Page 161 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 161/206
Edwin Abbott : Flatland - A Novel of Many Dimensions by A. Square 1884
“The notion of a fourth dimension of space had, in various guises, been in the popular sphere for a decade. The London schoolmaster Edwin Abbott’s Flatland combined Alice-in-Wonderland nonsense and mathematical logic to lead its protagonist, and thereby its readers, to ‘the land of Four Dimensions’...Charles Howard Hinton had proclaimed the dawn of the ‘four-dimensional era’...in 1884. Both Abbott and Hinton had popularised techniques for training...the mind to think in four dimensions; “Hinton had been perhaps the first to identify the fourth dimension with time, a nebulous but tantalising idea that was simultaneously moving Albert Einstein towards the notion of space-time curvature and the theory of relativity.”... “Dimensions beyond the 'normal' (XYZ+time) had been in the popular sphere for a decade. The London schoolmaster Edwin Abbott’s Flatland combined Alice-in- Wonderland nonsense and mathematical logic to lead its protagonist, and thereby its readers, to ‘the land of Four Dimensions’...Charles Howard Hinton had proclaimed the dawn of the ‘four-dimensional era’...in 1884. Both Abbott and Hinton had popularised techniques for training...the mind to think in four dimensions; Hinton had been perhaps the first to identify the fourth dimension with time, a nebulous but tantalising idea that was simultaneously moving Albert Einstein towards the notion of space-time curvature and the theory of relativity.” (Mike Jay at www.strangeattractor.com)
Dealing with extra-dimensions was an issue faced by hypermedia designers in the 1980s.. The problem-space inhabited by hypermedia designers, games developers and other 'interactive' designers in the mid 1980s was an intriguing one - designing with hyperlinks or branching sequences on a CDROM, Hypercard stack or Laserdisc presented many problems that had no clear precedent in design (That's why Richard Oliver and I wrote Understanding Hypermedia in 1993). So we discovered game-play-design, ‘teaching-machines' and ‘programmed learning’ , hypertext fiction, non-linear narratives, (etc) and delved into older philosophies that dealt with these issues, albeit mostly by metaphor - so I got into Bruce Chetwynd's The Songlines; Tristram Shandy; William Gibson's cyberspace-related sci-fi; The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour; Medieval (Llullian) mysticism; Narratology, and much else - including this fascinating book on one-dimensional life by Edwin Abbott. This led on to mathematical definitions of hyper-space, hypercubes etc - and to the cyberpunk fiction and factual books of the mathematicians Vernor Vinge (True Names) Rudy Rucker (the Ware tetralogy; Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension etc) - and the beautiful hypercube- extrapolation prints and animations of Manfred Mohr (see 2002_Mohr: Space-Color-Motion + P777). This was very interesting territory...