What follows is an abridged version of a public conversation which took place on February 1, 2014 in the CAC Reading Room between art critic and historian Vivian Sky Rehberg and Melvin Moti, a Rotterdam-based artist whose exhibition Hyperspace [1] that had opened at the CAC a day earlier. The conversation traces some of the historical work that informs Moti’s research on the so-called fourth dimension, a thin line between fiction and expertise, and his personal take on pushing the boundaries.
Vivian S. Rehberg: I had the privilege of reading your book MU before it was published, which doesn’t mean that I fully grasp all the very detailed concepts and descriptions within it. There is one line in the first text in which you are describing a theory related to the fourth dimension that particularly struck me. I will read the paragraph:
“Based on their theory and using Gauss’ models (too complicated, never mind), math genius Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, who revolutionized just about everything from functions, to number theory, to geometry, finally developed a version of non-Euclidian geometry in 1854. His theory involved a Cartesian grid with real numbers along one axis, complex numbers on the other, and something called a Riemann sphere. Basically one ends up with a two-dimensional Euclidian plane curved into a ball that is set up the complex plane. For those who don’t understand exactly what all this means, I have bad news, neither do I. The Riemann sphere is complicated as hell and deals with infinity as well as Cantorian set theory. It’s also, most of all, brutally abstract.”
I would like to start our conversation from this premise: “For those who don’t understand what this all exactly means, I have bad news, neither do I”. If you know anything about Melvin’s practice you know that it is deeply research based and that there is an enormous amount of work that takes place and exists behind the final visible product, which in this case is the 35mm film The Eightfold Dot. I really like the idea that your research is conducted in the direction of non-expertise — without a guarantee that you are going to actually understand the outcome.
Melvin Moti: In this case it was very clear that I hit the limit of what I can understand and explain. The fourth dimension is a concept coming from a very abstract mathematical model. It’s geometric translation is that there are three dimensions: zero is a dot, one is a line, two is a plane, three is a cube and four is a hyper cube: mostly pictured as a cube within a cube. You can draw that and you can illustrate the fourth dimension in terms of geometry. But the point is that it’s an abstract concept, so you are not supposed to draw it out, that would make it concrete, not abstract. Fact is that I don’t understand this abstract stuff, it is brutally technocratic and I don’t have a mathematical mind anyway. But the fact that I don’t know is exactly the whole clue of the fourth dimension: no one can know, in an empirical sense. On the other hand, from the moment it got onto paper, people started to imagine, and people started to fill the gap between something which is abstract and the natural world. So on one hand there is an abstract theoretical possibility that there is a four-dimensional space, and on the other hand no-one really knows how translate this into something concrete. In the history of the fourth dimension this non-expertise element, not knowing, is actually essential. That is where things became very imaginative, but also not abstract.
V. S. R.: In your book MU, which is presented alongside The Eightfold Dot, you write about literature, you write about architects and you write about mathematicians, philosophers, all of whom approach the question of the fourth dimension differently, which involves constructing a narrative that’s in some ways meant to be believable as a proposal with specific functions in each domain. The narrative for literature is distinct from the science narrative and the architecture narrative.
M. M.: Well, it is a very chronological development. It comes from math. And then some scientists started to turn this mathematical abstraction into common language. One of them is Hermann von Helmholtz, a German scientist who tried to explain this very abstract model to an audience, who was scientific but not necessarily into the whole lingo of Riemann. He described a figure living on the surface of a sphere, a two-dimensional figure who could not escape the flat yet spherical surface. This image stuck and people were are less and less involved into hard science became interested in this figure. It became a character in literature: fictional character in a form of a shadow, living on a surface, never being able to escape the surface; this fiction caught on. A. A. Abbott, a British writer, wrote a book called “Flatland” where he summarized all the explanations and illustrations given by scientists before that. His book is a novel and all the characters in the novel are geometric figures. They live in Flatland, so all the characters are flat. It describes basically the progression of dimensions in novel form.
