The Tesseract has awakened! It is on a little world… a human world. And mirror artist, Nicky Alice, has made it! The artist created the infinity LED mirror cube after seeing the design for it in his dreams. Although he hasn’t divulged whether or not it contains a Space Stone.
In the video above, Alice shows off a new glimpse of his Tesseract. He created the sculpture in 2019, but recently posted new videos of the mind-blowing art to Instagram and YouTube. And they offer a wholly new look at the “hypercube” that first went viral two years ago.
As the Orange County-based artist notes in the above video’s description, the tesseract is to a cube what a cube is to a square. That is to say: just as the surface of a cube consists of six square faces, the “hypersurface” of the tesseract consists of eight cubical ones. (Another way to imagine this is to think of the way a cube has three lines of equal length meeting at each corner; in the case of the tesseract, four lines of equal length meet at each corner. In turn allowing each tesseract’s side to become a cube.)
As for inspiration, Alice gives a lot of credit to psychedelics. “When I started experimenting, I saw a lot of geometric patterns, especially when I went to Peru and did Ayahuasca,” the artist said in a recent video. “I saw a lot of sacred geometry in my visions and it plays a big part in my inspiration,” he added.
Unfortunately, somebody has already purchased Alice’s Tesseract—for the hefty price of $8,500. And it does appear that it was a one-off build. But reminders of the beauty of geometry, and the way it can trompe l’oeil our brains out, abound. And also remind us of the boundless—indeed infinite!—power of illusion.
Nicky Alice