art & physics 12: space & time in science and art1 art & physics

1Art & Physics 12: Space & Time in Science and Art

Art & Physics

Equivalents I-VIIICarl Andre, 1966

Equivalent 8 Carl Andre, Tate Gallery 1978

A Pile of Bricks Unknown Workman Hong Kong 2004

I paint things as I think of them, not as I see them.Pablo Picasso

No one has ever been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing.

Norman Cousins

I paint things as I think of them, not as I see them.Pablo Picasso

No one has ever been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing.

Norman Cousins

At the speed of light

“There is no there, there.” Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

According to relativistic physics, space contracts as speed increases.

all space is here

Gertrude Stein(Picasso, 1906)

all time is now

For us, time seems to be instant by instant, although we never seem able to capture that instant.

As soon as we try to think of the present moment (the now) it has already become the past ….. and has therefore slipped away.

Nor is it possible to try and see the present before it arrives, because it is still in the future …. and is therefore out of reach.

Picasso had already expressed the artistic point of view in 1907.

Hermann Minkowski expressed the scientific point-of-view in 1908.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

“Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

“Both art and physics attempt to assemble from parts a whole which by itself is indistinct in such a way that the resulting order creates distinctness and clarity.”Cubism and Relativity in a letter from Albert Einstein, Art Journal XXV, 1946

Dove with Green Peas (Picasso, 1912)

“These new works look like a bunch of little cubes.”

(Louis Vauxcelles)

In cubism, objects were fractured into visual fragments and then rearranged so that the viewer would not have to move through space (or time) to view them.

Ma jolie (Picasso, 1911)

Segments from all viewpoints - front, back, top, bottom and sides - enter the viewer’s eye simultaneously.

Normally, to view a cube the viewer must walk around the object, thus requiring relocation to different points in space and, sequentially, to different moments in time.

In the cubist world, the viewer doesn’t have to move either in space or time. Perspective (depth) and causality (time) are absent.

view of square from within 2-d space

view of square from 3-d space

view of cube from within 3-d space

unwrapped cubewithin 3-d space

view of cube from 4-d space

Cubist painters fused Monet’s single-viewpoint series into single works with multiple viewpoints.

Cubism provided the first new way to perceive space since Euclid 2300 years earlier.

Violin (Picasso, 1912)Gare St. Lazare (Monet, 1877)

Single painting, multiple viewpointMultiple paintings, single viewpoint

Other cubist painters included Georges Braque (1882-1963), Juan Gris (1887-1927) and Fernand Leger(1881-1955).

Houses at L’Estaque (Georges Braque, 1908)

Castle at La Roche-Guyon (Georges Braque, 1909)

Three Lamps (Juan Gris, 1910--11)

Landscape at Ceret (Juan Gris, 1913)

Nudes in the Forest (Fernand Léger, 1909-1910)

The City (Fernand Léger, 1919)

Composition Architecturale (Fernand Léger)

Partie de Campagne (Fernand Léger, 1954)

“The objective world simply is; it does not happen.”

Hermann Weyl (1885-1955)

“Only to the gaze of my consciousness does a section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time.”

In modern physics, light is (i.e. it is absolute); space and time change in relation to it.

Although the velocity of light is constant for all observers, the frequency of emitted light from moving objects will appear different. If the tram moves towards the observer, he will see the light as if its frequency were greater (it appears bluer); if it is moving away, he will see the light as if its frequency were lower (it appears redder). This is the well-known Doppler effect.

stationary recedingapproaching

Ma Jolie(Picasso, 1911)

For the observer on the tram, scenery ahead of the tram will appear bluer, scenery to the rear of the tram will appear redder. To the sides will be a mixture of colours.

Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (Picasso, 1910)

At the speed of light all colours merge as space flattens into a plane and the front and rear become one. Strong individual colours would disappear and only neutral tones - white, black, brown, grey - would remain (the colours used by the cubist painters).

Shadows are also affected by relativistic effects.

In everyday experience light casts shadows so that objects have light and dark areas. But at relativistic speeds, space is so distorted that all areas are seen simultaneously, making it difficult to distinguish between light and dark.

In art, disegno (contour drawing) is based on the principle that things in high contrast appear nearer than things in low contrast.

Caravaggio

high contrast low contrast

In many of his still-life cubist paintings, Georges Braque inverted this technique by creating a black area where convention would put white.

Braque’s work is characterized by disordered shading and flattening of space, exactly as one might expect when travelling at lightspeed.

Cubism denies the traditional illusion of depth by means of perspective, as can be seen clearly in the cubist paintings by Picasso.

Girl with a Mandolin (1910) Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1910)

The Aficionado (1912)

Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter (Pablo Picasso, 1937)

Multiple viewpoints are evident in Picasso’s work.

The hat indicates eye-level.

