Flatland Selfies

What do self-portraits look like in one dimension?

June 2014 - online

Flatland is an 1884 novel by Edwin A. Abbott which attempts to explain the concept of a fourth dimension by describing our three-dimensional experience from the point of a view of a two dimensional creature. A circle’s experience of a sphere is analogous to our experience of a 4D hypercube, goes the thinking.

I’ve always liked the Flatland model since first coming across it in Rudy Rucker’s The Fourth Dimension and while playing around with slicing and dicing pictures using ImageMagick I wondered how a resident of Flatland might experience a photograph.

The images I used came from a massive stash of selfies I’d downloaded from Instagram (when Instagram had a very lax API which allowed such things).

The following videos are three different attempts to show this.

This led directly to Spectral Songs of the Slitscanned Selfies.