Unveiling Historic Sites

Unveiling Historic Sites

The Four-Dimensional Aspects of History: Thinking, Creating, Declining, and Regenerating



What is history? Reflecting on our daily experiences, history is black words printed on white paper in books, it is aged archives hidden somewhere; history is both ancient artifacts and legendary stories; history is a social science that studies various aspects of human past, and also a reference for future actions; those diaries written in life, yellowed newspapers, expired tickets, and even today's breakfast sandwich... Who can say they are not history?



Albert Einstein told us—when determining a position in the universe, in addition to describing the three-dimensional "space", we also need to describe "time". Although humans can only see the space composed of three axes—up and down, left and right, front and back—the "historical scene" is a space that has moved a long way on the time axis. Because of various human "thoughts", many tangible and intangible values are "created" within it. These scenes gradually "decline" as time flows, but now they are "reborn" through the project of recreating historical scenes, forming a four-dimensional universe in our imagination. Scientists believe that in four-dimensional space, people will no longer be limited by time, like a hypercube rotating around a plane in four-dimensional space, able to fluidly browse through all past, present, and future.



Quoting American sociologist Andrew Abbott's description of "time": "Real time is time as experienced by each person, not the absolute standardized minute and second scales presented by mechanical clocks, not meaningless abstract units, but belonging to the sentient world woven by matter and energy." History, as a science closely related to time, often yields different interpretative views due to different experiential memories or bystander perspectives, and its subjective meaning cannot be ignored. Through this exhibition, history will step out of books, like opening one hypercube after another. Although there are no absolutely objective standard answers, we hope that we can find the correct way to open history together here and think about the meaning of history to "me".