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We all exist as dimensional beings, we see and experience the world from a third dimensional plane, but mathematically we can deal with many more. Beings, robots, and artificial intelligence could exist or be built to exist within these high/lower spatial planes and still interact with ours, as we technically can with theirs.
Artists Julius von Bismarck, and Benjamin Maus created such an object Round About For Dimensions (or being however you prefer to interpret the work). At CERN the duo created the shadow of a hypercube, a 4 dimensional cube, this becomes hard for us too full grasp as an object due too our inability to truly visualise a higher dimensional object.
Round About Four Dimensions, CERN Science Gateway, 2023
Round About Four Dimensions, Installation view Exploring the Unknown, 2023
Every being is limited towards its personal dimensional perception.
Writer Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote Flatland in 1884 wrote a little short story from the perspective of a square Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions in this short story the square lives in flatland a 2D planar society, the beings in this society can't imagine what "up" is, any third dimensional thinking feels impossible for them. When the square is visited by a sphere that from his perspective grows and shrinks, they finally start questioning their planar existence. These beings are not stupid, rather just don't have the cognitive architecture to visualise what they are seeing when the sphere comes by.
The cover to Flatland, first edition
In Round About Four Dimensions we can just like the flatlanders see only a fraction or shadow of this tesseract, but can never truly visualise the object. Leading to a dimensional blindness.
For us as three-dimensional beings, we can also imagine this feeling even without yet debating the fourth spatial dimension. To imagine a consciousness different from us, we can, as philosopher Thomas Nagel does in his essay What is it like to be a Bat, look at bats. They do not have to interact or experience the world in the same way we do, and we could never truly imagine what it is like to be a bat, just like how a blind from birth person can not ever imagine what the colour red would be.
In my work The 4D Window I created a scene where you as the person would gather an idea of what it would be like to be a fourth dimensional being looking at a Third Dimensional object (Cube). As a fourth dimensional object, we can observe the entire cube as a whole at once, not just from one perspective. This still however looks alien to us as 3D beings, we still cannot fully comprehend what we are seeing even if we already have a clear idea of what a "normal" cube is.
To imagine a new creature that evokes this feeling of not being able to completely comprehend the unnatural/ higher dimensionality, I would like to bring forth the idea of the four dimensional being that is blind from birth growing up around people from a third dimension. The ability to experience the fourth dimension but never being able to imagine it since they grew up and were raised by beings that cannot comprehend such a space.
"He was alone, naturally fluent in a language noone else spoke, unable to understand it. Capable of a movement so foreign to him, yet lacking the ability to share it. Running his hands along shapes so simple, but impossible for everyone else. He was left in the dark."
TODO: ADD THE BIBLIOGRAPHY
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