The floor indicates downwardThe ceiling indicates upward

The chair has at least two points of view

The face has one viewpoint for the eyes, another for the mouth and a third for the nose

Portrait of Dora Maar (Pablo Picasso, 1937)

Could Picasso’s work be considered as the viewpoint of an observer in a 4th (spatial) dimension?

Perhaps, but in a limited sense, since not all viewpoints are shown.

An Englishman in Moscow(Malevich, 1914)

The suppression of depth continued and is apparent in the work of other artists such as Russians Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Dutchman Piet Mondrian (1872-1944).

Composition VI(Kandinsky, 1913)

Composition in Blue, Grey and Pink (Mondrian, 1913)

Relativity causes contraction of space, giving an observer a distorted view of his surroundings and the illusion that height elongates. This odd consequence of the special theory of relativity did not become widely known until the 1920’s.

But distortion in art, especially elongation of figures, began as early as the 1880’s with Cezanne and Seurat and later with the Italian Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920).

Portraits by Modigliani

Elongation was taken to the extreme by the Swiss sculptor Giacometti.

Man pointing Woman standing

His stick-like figures are just how one would expect people to appear to an observer travelling almost at lightspeed.

Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966

In the 1870’s German physicist Herman Helmholtz popularized the notion of non-Euclidean space and higher geometries.

He challenged Kant’s theory of a priori knowledge (knowledge that is truth not opinion) by saying that our knowledge of space is a belief that coincides with our perception of the world.

French mathematician Henri Poincaré supported this view: “The fundamental hypotheses of geometry are not experimental facts. It is, however, the observation of certain physical phenomena which accounts for the choice of certain hypotheses among all possible ones … the group chosen is only more convenient than the others and one cannot say that Euclidean geometry is true and the geometry of Lobachevsky is false.”

Poincaré 1854-1912

Helmholtz 1821-1894

In 1946, based on Helmhotz’s concept of visual perception, Adelbert Ames Jr. constructed the illusion, now known as the Ames Room, which creates two illusions.

Secondly, within an Ames Room people or objects can appear to grow or shrink when moving from one corner to the other.

In the static illusion, the room appears cubic when viewed monocularly from a special viewing point (the room is actually trapezoidal).

When you look into an Ames Room (through a peephole - to remove any cues from stereoscopic vision), the room looks normal and cubic, but its true shape is cleverly distorted.

The floor, ceiling, some walls, and the far windows are actually trapezoidal surfaces.

Although the floor appears level, it is actually at an incline (the far left corner is much lower than the near right corner).

The walls appear perpendicular to the floor, although they are actually slanted outwards.

Our perception of the world is affected by our familiarity with the geometry of 3-dimensional space and the expectations it creates.

Speculation on higher dimensions and how to visualize them was brilliantly portrayed in Edwin Abbott’s 1880 novel Flatland, which challenges people to imagine what it would be like to view our world from the fourth dimension.

Edwin Abbott (1838-1926)

The hero, a square living in two-dimensional space, is visited by a sphere from three-dimensional space who takes him out of his flatland to to experience the view from the third dimension. The square annoys the sphere by suggesting that the view from four-dimensions might be even better and on his return is imprisoned for spreading the news of his adventure.

3-d space

2-d space

sphere

circle

If a doughnut encounters flatland, flatlanders will see the doughnut as two circles. An observer in three dimensions will see only one doughnut.

“Cubism breaks with Renaissance perspective. It views objects relatively; that is, from several points of view, no one of which has exclusive authority. And in so dissecting objects it sees them simultaneously from all sides - from above and below, from inside and outside … Thus, to the three dimensions of the Renaissance which have held good as constituent facts throughout so many centuries there is added a fourth one - time … The presentation of objects from several points of view introduces a principle which is intimately bound up with modern life - simultaneity. It is a temporal coincidence that Einstein should have begun his famous work Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper, in 1905 with a careful definition of simultaneity.”

Sigfried Gideon (1938), art historian

Violin (Picasso 1913)

Some physicists argue against there being any analogy between cubism and relativity in their treatment of space.

“The cubist space, for example, tended to be a two-dimensional surface which excluded the third; the mathematics of relativity works in four-dimensional space-time. And one can continue indefinitely; looking for similarities is quite useless.”

Gésa Szamosi (Science Director, Concordia University)

What this statement overlooks is that at the speed of light depth disappears.

speed = c

Cubism eliminates the moment in time.

According to Einstein, this is the viewpoint of an observer travelling at the speed of light.

Illusionist perspectivist art has four dimensions

three perspective to locate positionone of time to locate the moment

In a cubist painting time does not exist.

There is no next or previous moment for the viewer to imagine

Cubism destroys perspective by eliminating depth

Cubism reduces art to two dimensions.

It thus allows the viewer to escape from 4-dimensional spacetime

Creation (Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475 - 1564)

art & physics 12: space & time in science and art1 art & physics

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