Urville: An Autistic Savant’s Remarkable Imaginary City, 20 Years in the Making

A rare glimpse of the extreme frontiers of human ability and imagination.

With its population of 12 million, its formidable architecture, and its extensive infrastructure, Urville, the capital of a large island province, is one of Europe’s most important cities. If your geographic confidence is beginning to quiver and crumble, you can exhale — Urville is entirely imaginary.

For the past 20 years, French autistic savant Gilles Trehin has been devising and developing this fanciful megacity, from the remarkable architectural detail to the thoughtful cultural context rooted in real world history, including WWII’s impact on the city and how the forces of globalization are changing its fabric. For instance, on the French Revolution:

In 1789, during the French Revolution, Urville has 2.8 millions inhabitants, but the number of habitations became too limited to host the huge population growth due to the Industrial Revolution. In order to cope, the authorities of Urville call upon the famous town-planner Oscar Laballière (1803/ 1883) to start gigantic urban projects which are still outlining Urville even today.”

Urville gathers 300 of Trehin’s meticulous, obsessive drawings and sets the door ajar to this complex and intricately woven alternate reality, inviting you in. It’s part Stephen Wiltshire’s panoramas, part Gregory Blackstock’s lists, part Jerry’s Map — an utterly original.

At its heart, Urville offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a savant, the artistic equivalent of Daniel Tammet’s linguistic and mathematical prowess.

Thanks, Wy

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Schematics: A Love Story in Geometric Diagrams

The mathematical poetics of time, or what matrices reveal about the matters of the heart.

Somewhere between the psychology of love and the intricacies of romance lies a vast and unmapped territory of abstract and subjective existential paradoxes. That’s precisely what New-York-based British photographer Julian Hibbard sets out to map in Schematics: A Love Story — a truly unique, in the most uncontrived sense of the word, project exploring love, memory, and time through 43 schematic diagrams drawn from old books and paired with poetic text that gleans new meaning from the geometric forms. From them emerges a layered and paradoxical narrative that is at once very personal and very universal, a kind of forlorn optimism about what it means to be human and to follow the heart’s sometimes purposeful, sometimes erratic, usually unpredictable will in pursuing the deepest of human connections.

I learnt to tie my shoes

I learnt to ride my bike

I learnt to smoke

I learnt the vulnerability of fully exposing an idea

I learnt to tie my shoes

I learnt to adapt my behavior in the light of others' actions.

I learnt the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth.

I remember a French girl with an English name.

'Leave me now, return tonight,' she told me every morning, and I did.

I remember an English girl with an French name.

We were the circle that no one could break, or so I thought.

The book, whose own unusual, geometric, highly tactile physicality reflects its substance, begins with a beautiful T. S. Eliot quote:

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Yesterday I was there.

Today I am here.

The two are light years apart.

I dance with a friend,

holding her hand realize,

how disconnected I have become,

from the simple beauty of touch.

I return and sense,

that things are not the same as before,

but feel had I stayed,

everything would likely seem the same.

David LaRocca writes in the afterword-by-placement-introduction-by-purpose:

Schematics operates simultaneously on two distinctive registers: the deeply personal (a love story between the narrator and the objects of his affection, desire, and confusion) and the profoundly anonymous (a love story within matter — subject to gravity, magnetism, genetics, mechanics, electricity, and the space-time continuum.”

Your words touch me.

Your thoughts excite me.

I want to try all that.

Explore everything with you.

Alone.

All one.

If and but and maybe and whatever.

I hate those words.

Everything doesn't have to be perfect.

To idealize is also a form of suffering.

LaRocca concludes:

Schematics is a love story because love involves (tragically, incorrigibly, but also beautifully) a desire for something that continuously transforms. Love is painful because we want the object of love to change and to stay the same; love is a desire and a fiction that animates our greatest pleasures and our most profound sufferings. Love holds us to this life, keeps us faithful to it. Yet nothing can save us from our ultimate reentry into oblivion — the point at which no amount of consciousness or desire can preserve identity or the energies that we once called our own. Hibbard’s poetic concept-curating presents schematics that invite us to consider — alone and as ‘all one’ — the existential graphs that underwrite life, and take us out of it.”

Page images courtesy of Mark Batty Publisher

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What It’s Like to Live in a Universe of Ten Dimensions

What songwriting has to do with string theory.

What would happen if you crossed the physics of time with the science of something and nothing? You might get closer to understanding the multiverse. In Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A New Way of Thinking About Time and Space, Rob Bryanton — a self-described “non-scientist with an inquisitive mind,” whose dayjob as a sound designer involves composing music for TV series and films — proposes a theory of the universe based on ten dimensions, a bold and progressive lens on string theory based on the idea that countless tiny “superstrings” are vibrating in a tenth dimension. In order for us, creatures of a three-and-a-half-dimensional world, to begin to wrap our heads around this concept, we have to radically reconsider our perception of infinity, the possible and the impossible, and consciousness itself — which is precisely what Bryanton sets out to do, in what he is careful to frame as a personal expression rather than a traditional scientific theory.

For a taste, here is a mind-bending explanation of ten dimensions might mean:

The project began as a set of 26 songs, exploring the intersection of science and philosophy. Over the years, Bryanton began to see connections between his own ideas and scientific theories across quantum physics, multiple dimensions, and superstrings, including the “Many Worlds Theory” first advanced by physicist Hugh Everett III in 1957. In time, he developed a model of the universe based on the harmonics of superstring vibrations.

Before launching into the additional dimensions, Bryanton also breaks down the familiar three:

A kind of scientific expressionism and creative exploration of curiosity, Imagining the Tenth Dimension might not rewrite the theories of Stephen Hawking, but it is certain to give you pause.

HT It’s Okay To Be Smart

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