2004OP_ERA: Hyperviews

The hypercube — a cube whose six faces are themselves cubes — cannot be drawn, photographed, or projected. It can only be imagined. OP_ERA: HYPERVIEWS attempts to provoke that imagining. As Arlindo Machado wrote of the work, it proposes "to explore the representation, in three-dimensional spaces, of objects in four dimensions: in this case a virtual hypercube, suggested to the mind of the observer."

The architecture is a darkened cube, three meters on each side, its five inner walls lined with 688 halogen lamps. Custom software fires the lamps in synchronized flashes, each flash representing the temporal projection of a vertex of a four-dimensional object. The flashes are short. The room is dark between them. One visitor enters at a time, alone, wearing headphones. The visitor's retina holds each flash for a fraction of a second after it has gone — the persistence of vision, the same physiological lag that makes cinema possible.

What the visitor sees is not on the walls. What the visitor sees is in their own head: a figure assembled by the mind from afterimages, from the phi effect, from the convergence of light, sound, and time. The work runs by three rules: unfold the hypercube into lower dimensions; examine its projections and shadows; analyze its intersections and cross-sections. None of these operations occurs on the walls. All of them occur in the visitor.

The photographs of HYPERVIEWS are not what the visitor saw. The naked eye cannot accumulate light the way a long camera exposure can. What the photographs show is the latent structure: every flash, layered over time, into a single image of the work the visitor's brain was being asked to assemble. The camera sees what the body cannot, and so the documentation is itself a fourth-dimensional translation. The photograph is what the visitor almost saw. The video documentation comes closer — shot in real time, it shows the flash-and-darkness cycle the eye encounters. But even video cannot reproduce the afterimage, since the afterimage occurs not on the screen but on the retina of the person watching. The work's real medium is human perception, and that medium has no recording device.

Salvador Dalí, in 1954, painted Corpus hypercubicus — Christ crucified on the unfolded net of a four-dimensional cross, calculated with the help of the mathematician Thomas Banchoff. HYPERVIEWS works the inverse problem. Where Dalí painted a 4D object as if it could be seen, we built a room that admits the object cannot — and uses the fact of perception's limits as the work's medium.