I'm trying to figure out a new thing to call this. Wordsmithing sounds trite, and Wordblasting stupid. Wordbombing? Word Vomit? Wordering? Advice needed.
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MC Escher
MC Escher is probably my favorite artist. I guess a lot of math majors think that. He made a lot of neat tessellations and impossible constructions. But I’ve always preferred the mindbenders. “Another World”, “House of Stairs”. I’m irrationally fond of his “Tower of Babel”, one of his earlier and less acclaimed pieces before he found fame in optical illusions.
I think the reason I love these pieces is what they do to reality. Most of the art I’ve come across either tries to represent the real world, like realism or cubism, or represent ideas, like Suprematism or modernism. Escher on the other hand feels like he’s destroying reality, presenting something that Can Not Be. It goes beyond normal optical illusions and impossible constructs into a sort of Lovecraftian insanity. My mind can tell there’s something but cannot comprehend the totality of it. To really get “Waterfall”, I feel like I’d have to break spacetime.
Which got me thinking. Escher uses 2D to go beyond 3D. Could you take that one step further? Maybe you could use 3D to go beyond 4D, like build a sculpture that- from the right point- looks exactly like a tesseract. Why haven’t we done this? Maybe Escher was a rare genius. Maybe we’d have to see 4D to know how to smash it. Maybe people have already done this and I’m just ignorant. No matter what, I’m excited to see what people do with it. If people do something with it. Here’s hoping.
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