. We explore the effects of time dilation, light aberration, frequency shift and radiance accumulation by modifying existing models of these relativistic effects to take into account the time-resolved nature of light propagation. Unlike previous works, we do not impose limiting constraints in the visualization, allowing the virtual camera to explore freely a reconstructed 3D scene depicting dynamic illumination. Moreover, we consider not only linear motion, but also acceleration and rotation of the camera. We further introduce, for the first time, a pinhole camera model into our relativistic rendering framework, and account for subsequent changes in focal length and field of view as the camera moves through the scene