Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

2.3On Space

The environment or “milieu” that we live in is partly composed of a space and as such, some of the earliest things that we need to describe during childhood exist in a spatial field. We become accustomed to understanding the spatial dimensions and become experienced at describing them. Survival, [MIM] claims, has become our motivating force to understand spatiality. On the whole, human conception is restricted to those things that we have observed and for most, dimensionality of orders greater than 3 is beyond everyday experience and hence very difficult. Such a skill is attainable by practice* and [MIM] claims that it is purely familiarity that has made it ‘transparent’ to us.

A space is only distinguishable from that which it contains when the space encompasses more than one object. It takes its form only when it has to enclose two or more items, and it is only when an observer is standing in the space that observer can perceive a separation of any spatial relationship between the items. Hence, the space defines what we can see. ‘Flatland’ (a short account about the ability to conceive dimension), illustrates this point brilliantly in an explanation of a two dimensional world; to an observer living on a flat plane everything appears as a straight line. In the book, it is only when the observer is lifted above this plane does the observer realise that the third dimension exists.

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