Fireworks, July 4, 1997, Seattle
Taken through the window of a lovely night club on the 24th floor of the building next door with the expert assistance of R. Bloomberg during a break in the festivities at the National Stereo Association Convention in Seattle, Washington. Stereo base of about 8 feet and a time exposure of about 10 seconds.
- Cross-eyed.
- Cross your eyes to view an image in true 3D.
- Parallel.
- Look far into the distance keeping your eyes parallel to fuse this 3D image.
- Anaglyphic.
- Use red/cyan glasses to view this image.
Apparatus to View the Illusion of Four Dimensionality
We focus our eyes through two lenses on stereoscopes to view the illusion of three dimensional objects or scenes. I wondered what type of apparatus one would use to view the illusion of four dimensionality. This "trioscope", for the fourth dimension, needs three lenses. Don't ask me who or what would look through them.
I put together this piece of sculpture as myinterpretation of certain mathematical models of
dimensionality. These mathematical theories state that the first dimension is a point with no width
or length. The second dimension has length and width but no depth (or height). The third dimension has length, width and depth (or height). I have chosen to represent the first dimension with a small rivet, the second dimension with an aluminum disk and the third dimension with a
spherical, lead shot-put.
The shadow of a three dimensional object is dimensional (we all know this). In
mathematics the shadow of a four dimensional object is three dimensional and, of course, the shadow of a two dimensional object is one dimensional. Put another way, the shadow of any object is always one dimension less than the object itself. The sculpture was meant to be observed with a strong light from the side of the single lens. This would demonstrate the above.
Noël, Mount Tremblant Village, Quebec
Match Trees, Tumut River, Australia
I was fortunate to stumble across a canoe trip through the interior of Australia in 1989. It began in Gundagai, a small town of 2,300 in the territory of New South Wales and proceeded down the Murrumbidgee River through rolling hills and cattle country. This river flows generally westward for 1,050 miles until it joins the Murray River on the Victoria Territory border. Our tour guide, Lance, was quite a colourful guy who had somewhat shady past full of wild adventures. We passed many an hour by the campsite listening to his stories of being a bus driver smuggling hash, blue jeans and who knows what else between Europe and Iran. He ended up in jail a few times and his attitude towards settling down and getting married can be summed up by the following expression of his: "Why take only one book when you can have the entire library".
Eucalyptus trees, weeping willows and she-oaks(also known as beefwoods) crowded the river banks. We saw (and unfortunately heard screeching) hundreds of sulphur-crested cockatoos, the odd black-swan, galahs and the beautiful crimson rosella. Occasionally at sunset, the monkey-like laugh of the Kookaboora shot through the silence and we felt were in Africa not Australia. Rarely, we would see dingoes at dawn. But what were the hardest to see was a strange monotreme(egg laying mammal), the duck billed platypus. Our guide would shout as one dived under the water and we never seemed to get a really good look. Possums were spotted eating leaves and we saw one wallaby, a smaller, darker, version of the kangaroo.
We portaged the Bowering Dam, then canoed down the Tumut River and camped at the site seen in the stereo photograph. What you see is the result of a curious land management policy developed by the Snowy Hydro Electric Scheme(S.H.E.S.). The land was originally expropriated from the local farmers because it would end up being flooded by the Bowering Dam. It was later sold to a match company who planted the trees you see here. The match company subsequently leased it back to the same farmers who originally owned it to use, once again, as grazing land for their cattle!
