In this strand, all moments exist simultaneously with the present, constituting a continually shifting, three-dimensional slice of this hyper-solid through our lower-dimensional space.
Two strands of interpreting the fourth dimension developed: one which defined the fourth dimension as an additional dimension of space perpendicular to our own three, unimaginable to us yet encompassing our three-dimensional scope as the cube encompasses the square the other defining the fourth dimension as time, imagining space-time as a continuous, four-dimensional volume of past and future spread along a linear axis of time. These new notions of reality, engendered by the discoveries of non-Euclidean geometry, the Theories of Relativity, and quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century – the ‘new science’, affected the development of Modernist concepts in the arts from the traditional avant-garde of the early century to Minimalism in the 1960s and ’70s.Īt the end of the nineteenth century, a great deal of cultural interest sprang up around the concept of n-dimensional geometry, hyperspace, and the fourth dimension. These discoveries fundamentally altered contemporary culture’s relationship to space and time by ushering in the validity of notions such as the curvature of space, hyper-dimensions, indeterminacy, and subjectivity as rational principles. New concepts of space in the arts grew out of the discovery of new geometries and physical laws at the turn of the last century. ‘Supra-’ as defined in (New Oxford American Dictionary 2011). ‘Supra-dimensional’, from the Latin supra meaning ‘above, beyond transcending’, connotes a number of dimensions of space-time greater than those which are characteristic for a given medium. In this paper, we examine the theoretical underpinnings and artistic experiments beginning with Sergei Eisenstein’s theoretical approaches to film montage, leading up to the contemporary moving-image as a supra-dimensional medium. The concept of somatic montage extends this artistic evolution to the immersive moving image, taking the tesseract, the four-dimensional cube, as a model-metaphor for time-based forms of composition that derive from the deconstruction of linear sources, allowing for a multidimensional re-composition of the parts that actively engages the viewer in constructing associative flow structures. on the profound role that concepts of n-dimensional geometry, hyperspace, non-Euclidean geometry, and the fourth dimension played in the development of the avant-garde at the turn of the last century these were all scientific discoveries that inspired new artistic approaches to space-time, motion, and the faceting of perspective. See The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Henderson, 1983). The projection architecture becomes an ordering element in the compositional flow of the film, an element of the cinematic grammar that allows the spectator to construct an interpreted field of associations and meaning in the creation of a poetic narrative.Īrt historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson has written a comprehensive treatise Immersive cinema forms a four-dimensional, navigable cinematic space in which the montage composition becomes an embodied, participatory experience. The expanded cinema mediums of fulldome cinema, immersive video and film installation, virtual reality, and extended reality, when approached as architectonic spaces occupied by the immersive motion picture, allow for a spatialized, non-linear juxtaposition of the cinematic elements or ‘cells’. is a new approach to the established cinematic language of montage that marries chronological with spatial composition in the creation of narrative, presented here as an extended, supra-dimensional notion of what Eisenstein called the ‘disjunctive method of narration’. Portions of this paper are reproduced from the unpublished dissertation Somatic Montage: Supra-Dimensional Composition in Cinema and the Arts ( Chamier-Waite, 2019). The nomenclature ‘somatic montage’ was first introduced by this author in ‘The Cine-poetics of Fulldome Cinema’ ( Chamier-Waite, 2013). Immersive cinema affords a proprioceptive interaction of form and content, allowing the signification structure of a film to extend outwards from its internal narrative structure into the architectonic geometry of its projection space. The development of a formal, cinematic language for immersive motion pictures is currently in its early stage, a stage comparable to the invention of rhythmic montage pioneered by filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, by the early Soviet cinema movement, and by the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s.
0 kommentar(er)
