THE FOURTH DIMENSION

To this point, we have concerned ourselves with drawing in three dimensions.  We have discussed some of the limitations of the linear renaissance perspective system.  And believe it or not, another limitation of the conventional three dimensional drawing is that it does afford the possibility of drawing in the fourth dimension.

Now of course, nobody knows what the fourth dimension looks like.  2D shapes and colors fall on our retinas.  And then then we construct our three dimensional world understanding within our nervous systems.  The physical limitations of this transition from 2 to 3 dimensions is difficult enough.  So there is no wonder that we can’t automatically shift from 2 to 4 dimensions with any facility.

Nevertheless, this has not stopped us from trying.  Modernists such as Picasso based much of his entire output on what the fourth dimension might be like to experience.  We will look at artist’s preoccupations with the fourth dimension in the future.

One of the most prevalent and simplistic examples of the fourth dimension is the tesseract cube.  What I find amazing is that nearly all attempts to draw in the fourth dimension are drawn transparently.  However close, or not, any of these drawings come to the depiction of the fourth dimension, none of them are completely opaque.  And most of them are completely transparent.

So what does that mean to us exactly?  Well, even as mere three dimensional humans, we do struggle to understand our three dimensional world.  And as we have seen, our three dimensional understanding is vastly enhanced when we draw transparently.  Transparency is the tool that leads us to higher dimensional understandings.  So the fact that even rudimentary 4th dimension depictions almost by definition must be transparent I believe lends credence to our current efforts.   And quite possibly, the use of transparency as an analytical tool increases the chance that the 4th dimension will be addressed.

Or another way to say this is I find it heartening.  It seems that indeed we are going in the right direction as we work to expand our minds to the manifestations of our world.

The drawing above was based rather directly on a cartoon that was in the December 2014 Wired Magazine.  I have included the original cartoon panel here, and it was drawn by Randall Munroe of XKCD fame.  I found the drawing so compelling, I drew my own version with little changes.  Whether doing this violates any copyright laws, I can’t say.