Claude Bragdon: Drawings of the Fourth Dimension (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Claude Bragdon: Drawings of the Fourth Dimension (2022)

socks-studio.com

139 pointsdiaphanous21 comments

Something about this feels like a comedy of manners about a recent fad for some section of mathematics instead of, say, learning Hungarian, blazing like smallpox through a set of the gentry ... combined with a touch of the Lovecraftian horror of revelation of subjects too large for a brain only recently post-simian, more tuned to hurling rocks than visualization of the perambulations of higher-order Platonics through a more understandable, lesser membrane. One might imagine the Thirteenth Duke of Wybourne, having commissioned from an artisan a fine set of Hinton cubes and, upon their reception, ensconced them in some parlour corner bit of cabinetry, only for a succession of his niece's acquaintances to fall victim to some palsy, seizure, or neurasthenic disorder purely because her companions were typically relegated to a particular chair near the offending objects of uncanny intellectual curiosity. Why do all of her friends fare so poorly?

More from the 13th Duke of Wybourne https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCf1FMmHHWY

I have to say I don't understand much of your reply except for the Lovecraftian part, but I found it particularly geeky.

I think I followed the whole thing, and quite enjoyed it. But not very HN.

Hunh. And here I would have thought that Hinton cubes were quite topical.

I wasn't entirely unserious about the fad, either. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions was made in 1884 and for a while, speculation and attempts at visualization of higher dimensions were popular. Hinton coined "tesseract" in 1888, and by 1904 his book The Fourth Dimension introduced his cubes. In one of Martin Gardner's books I had found a letter discussing a potential downsides of such studies, that some began to inescapably visualize the exercise progression which went along with Hinton's cubes, much to the dismay of a few afflicted.

The Thirteenth Duke of Wybourne, however, is from The Fast Show; I do a passable impression.

With a touch of Lord Dunsany

One of my favorite HN comments of all time.

I feel like this all happened just out of frame in a flashback sequence in The Invisibles.

that was fantastic, very enjoyable

There's something quite Mobius (as in Jean Giraud) about some of those, particularly the robed women, and the plain of solids.

I'd love to capture Bragdon's style with image generation. It's really quite magical, and it'd be amazing to see more of it.

I did some more reading on Bragdon, and we tore down [1] his architectural magnum opus. Quite disappointing.

[1] https://www.rochestersubway.com/topics/tag/bragdon-station/

Removing the theosophy from his work may make it more palatable (and ultimately more sensible).

The handwritten font (hmm does such a phrase even exist?) in his drawings is great, not very readable, but great.

I think that you should say "script" instead of "font". Font is for typesetting. Script is (often) for handwriting.

i would just call it 'handwriting' if it doesn't mind

I look at his work and feel love. What a great guy. Such depth, breadth and sensitivity.

Forget collecting art. I think I'd rather collect artists.

And he was a theosophist!

I believe he was also the person who first got P.D. Ouspensky published in English.

Edit: yes - he produced the first English translation of Ouspensky as early as 1919. Ouspensky was a refugee in Constantinople, had no idea the translation had come out, and Bradgon had no idea where he was. Eventually he found him and sent him a royalty check and this led to Ouspensky's emigrating to England.

It’s funny, I found the images somehow quite unsettling. Maybe it’s just that they look like drawings associated with magical work. Which, reading the comments here, they might be.

Claude Fayette Bragdon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Fayette_Bragdon

https://theosophyart.org/2018/03/30/claude-fayette-bragdon/

The Bevier Memorial Building at night: another dimension of Claude Bragdon

https://talkerofthetown.com/2017/05/11/the-bevier-memorial-b...

Claude Bragdon: His Work in Rochester

https://www.libraryweb.org/rochimag/architecture/Architects/...

Crystal and Arabesque: Claude Bragdon, Ornament, and Modern Architecture

https://upittpress.org/books/9780822943624/

Just lost half an hour on this site, Well done and thank you.

Not many previous threads but I found two from the site:

Isometric Geological Diagrams - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37898223 - Oct 2023 (4 comments)

Walls as Rooms (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144031 - Feb 2019 (2 comments)

wow. Meigikure really has been in development forever.

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