Flat Time House

Just around the corner from where I live is a glass-fronted building which has two inter-leafed and over-sized molded books sticking out from the window. On a street otherwise made up of Victorian terraced houses and ramshackle auto workshops, it looks quite the part. Above the front door is a sign saying FLAT TIME HO.

This is Flat Time House, home and studio of the late artist John Latham.

I didn’t know very much about John Latham before I visited. In fact I didn’t even know he was dead, which is perhaps why I hadn’t visited Flat Time House before, imagining it was a working studio. I guess death can sometimes make you more approachable.

When I read about him, I remembered some furore over one of his ‘God is Great’ installations (wikipedia says #2, but I seem to remember it being #4 – edit The Independent says it was #2 as well) which was withdrawn from a Tate Britain exhibition in the aftermath of the 7th of July London bombings. He might have been interviewed about it on the Today programme. But that was about all I knew.

After passing through the initial gallery space which features some of the original visualisations of Flat Time, you can walk down a corridor to a small library/performance suite. From there, you can go through the garden to the Office of Experiments. The Flat Time House website‘s tour of the house tells us these these rooms and house parts are titled The Face, The Mind, The Brain, The Body Event and The Hand. Though to be honest, I get lost around ‘The Body Event’ in terms of the rooms I visited. That might have been upstairs and off limits.

As the name suggests, the building is dedicated the investigation of Flat Time, a Theory of Everything that Latham conceived together with Barbara Steveni.

If you’re interested, you should read this Introduction to Flat Time, but in a hugely oversimplified nutshell it’s an attempt to get around the contradictions between Einstein’s Relativity and Quantum Mechanics by considering ‘events’ rather than particles as the basic building blocks on the Universe. What we perceive to be physical things are ‘constellations of events’.

In visual terms, The Universe is described as being like a roller blind:

If one imagines a roller blind hanging against a wall and unrolling slowly from the back, flat against that wall, with the whole of the turning roller visible at all times.

“Passing time” is represented by rotation of the roller and “History” (or “passed time”) by the vertical left and right hand edges of the blind as they descend under the influence of gravity.

“Time-Base” is represented by the lateral width of the roller, on which one can mark various phenomenal events as bands, their “width” representing their “time base”.

Micro-events to the left and macro-events to the right, hence the extreme left of the roller represents the origin of the universe in the big bang at a micro level when (supposedly) everything started from a point, before which there was “no time or space” in the conventional sense and the right hand end of the roller represents the whole cosmos of universes, the “total event” as a whole. So the roller (or a computer modelled analogue of it) can be used to represent the whole spectrum from microcosmos to macrocosmos.

“Flat-Time” is the area mapped on that roller by any given “event-structure” as, and after it has, occurred.

It can be seen that the history of an atomic particle, a leaf, or a person, could be precisely represented by different shapes of stain on the descending flat portion of the roller.

If the banding is on the front of the roller, then as it turns up and over and descends behind, it becomes invisible and inaccessible, even though it remains there and accessible to forensic excavation and reconstruction, just as all “histories” do.

It’s complicated. But it reads like a real theory. It references and builds upon real, peer-reviewed scientific papers. It’s not a clever, post-modern, pastiche science-as-art thing. It seems like a genuine attempt to explain the Universe, that harks back to times when anyone could have scientific ideas, even artists. It’s a throw back to da Vinci and the pursuits of the ‘gentlemen scientists’ of the 18th and 19th centuries. As Latham says (bold mine):

It may be an irrelevance to remember that Einstein was a Patent clerk before his theoretical work made him famous but the reasons why “Flat Time” has come from the art trajectory are rather more logical. It is just as much the artist’s professional business to envisage, reflect and propose the nature of “what is the case” as is the scientist’s. Both artist and scientist are concerned with the same axis, but travelling with opposite “spin”, the scientist being convergent and the artist being divergent, although both move constantly forward to create the way we envisage and by thus envisaging, shape our “reality” and indeed the possibilities of our future.

Is it really a scientific theory? The whole ‘but is it science?’ thing is a real can of worms. Philosophy of science has had trouble defining what makes a theory ‘scientific’, which is why something as ridiculous as creationism vis-a-vis evolution gets any credence at all. You just can’t pin it down.

Perhaps with this in mind, and with a tip of the hat to Popperian Falsifiability – ie, a theory should be refutable if it wants to be thought of as scientific – The Flat Time House crew have laid down the gauntlet of The Wager: “Although technically a wager based on the notion that Flat Time Theory can be proved or disproved, it has been reduced to a legal bet, and welcomes challengers to provide evidence for or against these ideas, laid down in Latham’s publications”. To be honest, I think they’re moving closer to the realms of the clever, post-modern, pastiche science-as-art thing here, but it looks like good fun.

And because we all like games: “Even The Odds continues the theme of game-playing and gambling. Viewers can take part in a specially designed dice game: a gentle reminder of the event/no-event structure of Latham theory.” You can walk away with a pair of custom blank-except-for-the-ones dice if you throw a 1-1, like the person after me did.