An angel stands in your way, but it is not menacing nor obtrusive. Instead, organellic and warmly-lit eye-catching patterns hit your retinas at lightspeed. Io's art has stood out to me since my recent discovery of it a month ago. It depicts ordinary scenes from a very honest but glorious perspective. I have spent hours looking through her tumblr profile, and have even made some musical discoveries because of it. But this piece is of most importance to me. I will try to explain why this is the case, I hope to explain why this case is special.

A cross section is the intersection of a plane in respects to a three (or higher) dimensional body. It is the theoretical infinitely-thin slice revealed when cutting through an object, like the image produced in the cut trunk of a tree, or a sliced tomato (in this case, it looks like the insides of a cell!). Cross sections reveal the internal structures of three-dimensional objects at the cost of only being able to see a portion of it at a time. They are used in areas ranging from technical drawings to tomographies (in the case of a cell, it is histology), both of which serve the same purpose of illustrating the internal arrangements of an object.

Although the logic behind the cross section is simple and discernible in daily life, it theoretically transcends the limits of our world and dimensions. For example, it is possible to represent three-dimensional objects via their two-dimensional slices by stacking said slices on top of one another. An effect which is commonly used in videogames and which might seem ordinary, but the rules of geometry far exceed the second or third dimension.

It follows that a four-dimensional object would be able to be represented by its three-dimensional "slices", though tackling with the fourth dimension will always be a challenge for the human brain, bounded by its three-dimensional perception.

Said logic can also be applied to lower dimensions. The scanline is a slightly obsolete but plausible example of the one-dimensional cross-section of a 2D image, and even the scanline can be broken down into its loci or individual pixels. It should be noted that these elements can only be accurately represented in mediums that fit their dimensions, it is not practical nor fun to discern the contents of a two-dimensional image by being shown its individual pixels in rapid succession.

My interpretation of the artwork is that the viewer is invited to appreciate a cross-section of time, which despite being ephemeral and limited shows the potential and perspectives of higher dimensions. This is a powerful frame of blooming love and accompanying sensations extracted from a merely ordinary moment that is most commonly overlooked. Paired with its mathematical allegories and philosophical implications, it demonstrates the aspects that make Io's art memorable and noteworthy.

Here is a quote from The Tale of Genji, which can currently describe better than my own writing, how I feel about this type of art.

In geometry, a cross-section is a loss of information (due to the dimension lost). However, is it not true that looking at the right slice of time at the correct place can reveal more than the whole? Is it not true that by focusing on the correct moments of our lives we can achieve more than by having our minds focused on an entire day?