It’s easy to believe that we have discovered all the main art forms already – that everything now will just be versions of what exists. I disagree and think there are many new avenues to explore – space-time being only one.
I am purposely avoiding the work of Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg and many others. I’m mainly concerned with our lived reality, irrespective of the actual physics (even though I am borrowing their spacetime term). I’m sure there’s a place for quantum art…
For this post, I will focus on a uniquely human activity – measurement, which has space-time at its core.
Artists are master measurers. Painters, illustrators, photographers all measure light and color. Musicians, dancers measure sound, friction and gravity. What would an artist do with measured temperature? Cook, of course.
Consider, for a moment, where you are, reading this. Imagine all the possible measurements you could make, right now, at your location. There are the familiar things. For example, you could measure and record the visual light spectrum (a photograph) or the air vibrations over time (an audio recording). But there is a vast collection of other inputs from which to choose.
The low hanging fruit:
- Air temperature
- Pressure
- Wind direction
The more personal:
- Your body temperature
- Blood pressure
- Heart rate
The situational:
- Your current altitude
- Heading
- Velocity
The unusual:
- Ambient radiation level
- Your distance from Paris (in millimeters, as the crow flies)
- Etc., etc.
The number of things you could measure, right now, where you are, is inconceivably vast. The real question is what could artists do with all these, limitless, options? Could there be an artist who specializes in heart beats?
But measurements are just numbers or characters until put into context. Saying the air temperature is 20 degrees Celsius doesn’t mean much until you hang the datapoint on a space-time peg. For example, saying – at 11:03:44 AM GMT, at 41.140116N, -72.319418W the air temperature at sea level was 20.84°C, is considerably more informative.
If you look at the photograph in my first post, you’ll see a lot of data displayed – date, time, latitude, longitude, altitude. There’s also the pictorial image itself with visual cues that would tell you, if you’re familiar with NYC, that the subject is standing on the edge of Central Park Lake, in the Ramble. The point of the photo is to make explicit what normally goes unacknowledged – the sea of information we are always swimming in, just waiting to be measured.
I can hear you saying…”but isn’t this the same thing?”
It is, but in a different way. The picture above has all kinds of data attached to it, and you can find it if you go looking. The Central Park photograph is literally *about* the data at that time and place. It’s not “meta”. It requires a conceptual leap; a little like Sol Lewitt’s “the instructions are the art”. I want to explicitly use spacetime-related information as new form of creative input, as a virtually limitless, palette of new “colors”.
I see physical reality as a collection of “decorations” hung on the spacetime framework. Our senses exist to identify and evaluate them, math and science to discover, quantify and describe them. As artists, our duty is to appreciate them. I think we have the opportunity to develop some new ways to do exactly that. I will give some examples in my upcoming posts.
psemme 
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