Flatland and the Art Student

My family is highly interested in science fiction, astronomy, physics, and mathematics; in fact, my brother is majoring in math and wants to become a quantum physicist. As an art student, I am interested in the way things look and the creation of other worlds through paintings, but I am also fascinated by the totality of existence and other worlds, particularly other dimensions. My interest ballooned while reading the 1885 novel, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott.

Flatland is a place where there is no concept of above and below. Humans there are shapes, like triangles, squares, and polygons, which have a specific hierarchical system declaring those with more sides, have more nobility. Women, however, are lines and have no nobility. The novel is mostly a description of this place and its people. You and I live in Spaceland and experience three spatial dimensions.

The novel goes on to describe Lineland and Pointland. In Lineland, people live in one dimension where left and right do not exist. Humans in Lineland can only move forward and backward, and will always be next to the same person because they have no way to move around or through anything. In Pointland, a city of zero dimensions, there is one sole inhabitant who is the universe in which it exists. This stationary person is the point in Pointland. The only other thing that exists is his thoughts.

My first question, the one that influenced the writing of this article, aroused before finishing the novel. What does Flatland look like to the inhabitants there? While reading the book, I tried to picture it and imagined a warm neutral color surrounding a line, the line being a person in Flatland. But there could be no neutral surrounding above and below the line of the person because above and below cannot exist in Flatland. Even a line has volume if one can see it-a pen mark on a piece of paper is not two dimensional at all because the ink and paper have volume. When I read further in the book, the Spacelander said that if there is no above and below, Flatlanders must be invisible to other Flatlanders; the only reason Flatlanders can see each other is because the Third dimension exists and, therefore, a glimpse of it exists in Two dimensional Flatland. No science can answer every question provoked by a literary piece whose artistic license allows for anything to be.

We can apply time, another dimension we live with, to art including movies, literature, music, and sculpture. It takes time to experience these types of art. In film, animation, and even television our experience of it is time related. It takes time to go from word to word reading a novel. We experience music because of the way notes are placed in time (and space because softer sounds can feel farther away, while loud sounds are closer). It also takes time to walk around a three dimensional piece of art such as Michelangelo's famous "David." Kinetic sculptures, sculpture art that moves, take time for viewers to take in its movement. During an online art class, someone suggested that I look up Theo Jansen, a kinetic sculptor who builds wind powered, walking sculptures called Strandbeests.

Although I consider theoretical physics an art with lovely intricacies, I am more familiar with visual fine art. All speculation on other dimensions originated in scientists' imaginations, so some artists, masters of imagination, must be thinking about it. Writers, like Abbott, can describe dimensions, leaving our imaginations the task of organizing words into images. What baffles me is trying to see other dimensions because I am mostly a two dimensional visual artist.

Although canvas is not literally two dimensional, it is theoretically two dimensional because it does not involve time, nor is it meant to have physical depth (except possibly with brush/palette knife marks). Like many artists, I want to achieve the illusion of depth in a two dimensional space. Perhaps paintings with depth illusions are Flatlands that want to be Spacelands.

The way I like to think of visual fine art, literature, and other types of art is that artists create other dimensions, or worlds, with their work. I think perhaps another dimension not included with space and time is imagination. Imagination guides artists and scientists to the discovery and exploration of other spatial and temporal dimensions. Paintings and scientific theories, though similar, are still quite different because paintings show what could be in other dimensions, while scientific theories try to find what really is in other dimensions.