V. S. R.: It is funny, because these characters are modeled on humans, they have genders and so on…
M. M.: Yes, that is a very conventional novel, but for me it was interesting to see how you can turn geometry into a narrative. And then it became a bit more slippery when people who were involved into theosophy became interested into fourth dimension as a kind of projection of a transcendental space. With that it became even less scientific, not only fiction but also mythology became attached to the fourth dimension, and artists and architects and writers became obsessed with it. Marcel Duchamp made beautiful, excellent drawings, which reverse-engineered the fourth dimension from fiction to math again. But to me one of the most interesting figures is an American Architect called Claude Bragdon. One of the things which he did, was trying to turn the fourth dimension into a practice instead of trying to describe it like the others did. By the 1920s the fourth dimension had become a projection of a transcendental space: if you reach it, your life and the world would improve. It became a progressive ideal. Bragdon didn’t call it the fourth dimension any more, but at the same time all his ideals were exactly demonstrated in the song and light festivals which he organized with communities mostly in the East Coast of the US. It’s interesting since the fourth dimension went from an abstraction to a drawing to fiction and turned into a relational practice pushed into a society. That is roughly the development I’m describing in the first essay. After 1920 Einstein’s space-time theory started to drip down to the general audience, which describes time as the fourth dimension, the idea that the fourth dimension is a physical parallel space became distinct. After the 1920s it was not such a sexy concept anymore, but in between the 1880’s and 1920 it was a dominant theme in popular science, but also for artists.
V.R.S.: Is it fully obsolete as a concept today?
M.M.: No, in math not. It is abstract math, it has nothing to do with how you perceive the world. Someone wrote me that in quantum physics there are 13 dimensions and asked me which fourth I was addressing.
V.R. S.: So it could be seen as a pure vehicle for fiction? And your film could be seen as a fiction film in that sense?
M.M.: Yeah it might be called predominantly a fiction. I think the fourth dimension can best be considered as an empty vessel, and as you present it to people, sooner or later it is going to be filled with the most amazing stories, most of which is fiction.
V. R. S.: The film ends with the dot.
M.M.: Yeah, and starts with a dot too.
V.R.S.: And how does that dot relate to the second part of the book, “The Eightfold Dot”?
M.M: In Buddhism there is an advice: Buddha gave eight rules and if you will follow these eight rules your life will improve. It’s called the eightfold path. In one of the books I read a passage by someone who said that this is actually not really a path, because it doesn’t lead anywhere, and a path takes up space while Buddha’s eightfold path is not supposed to take up space, so maybe it’s better describe it as a dot; the eightfold dot. Most importantly I really wanted to think about my work in another theoretical framework than is usual for me and my environment. Reduction is an important element in my work, as a visual and artistic strategy. It’s easy to speak about it in relation to modernism, conceptual art and, let’s say, immaterial strategies, but if you don’t want to go down that road and still speak about reduction, than looking into the theory of emptiness is very interesting and solid take on a subject. The publication juxtaposes two things: on one hand you have the group of people who believe in the infinitive expansion of space and on the other hand you have a book, which describes the infinite reduction of space and how to reach total emptiness.
V.R.S.: I do not want to attribute too much of an interest in mysticism to you, but for example your work The Black Room deals with the way parapsychology functions in the production of literature and in the production of artworks; and this comes with a very strong interest in visual phenomena that are triggered by association, or by confinement in space, like in your Prisoners’ Cinema. Maybe you could talk about how the scientific, the para-scientific, or quasi-scientific, and also popular science are filtering through your work? You have also have a strong interest in literature and in Arts and Crafts movements. And what’s surprising is that you do not establish a hierarchy between all these interests; they appear and disappear from different projects and they are treated very equally.
M.M.: I think this is quite a didactical film; and also my last film Eigenlicht which is about fluorescent minerals is a didactic film but that’s maybe because I think I kind of make films for 12 year old kids. I like to use the medium film (as in celluloid) as a scientific tool. With the resolution of celluloid and with the photochemical processing of film you can push images to an extent that they become untranslatable to another medium. This is how I like to work with film. In terms of my sources, I think Andy Warhol once said that an artist is someone who does something really well. For me that statement does away with any kind of hierarchy. I like crafts a lot, but general I like stuff that is done well and whether something is art or not is a question of context and platform basically. In relation to parapsychological area of my work I noticed that in my private life – I’m always interested in pushing my mind and body; similarly I tend to read and watch things which are related to that. Like this surrealist writer who tried to push his mind using self-hypnosis, became obsessed with it until he literally looses his mind. You get into that area where you can see how things can go wrong, a kind of a twilight zone between being in the world and losing touch with the world.
V.R.S.: And pop science?
M.M.: I don’t get hard science so I start with pop science. I do back it up with other readings, but since I enjoy popular culture, I like to watch TV and science programs on TV. It’s the best thing where they can explain super complicated concepts in five minutes, for an audience in between 8 and 99. It’s is incredible. That’s communication!
Images are the courtesy of the CAC archive