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8 Years Ago
so I was wracking my brain trying to figure out how to do 4 dimensional art - because I am big on pushing the envelope.. and I wanted something that would bend the mind a bit.. and then I realized, I had already done 4 dimensional art, I just didn't realize it! I had labelled it "chaos art" because I drew it with my eyes closed - how ironic that in order to envision something beyond regular 3 dimensions involved me stopping seeing in dimensions at all. Guess it makes sense as the mind is said to exist in 4 dimensions.
So to percieve dimensions the easiest way to do it is to think of taking an mri slice of the dimension above it.
So a slice of a line (1d) will give you a dot. (0d)
a slice of a square (2d) will give you a line. (1d)
a slice of a cube (3d) will give you a square (2d)
a slice of a tesseract (4d) will give you a cube (3d)
so a slice of a squared tesseract (basically a cube with 4 instances of itself) will give you a tesseract (4d)
another way to see it is
0d - no dimension
1d - line
2d - flat
3d - dimension
4d - wireframe
4d assumes that a shape is composed of solid structure - like a latticework, and if you were to run it through an imaginary boundary box, instead of seeing a flattened slice like you would an mri scan of say a brain, layered together to create the brain - you would see a 3d piece, that would gradually get bigger and more complex as more of that "bounding box" went through it, and then got smaller and smaller as it left it.
there is no accurate way to visually explain this to you through words that will do it justice - so this video should help:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG6aIVGquOg
the shape kind of morphs as more or less of it is shown.
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So how does one create 4d art on say, a piece of paper? Well you might think this is an arduous task, but it just involves a shift in thinking. In 4d there is no solid space - you can basically see THROUGH objects. You could think of it like layers of transparency on top of each other. You would draw it with uninterrupted lines going through each other - criss crossing into the piece - and colour accordingly.
With my last 2 pieces I kind of destroyed the 4d aspect by solidly colouring over lines, thus ruining the in depth feel, but you can see this better in the piece I am currently working on, where you an literally see THROUGH the entire piece. If it was in 3d, as you moved through the image would be constantly shifting to show new 3d layers contained within the piece. It would be like the layers as they move away from you become more transparent and as they move towards you become more opaque. I am not sure atm how you would construct something like that physically, but with paper you can give that illusion.
you can see it a BIT in the snail one, in the rainbow road area where you can see through it and to the beyond..
working on this one atm - you can see it better in this one where you can see through the layers to layers behind it that sometimes use the same lines - its like a 3d object compressed onto itself:
basically you throw away the laws of solid space and treat everything like a semi-transparent object so it becomes a collection of 3d objects overlaid in 3d space in a 2d environment.
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