ABSTRACT
During his tenure at the Bauhaus (1923–28), Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy questioned the nature of perception and its relationship to dreaming in his photo- and film-montages, which he later conceived of as demonstrating the malleability of space-time dimensions. This chapter provides a dimensional interpretation of his photo-montage entitled Untersehboot (Under-seeing-boat) in which spatial and temporal inversions reveal multiple relationships between viewer/viewed, dreamer/dreamed and dreamed/perceived. Misidentified in an alternate title, Die Lichter der Stadt (City Lights), the inclusion of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp character from The Circus, standing on the tips of his toes as the perspectival viewer looking up through a warped perspective diagram, deepens these inversions. This diagram reappears in two-, three- and four-dimensional versions in Moholy-Nagy’s paintings and other artworks, including on the ceiling of his living room in Dessau, where the space of the ceiling is designated as the permeable plane between dreaming and perceiving, a spatial scenario for dreaming in the fourth dimension and for inhabiting his own perspective diagram as both the dreamer and interpreter.
