Short Stories About The Sparks in the OUBEY MINDSPACE – Episode 9: The Year 1907

Perhaps it was coincidence; perhaps unseen interactions behind the scenes played their part. However it may have come about, the year 1907 marks a turning point in our thinking and in our culture.

In astonishing synchronicity, two events ventured into previously unknown territories of their respective disciplines: Albert Einstein formulated the General Theory of Relativity, and Pablo Picasso, with his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, laid the foundation for what would later be called Cubism.

In his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein describes gravity as the curvature of four-dimensional spacetime, caused by mass and energy. It explains the interaction between matter and spacetime and, to this day, remains the only scientifically recognized theory of gravitation.

Screenshot from the OUBEY MINDSPACE Spark about Time

In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso explodes the two-dimensional figure on the canvas, breaks it down into its individual parts, reassembles them, and thereby creates a previously unknown form of three-dimensionality on a flat surface.

Screenshot from the OUBEY MINDSPACE Spark about Art

The simultaneity of these two events stands in contrast to the scale of their significance. Picasso’s painting moves within earthly dimensions; it transformed art. Einstein’s theory moves within cosmic dimensions; it transformed our understanding of space and time.

OUBEY found the synchronicity of these groundbreaking advances—into entirely new dimensions of scientific knowledge on the one hand and radically new forms of artistic expression on the other—extraordinarily fascinating. In one of our countless conversations about “God and the world,” he once brought up the year 1907. That he effortlessly explained the General Theory of Relativity to me on the spot and quite in passing is mentioned here only as an aside.

He spoke with great enthusiasm about the simultaneity of these two events—a fortunate moment in cultural history when science and art came as close to one another, both in time and in their social relevance, as they rarely have.

Over the centuries, the division of the world and of life into school and university disciplines had led to increasing alienation between them, sometimes even to mutual ignorance. OUBEY never accepted this separation. Herein lay one of the roots of his intellectual connections to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and to Ilya Prigogine and his groundbreaking work Order Out of Chaos. Yet OUBEY did not merely reject this division — he experienced the overcoming of this separation and expressed it in his painting: “Everything is connected to everything else, and my art is a visual expression of this realization.”

Among the few research institutions that were already consistently pursuing an interdisciplinary approach during OUBEYs lifetime is the legendary Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. That Prof. Stuart Kauffman, associate of the institute, agreed to do an Encounter with one of OUBEYs paintings would have delighted OUBEY. What he said about it in that encounter would have pleased him even more.

The year 1907 is not explicitly mentioned in the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Yet visual references to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and to Einstein’s theory can be discovered there, and twice Albert Einstein appears in the form of a quotation.

Perhaps you will find them on your next visit to the MINDSPACE. This picture on a wall in the black-and-white Room of the OUBEY MINDSPACE might be helpful.

There are six rooms in the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each contains five different Mind Sparks, which in turn hold various impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse lies a story that tells us more about who OUBEY was and what he was like. These stories are told here by me.

With thanks to the team at Kubikfoto³ for the design of the OUBEY MINDSPACE, which has since received three international awards, including the renowned Red Dot Award.