"Botty-Shelly"

by

Stewart Dickson

Image by Stewart Dickson © 1999

This is a work of Postmodern Dada -- an artifact of CyberSpace -- Modern-day Cyber-Venuses projected onto my own implementation in Mathematica of the George Francis/ Donna Cox/Ray Idaszak "Etruscan Venus" as Marcel Duchamp's "Female Figleaf". My "Etruscan Venus" is being reborn in Botticelli's scallop shell which I also created using Mathematica. This sculpture depicts Woman as a four-dimensional, spiritual, intelligent, metaphysical, transformative vessel.

The Botties Shelly

Botty: [English(British)/UK] Shortened version of "bottom" referring to the rear end.

Why Math?

Zoroastrian/Pythagorean Mystical Mathematics

What was true 3,000 years ago still holds true today.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
by Eugene Wigner [Recipient of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics]
in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I (February 1960). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 1960 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Mathematics describes the Universe so exactly and elegantly that mathematics almost seems to be part of the Universe itself.

The closer you get to the fringe of knowledge, the more the Universe really begins to look the way it did to the Ancients of Days.

Mathematics is the loom upon which God wove the Universe. -- Clifford A. Pickover

M-Theory requires the existence of multiple dimensions, up to eleven, all but three of which are orthogonal (perpendicular) to ordinary three-space. The cosmological implications of M-Theory (the existence of Dark Matter) requires at least one P-Dimensional universe parallel to ours.

The connections to these perpendicular dimensions and parallel universes exist at the scale of the Quantum Foam ( 1.6 X 10^-33 centimeters -- the scale below which discrete distances are undefined and 5.39 X 10^-44 seconds -- the scale below which discrete durations are undefined).

Mathematics can describe sensual form. Mathematical forms can be sensuous.

Hindu Vedic Mathematics Or Sixteen Simple Mathematical Formulae from the Vedas by Jagadguru Swami Sri Bharati Krsna Tirthaji Maharaja, (1965). Simple, intuitive mechanical numeric recipes for doing mental mathematics from the ancient Hindu scriptures.

Together, the Vedic mathematical sutras and the Tantric sutras describe a unification of the body and the intellect.

The "Etruscan Venus" is composed of two Steiner "Roman" or Quartic Surfaces put together. A "Roman" surface is a Moebius band with its one edge shrunk to a point.

Steiner's Surface (ray tracing algebraic surfaces), Pat Hanrahan, 1983 -- An Historical Artifact of Visualization in Mathematical Computing.

If you put two Moebius bands together at their seam (they normally have to be twisted in opposite directions to do this) you get a Klein bottle. The Klein Bottle is embedded in Euclidean Four-Space. The "Roman" surface has tetrahedral symmetry, so there's no "handedness", unlike the Moebius band.

(Left image) Mobius Strip (Right image) Drawings of a Klein Bottle (Marcel Duchamp, ca. 1960)

Only one "indigenous to the fourth dimension," to borrow the words of [Marcel] Duchamp himself in À l'infinitif, could grasp the torsion that creates such a volume that no longer has an outside nor an inside, and that makes of a solid mass a curious entity in which the notions of interior and exterior, of surface and depth, are annulled or exchanged.

In the Etruscan Venus, the two "Roman" surfaces are joined by opening each at a point at the 'bottom' of the parameterization.

Another funny thing about this is that there is another surface, topologically related to the Steiner "Roman" surface, called the Werner Boy surface. Francois Apery invented the mathematics to do the "homotopy" -- or 3-D morph -- from the "Roman" surface to the Boy surface. George Francis calls this the RomBoy Homotopy. Francis/Idaszak/Cox also morph the Venus between these two forms. I think they thought this form must be the "Girl" surface. Donna uses it as a female icon.

The half-Venus is a really feindish object, topologically. It took me from October, 1999 until February of 2004 to get a parameterisation that could be 'thickened' for Rapid Prototyping. The features in thicken dealing with SoQuadMeshes were written primarily to solve the problem of building the Etruscan Venus.

