Prototype
In 1937, the Association of Arts and Industries invited László Moholy–Nagy to develop and direct a school of design and architecture in Chicago based upon the Bauhaus model of an […]
Prima Materia
According to Plato, the four material elements were derived from a common source or prima materia (first matter), associated with chaos, which alchemists later assigned to the first element used […]
Color–Light–Plays
While a student at the Bauhaus, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack developed equipment to produce experiments with Farblichtspiele (Color-Light-Plays, c. 1924) on continuous film. In Malerei Photographie Film (Painting, Photography, Film, 1925), Bauhaus […]
Views of the Tesseract
In his treatise on The Fourth Dimension (1904), British mathematician Charles Hinton demonstrated how three-dimensional representations do not adequately represent all of the elements of matter, only its three spatial coordinates, […]
Is Time Space?
American inventor and photographer Eadweard Muybridge was commissioned by Leland Stanford, then entrepreneur and horse breeder, later Governor of California, to study the motion of his horses at his ranch […]
Choreosophy
In his exposition on the geometry of movement, Choreutics (1966), choreographer and dance theorist Rudolf von Laban attributed the ancient Greek term choreosophia, a combination of choros meaning circles and sophia meaning […]
The Metaphysician
Until the publication of The Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849, John Ruskin published anonymously. For the first two volumes of his Modern Painters (1843, 1846), Ruskin was identified only as […]
The Circus
The Circus was produced and directed by Charlie Chaplin in 1928. In this scene, the Tramp runs headlong into a fun house mirror maze to avoid capture by the police, after […]
Relativity
Although Einstein’s “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”), known later as his Special Theory of Relativity, and his “Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie” (“The Foundation of […]
Bestiary
The Ashmole manuscript (1511) is held in the collection of the Bodliean Library, the main research library of the University of Oxford. This Bestiary Book, in Latin Liber bestiarum, as with […]
Jodi La Coe, R.A. 