Post 11: N-Spaces
16 May 2025 // Pages 274-288Meanwhile, our Narrator is immersed (literally, he dives in) in a medieval wall tapestry depicting the City. The artist who made the tapestry is one Zellen Warhol. Zellen is the German plural for cells—both the biological kind, and the originary name for them, that is monks’ cells or jail cells or cells like the Narrator was trapped in writing the Book of Life. Warhol is famous, of course for telling us all we’d have fifteen minutes of fame, and for testing the limits of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. Zellen Warhol talks about a theory he hears about from a scholar in Leipzig, that time is just a running of our spheres in a fourth dimension, along it, to be more precise. Anyway, if you cut “the life beam of man into short slices or cylinders” and placed them side by side, you’d get time compressed, which is to say a narrative, and you wouldn’t have to bother printing books, which is clearly the most important implication of a multi-dimensional physics in the world of Schattenfroh which is governed by books.
Other implications of such physics are manifest. When I was younger, the trendy thing in quantum theory was that the multiple dimensions of the universe were bound up in Calabi-Yau space, which you can see slices of in two dimensions. Here is one from Wikipedia:
You can’t really see the thing that is the thing because you’re human and can’t visualize n-space. You can’t really visualize any higher space other than the three-dimensional, what you see are cross-sections of that, usually two-dimensional ones. Imagine the entire life of Marylin Monroe spread out in four dimensions, a sphere rolling along a plane in the extra one. Slice it up, the path of the sphere. This is what you get:
Actually AI images are made using the concept of manifolds in n-space too. Coonsider the coordinates for a point (x,y). Now consider the coordinates for a point in infinite space (x,y,z,a,b…. ad infinitum). There are two points in super high dimensional space. Find the closest path between them. That’s sort of how some of the math behind AI generative images works, like when you ask for an image of a medieval town with a bird’s eye view like God or Zellen Warhol. Except Zellen Warhol says “ …. The more curvelessly runs the road, which also takes away time from people meditating on God.” This is concept also popular in Dutch altarpieces (like this one by Patinir, of the Penitence of St. Jerome, from ca. 1515 ) where the wandering eye on the road also brings the viewer meditatively to God:
Schattenfroh was accidentally prescient about AI here. Chat GPT means you compress the entire history of the human word, slice it up, and never have to print another book. The same goes for the history of the image, just ask for a thing and the calculations of adjacencies to the idea of that thing, rendered as points in n-space, will give you an image, no art-making necessary. But it’s a very straight road, an instantaneous one almost. It gives you no time to meditate on God, or why the Shroud of Turin would probably cost more than a Mercedes-Benz.
You can ask a program like Stable Diffusion or Midjourney for a perfect little city, like one in the background of the Patinir altarpiece, or your own face in the style of Warhol’s Monroe, but it won’t do the same thing of “simultaneity of non simultaneity” that a tapestry does, letting you move back and forth in time with your eyes. That’s because it collapses those dimensions into the shortest, most efficient possible route, no wandering allowed. Are you sure you’re not holding a poisonous black book? Is that you Lucifer, Schattenfroh, Nebo, Nemo?
-- A.V. Marraccini
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