0.1. Cucumber in the flatland
Speaking of the “Cucumber in the flatland”, I used a scanner to scan the cucumber in multiple ways. For example, to keep the scanned cucumber away from the plane of the scanner, then I got a blurred visual image. Or I suddenly moved the cucumber during the scan process, and then a segmented but continuous image was produced. To imagine the scanner is the eye of two-dimensional creature, and the scanned pictures are what it can see. Then the scanned cucumber it sees come in many forms. According to its understanding, what it sees can be different cucumbers or the same one can be transformed into various formats. But from the perspective of the three-dimensional world, this is just a static cucumber. This kind of behaviour quite similar to what a book called “Flatland” illustrated, which is to imagine a state of being in a lower dimension than the human one, and use a dimensionality reduction vision to reverse and examine our existing world. And that is how the name “Cucumber in the flatland” comes from, as well as the title of the whole process: “Qucumber’s Adventures in Flatland”. Therefore, the images of scanned cucumber as the lower-dimensional simulacrum is doing a reflection of a 3D reality.