Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Socrates, in his dialogue with Glaucon, as described in Ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s work called Republic, imagines humans located in an underground dark ‘Cave’, immobilized with chains on the legs and neck. Behind these people, at a distance and at a higher level, there is a fire. Other humans, statues and animal figures are placed behind these chained people and the glow of the fire casts their corresponding shadows onto a wall of the ‘Cave’ in front of them. Since they are not able to turn their heads, they perceive their casting shadows and hear the reflection of the sound they make on the wall of the ‘Cave’. Therefore, they assume that these shadows form their existing world (Ferrari 2000: 220–221).
Mathematician and philosopher of hyperspaces Charles Howard Hinton claimed a possible connection between Plato’s allegory of the ‘Cave’ and 4D space. He expanded the meaning of the ‘shadows’ via the induction method: as the shadow of a 3D object is a 2D shape, similarly, the ‘shadow’ of a 4D hyper-object is one dimension less; that is, a 3D object (Hinton 1904: 23–35).
The authors advance further along this line of thought and propose that the reflection of the sound on the walls of the ‘Cave’, that chained people perceive as their 3D acoustic space, has many similarities with the characteristics of 4D acoustic space, as proved mathematically by scientists. Specifically, in fourth spatial dimension a distortion which is propagated in the form of a main wave is followed by secondary waves of lower intensity (Morley 1985: 69–71; Math Pages 2017).
Finally, the authors present an interactive art application that they developed as a logical approach to the hypothetical 4D acoustic space of Plato’s ‘Cave’ perceived by the chained people and by someone that removes the chains and traverses through the ‘Cave’.