A pioneering artist continues his visionary inquiry into hyperspace In this insightful book, which is a revisionist math history as well as a revisionist art history, Tony Robbin, well known for his innovative computer visualizations of hyperspace, investigates different models of the fourth dimension and how these are applied in art and physics. Robbin explores the distinction between the slicing, or Flatland, model and the projection, or shadow, model. He compares the history of these two models and their uses and misuses in popular discussions. Robbin breaks new ground with his original argument that Picasso used the projection model to invent cubism, and that Minkowski had four-dimensional projective geometry in mind when he structured special relativity. The discussion is brought to the present with an exposition of the projection model in the most creative ideas about space in contemporary mathematics such as twisters, quasicrystals, and quantum topology. Robbin clarifies these esoteric concepts with understandable drawings and diagrams. Robbin proposes that the powerful role of projective geometry in the development of current mathematical ideas has been long overlooked and that our attachment to the slicing model is essentially a conceptual block that hinders progress in understanding contemporary models of spacetime. He offers a fascinating review of how projective ideas are the source of some of today's most exciting developments in art, math, physics, and computer visualization.]]>
A fundamental tenet of the historiography of modern architecture holds that cubism forged a vital link between avant-garde practices in early twentieth-century painting and architecture. This collection of essays, commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, takes a close look at that widely accepted but little scrutinized belief. In the first historically focused examination of the issue, the volume returns to the original site of cubist art in pre-World War I Europe and proceeds to examine the historical, theoretical, and socio-political relationships between avant-garde practices in painting, architecture, and other cultural forms, including poetry, landscape, and the decorative arts. The essays look at works produced in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia during the early decades of the twentieth century. Together, the essays show that although there were many points of intersection -- historical, metaphorical, theoretical, and ideological -- between cubism and architecture, there was no simple, direct link between them. Most often the connections between cubist painting and modern architecture were construed analogically, by reference to shared formal qualities such as fragmentation, spatial ambiguity, transparency, and multiplicity; or to techniques used in other media such as film, poetry, and photomontage. Cubist space itself remained two-dimensional; with the exception of Le Cobusiers work, it was never translated into the three dimensions of architecture. Cubism's significance for architecture also remained two-dimensional -- a method of representing modern spatial experience through the ordering impulses of art. Copublished with the Canadian Centre for Architecture/Centre Canadien d'Architecture.
This work seeks to transform our understanding of Cubism, showing in detail how it emerged in Picasso's work of the years 1906-13, and tracing its roots in 19th-century philosophy and linguistics.
Cubism was one of the most important and influential movements in twentieth-century art. In the eight years between 1906 and 1914, Cubism - Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in particular - was to change the technique and form of painting, radically and for ever. Originating in Paris, the movement became a truly international force, and one with a profound impact on human visual experience. This book, illustrated with over 300 photographs, presents a vivid personal evocation of Cubism as a historic and aesthetic force.