Global Translation, Oriental Spaces: The Work of Abstracting Eastern Aesthetics in 20th-Century American Mathematics

• In Event: The Valency of Misplaced Concreteness

Abstract

As a mathematical concept, a “manifold” designates a topological space or surface that is globally abstract with increasing n-dimension. A manifold is also locally Euclidean, comprising of points that lie in a neighborhood resembling flat space. Various techniques and materials have been used throughout the twentieth century to instantiate manifolds in mathematics and design (e.g. as symbolic expressions, line sketches, paper folds, and wire sculptures). This talk examines how mathematicians and artists in mid-twentieth-century America have tacked back and forth between thinking of manifolds, on one hand, as local-global properties defined by mathematical formalism, and on the other hand, as distinctive signatures of cultural discourses both particular and universal. I argue that the generalized and formalized conception of a manifold not only derived from early twentieth-century “modernist” transformations in mathematics, but also from the retention of racial and cultural identities associated with techniques for presenting it. Drawing on A.N. Whitehead’s notion of “prehension,” I gesture towards a theory of translation among disciplinary modes of practice and knowledge. To this end, I turn to archival material and mathematicians’ efforts to interpret the “Orient” and associate Eastern modes of craft and design with international modernism and mathematical practice. The historical trajectory of “mathematical modernism,” then, no longer appears exclusively aligned with Euro-American modernisms, but also convergent with transpacific discourse.

Author

• Clare Kim