It all starts with a little tourism video that presents the attractions of the city of Onomichi in 3D. Actually, the acronym doesn’t refer to an advanced technology, but to three adjectives used to describe the city: delicious, dramatic, and delectable. Beneath this marketing sleight of hand is the invention of a kitsch journey in which a young girl boasts of the charm of this port city near to Hiroshima. Nothing serious of course, but this promotional object becomes a pretext to return to a concept that, with industrial change in full swing, inspired dreams: the fourth dimension.
The project seeks to reexamine this problematic which inspired the scientific minds of the 19th century to call Euclidian space into question and was then appropriated by modern artists from Gaston de Pawlowski to Marcel Duchamp, and from Alfred Jarry to Edwin Abbott. Like a Möbius strip, the fourth dimension invites us to look back in time and space, unveiling their reversibility a century later: historical progress has become obsolete when the virtual is more embodied than ever.
In a mode both aleatory and allegorical, The 4D Onomichi Project proposes one room for each artist so as to envisage an n-dimensional world. Each artist can exhibit her world, display the curves of his artistic thought, and play with the additional D in this Japanese city, which the 10 day workshop will not enable the artist to map out, but rather to redraw through his or her own mental constellation.
Exhibition “The 4D Project”, Onomichi City Museum, November 2014, 22nd to January 2015, 12th