Structural Considerations of the Business Card Sponge




	Forthcoming Lectures + Events Seeing Anew [IFF-L20] A lecture by Trevor and Ryan Oakes at Machine Project Sunday, June 24 @ 7pm // Previous IFF Lectures The Logic Alphabet of Shea Zelleweger[IFF-L19] A discussion with the IFF and Dr. Shea Zelleweger at Foshay Masonic Lodge Saturday, March 3 @ 5pm Structural Considerations of the Business Card Sponge[IFF-L17] By Dr. Jeannine Mosely Sunday, September 10 @ 8pm The Insect Trilogy @ Telic Arts Exchange How Flies Fly [IFF-L14] By Dr Michael Dickinson The Ecology of a Termite's Gut [IFF-L15] By Dr Jared Leadbetter What is it Like to be a Spider? [IFF-L16] By Dr Simon Pollard Where the Wild Things Are 2: A Talk About Knot Theory [IFF-L13] By Ken Millett at The Drawing Center in NY. Where the Wild Things Are 2 by Ken Millett at the University of California, Santa Barbara Things That Think: A hands-on history of physical computation devices. by Nick Gessler [IFF-L12] Where the Wild Things Are: A Talk about Knot Theory by Ken Millett [IFF-L11] at The Foshay Masonic Lodge (Culver City) Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane: A conversation on non-euclidean geometry and feminine handicraft by Dr. Daina Taimina and IFF Director Margaret Wertheim [IFF-L10] Darwinism on a Desktop: Sodaplay and the Evolution of a Digital World by Ed Burton [IFF-L9] The Logic Alphabet by Christine Wertheim [IFF-L8] Why Things Don't Fall Down A Talk About Tensegrities by Robert Connelly [IFF-L7] Kindergarten: The Art and Science of Child’s Play By Norman Brosterman [IFF-L6] Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane [IFF-L5] A Talk by David Henderson and Daina Taimina The Mathematics of Paper Folding [IFF-L4] by Robert Lang The Physics of Snowflakes [IFF-L3] by Kenneth Libbrecht Crocheting the Hyperbolic Plane [IFF-L2] by Daina Taimina and David Henderson The Figure That Stands Behind Figures: Mosaics Of The Mind [IFF-L1] by Robert Kaplan // Previous Events Crochet Hyperbolic Workshop Proteus Gowanus gallery, Brooklyn, NY Hyperbolic Crochet Workshop: a celebration of feminine handicraft and higher geometry and a homage to the disappearing wonder of coral reefs. at The Institute For Figuring – Special Collections KnitOne-PurlOne: A workshop on crocheting the hyperbolic plane. at the Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles.	In conjunction with an exhibition at Machine Project gallery the Institute for Figuring announces our first lecture for Fall 2006: Structural Considerations of the Business Card Sponge By Dr. Jeannine Mosely [IFF-17] Sunday, September 10 @ 8pm Location: Machine Project 1200 D North Alvarado Los Angeles, CA 90026 For information about the exhibition. [Link]

		Diagrams by Dr Jeannine Mosely.
		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.

		In conjunction with an exhibition of the Business Card Menger Sponge at Machine Project gallery, 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. 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 lecture and exhibition were assisted by grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and by the Annenberg Foundation.


© 2005 The Institute for Figuring