Image by Joe Richey © 2004

The halves of "Botty Shelly" being constructed on a Stratasys Prodigy Fused Deposition Modeler by Tri-City Machine Products, Inc. under the name of the Prairie Center of the Arts at the Discovery Forum, Peoria, Illinois in February of 2004.

The two halves of "Botty Shelly" as constructed in FDM.

"Botty Shelly" -- the artist's proof -- in need of a little clean-up and mould-making for reproduction.

A two-piece silicone mold and reproductions of the FDM original in cast polyurethane.

"Easter Eggs" in production -- Metaphysical symbols, hidden in the Fourth Dimension, viewable only by projection.

This is not an hommage in the manner of my previous mathematical concretizations. Please see Art Historical Reference, below.

This is a work of appropriated art and found mathematics. The only original contribution to this work is the programming which went into thickening the mesh for rapid prototyping -- which is nearly invisible -- and the juxtaposition of the Etruscan Venus with Botticelli's seashell.

In 1987, Donna Cox juxtaposed the Etruscan Venuswith the Venus of Willendorf, a statement of timescale and a treatment of the feminine ideal which flies in the face of popular stereotypes of beauty.

"The Venus of Willendorf was a Sex Toy"

This is a work of postmodern Dada. It is Marcel Duchamp's Female Figleaf presented upon a scallop shell. Circa 1978 there was a story about an IUD which was of the form of a Klein bottle. It functioned by sending the male emission through the fourth dimension. Donna Cox' "Venus and Milo" has the Venus ingesting chocolates and the vacuum cleaner recursively ingesting the Venus and the janitor. I choose to think of the Venus as the Hole which engulfs all.

"I believe very much in eroticism ( ... ) It replaces, if you will, what other schools of literature call Symbolism, Romanticism"

If this work is an hommage at all, then it is Annie Sprinkle's Public Cervix as a four-dimensional object.

"Botty Shelly", (artist's proof) with cartoon navel and pubic hair.

(Right image)
"Botty Annie"" (2008) 3D color print, dimensions: 5"(H) X 6-1/2"(W) X 6-1/2"(D). Edition of Eight.

(Right image) "Botty Suzy", (2008) 3D color print, dimensions: 6-1/2"(H) X 6-1/2"(W) X 6-1/2"(D). Edition of Eight.

You see, the tits and ass are merely the external manifestation of a being who exists in four dimensions. Botty Suzy's textures are bing sucked into a metaphysical vortex. She shows us the inverse projection from our own three-space to the parallel dimension where resides her soul.

(Right image) "Botty Anastasia", (2008) 3D color print, dimensions: 6-1/2"(H) X 6-1/2"(W) X 6-1/2"(D). Edition of Eight.

Female Ejaculation -- Ph.D sexologists cannot even agree on it -- Does it exist or not? Sillies! It is Amrita -- sacred, metaphysical Water of Life -- It comes from the Fourth Dimension!

	(Left Image) "Botty Kat", VRML V2.0 object with color image maps © by iStockPhoto.com See Animated Turntable (2 Mbyte GIF movie).	(Right image) "Botty Kat" 3D color print with hidden symbol. Hommage to Mary Kat Watson.
	(Left Image) 3D CGI animated mock-up of Kat's metaphysical symbol projecting from the Fourth Dimension. (4Mbyte Quicktime Movie)

(Right Image) "Binary Botty", 3D color print with hidden symbol. Hommage to Anna the Happy Hedonist of NerdPr0n.com

Also in Hommage to Mary Kat Watson.

(Right image) The Deaf-Blind Symbol for the word to Masturbate from the Deaf-Blind Project, Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired Austin, Texas. (Fake fur and felt)

(Right image) 1.7 Mbyte MPEG movie loop: "Botty Laura" X-Rayed. Laura's Soul Art symbol projects from the Fourth Dimension.

Femalic Molds by Jean Clair (translation by Taylor M. Stapleton) Excerpt from Marcel Duchamp et la fin de l'art, by Jean Clair (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).

Response to "Femalic Molds" by Dickson, Stewart; Tout-Fait, the Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal.