THE BUSINESS CARD MENGER SPONGE
by Dr Jeannine Mosely

August 26 – September 24
Machine Project (Los Angeles)

A collaboration between the Institute For Figuring and Machine Project
Curated by Margaret Wertheim

Machine Project Gallery

Opening: Saturday, August 26 @ 7-10pm

Lecture: Structural Considerations of the Business Card Sponge
Sunday, September 10 @ 8pm

The Institute's third book is now available:
A Field Guide to the Business Card Menger Sponge

See Here for the Flickr Photo Set of the Business Card Menger Sponge

Menger's Sponge - named for its inventor Karl Menger and sometimes wrongly called Sierpinski's Sponge – was the first three dimensional fractal that mathematicians became aware of. In 1995 Dr Jeannine Mosely, a software engineer, set out to build a Level 3 Menger Sponge from business cards. After 9 years of effort, involving hundreds of folders all over America, the Business Card Menger Sponge was completed. The resulting object is comprised of 66,048 cards folded into 8000 interlinked sub-cubes, with the entire surface paneled to reveal the Level 1 and Level 2 fractal iterations.

Recipe for a Menger Sponge: Take a cube, divide it into 27 (3 x 3 x 3) smaller cubes of the same size - now remove the cube in the center of each face plus the cube at the center of the whole. You are left with a structure consisting of the eight small corner cubes plus twelve small edge cubes holding them together. Now, imagine repeating this process on each of these remaining 20 cubes. Repeat again, and again, ad infinitum ... To make a Level 3 sponge, stop after 3 iterations.

The Business Card Menger Sponge is being presented by the Institute For Figuring and Machine Project in its first appearance to the general public. On Sunday Sept 10, Dr Mosely will present a lecture on the logical challenges of decomposing this fractal form into manufacturable subunits and on the structural considerations of building such a large object out of business cards. The audience will be invited to make their own business card cubes and to collaborate in making a Level 1 sponge.

The exhibition coincides with OSME 4, the fourth international conference on Origami in Science, Mathematics and Education, being held at Caltech. [Link]

Dr Jeannine Mosely is one of the pioneers in the emerging field of computational origami, a branch of mathematics that explores the formal properties and potentialities of folded paper. An expert on the subfield of business card origami, she also conducts research on curved crease origami, investigating the forms that can result from non-linear foldings. Dr Moseley was trained as an electrical engineer at MIT and works in the computer graphics industry writing three-dimensional modeling software.

More information about the Business Card Menger Sponge and Dr Mosely’s work on curved crease folding may be seen at the Institute For Figuring’s Online Exhibit [Link].

This exhibition was assisted by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and by the Annenberg Foundation.