Institute For Figuring

Seeing the Unseeable: Data Design Art

A beautiful catalog of the ArtCenter  exhibition Seeing the Unseeable: Data, Design, Art is now published and includes an essay by IFF director Margaret Wertheim about the Crochet Coral Reef as an examplar of “vernacular science.”

Seeing the Unseeable is an exhibition at the Williamson Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design held as part of the Getty Center’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide initiative during late-2024/early 2025, showcasing artists working around concepts connected to data. On show from the Crochet Coral Reef was a selection of our miniature coral Pod Worlds featuring superbly crafted hyperbolic forms by a selection of the project’s most skilled and imaginative contributors.

Exhibition Curators: Stephen Nowlin, Christina Valentine, Julie Joyce.

Ms Wertheim’s essay draws on ideas formulated by science historian Pamela H. Smith, who proposes that artisanal crafts-people in the early Renaissance contributed to the development of modern science through material explorations of natural processes – a contribution she sums up with the term “vernacular science.” Wertheim posits the Crochet Coral Reef crafting community as an extension of this tradition, and our explorations of hyperbolic space as a form of “vernacular mathematics.”

Essay Excerpt: The domestic frontiers of hyperbolic space

The discovery of “hyperbolic crochet” is attributed to Cornell mathematician Daina Taimina, who created such models as pedagogical tools for college-level geometry classes. Taimina’s brilliance was to identify how a humble craft could be employed to emulate a structure mathematicians had struggled to visualize for two hundred years. With crochet, she crafted models they could see and feel and manipulate in their hands…

But if Taimina was the first to recognize the mathematics embedded here she wasn’t the first to construct such shapes—ladies crocheting doilies have been making hyperbolic surfaces for at least a hundred years. In the collection of doilies Christine and I own we have an exquisite piece of lacework from the nineteenth century with cascading layers of crenellated hyperbolic frills; plus a selection of 1940s pattern books for “ruffled doilies” features dozens of examples of hyperbolic edgings spelled out in stitch algorithms incorporating subroutines and other staples of computer-coding techniques. The “literate artisans” who wrote these patterns—and the women who reproduced the objects in their homes—had a clear understanding of how hyperbolic surfaces behave. Theirs was (and is) a mature form of material “knowledge making.”

Thus, in parallel with the academic study of hyperbolic geometry going on in university math departments, wives and maids at home were also developing an understanding of non-Euclidean concepts. Using what Smith calls “sensory tools of embodied experience,” ladies crocheting doilies have long been exploring the frontiers of hyperbolic space.

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Crochet Coral Reef contributors featured in this exhibition: Nadia Severns, Anita Bruce, Kathleen Greco, Rebecca Peapples, Vonda N McIntyre, Sarah Simons, Lucilla la Villa Haviland, Heather McCarren, Unknown Chicago Wire Reefer, Margaret Wertheim, Christine Wertheim. [Plus book photo of model by Anitra Menning.]

Fluid Flow. Image courtesy Dept of Mathematics, University of Minnesota.

Sam Altman has declared that we are entering into “The Intelligence Age,” when articifical intelligences will usher in a world of universal healthcare and first-class education for all, a clean environment, and unimaginable prosperity. In my new Substack post at Science Goddess, I push back against AI hype by considering what we even mean by the term “intelligence”. Beginning with the question “Is Water Intelligent?” I conclude that AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a kind of infomatic delusion, based on narrow, computationally inflected ideas about what constitutes “smart” thinking.

Substack Post:
AGI as Infomatic Delusion: A meditation on the meaning of ‘intelligence’

Margaret Wertheim was part of the 2025 Brown Symposium “Visualizing the Abstract” at Southwestern University (March 4-6, 2025). What a fabulous ecclectic lineup of speakers! Margaret presented a talk on “Embodying Mathematics” and led a workshop on making models of hyperbolic space. Final model seen here with symposium organizer, math professor Dr. Fumiko Futamura.

Baden Baden Satellite Reef at Musee Cantonal des Beaux Arts Lausanne.

The Baden Baden Satellite Reef is showing at the Musee Cantonal des Beaux Arts Lausanne, Switzerland in a stunning exhibition Thalassa Thalassa: Imagery of the Sea (October 2024 – January 2025).

The Crochet Coral Reef is the subject of a feature article in The New York Times  Science section. Written by acclaimed math writer Siobhan Roberts, the piece has gone viral on the Times instagram – over 200,000 likes! More than for any NYT Insta-posts during the past month except Barbie at the Oscars and Taylor Swift at the Grammys. This for a story on math! Read Margaret’s Substack post about the importance of crafty hand-making as a way of engaging with abstract mathematical ideas.

The Reef project is also featured in a special section of the new issue of WEAD magazine (Women Eco Artists Dialog) devoted to Kinship: The Art of Connection.

Due to popular response, our exhibition at Schlossmuseum Linz has been extended to July, and ever-more people are crocheting corals for the magnificent archipelago of the Austrian Satellite Reef.

“Goldhauben Reef” and “Pod Worlds” at Schlossmuseum Linz.

An exhibition of the Crochet Coral Reef is on show at Schlossmuseum Linz  which also debutes a new Austrian Satellite Reef.

Over 100,000 hours of female labor; 30,000 coral pieces; and 2,000 contributors. The Austrian Satellite Reef is a mistress-ful retort to the modernist obsession with “individual genius.” Here is art collectively produced on a scale rarely seen in the contemporary world, and dynamically illustrating mathematical underpinnings of textile craft.

For this installation, Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim collaborated with Schlossmuseum Linz to design a suite of crochet reefs based on Upper Austrian folk-art traditions. 2,000 people contributed to this intense, sparkling installation. All their names are projected on the gallery walls and can be seen here.

Exhibition dates: October 2023 – April 2024//Now extended by popular demand to July 2024.
See here for a photo-report on the show.

A new book about the Crochet Coral Reef is available from DAP. Titled Margaret and Christine Wertheim: Value and Transformation of Corals the text is published in conjunction with a major retrospective of this unique worldwide eco-artistic happening at Museum Frieder Burda in Germany. Now the largest art+science project on the planet, the Crochet Coral Reef is an elegiac response to the disappearing wonder of living reefs due to global warming and climate change, that also highlights the creative power of collective human action in the anthropogenic age. With essays about the scientific, mathematical, environmental, and community dimensions of the project, the volume also includes 200 pages of photos documenting 17 years of the Crochet Coral Reef endeavor, along with images of the extraordinary new Baden Baden Satellite Reef – the largest community reef to date with over 40,000 coral pieces. Essays by Donna Haraway, Heather Davis, Christine Wertheim, Margaret Wertheim, Doug Harvey, Udo Kittelmann, and others. Published by Weinand Verlag (German & English editions), distributed by DAP.

More about the book
Crochet Coral Reef website

Buy Book Now: on Bookshop.org
Buy Book Now: on ArtBook.com

Sample Book Pages

Launch of the Baden-Baden Satellite Reef in Burda Style magazine.

All of Germany is invited to participate in a nation-wide community crochet coral reef to be exhibited in 2022 at Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, the spa-city where Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment. This Baden-Baden Satellite Reef will be exhibited as part of a museum-wide retrospective of the Crochet Coral Reef, a global interdisciplinary art+science “happening” now in its 16th year. The Baden-Baden reef is launched in the pages of Burda Style, a beloved Deutsche women’s magazine. Science meets art meets fabulous feminist handicraft. In this special collaboration, artists Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim will work with the people of Germany on a curatorial vision inspired by the discovery of an ancient “pinnacle reef” in the remote Pacific Ocean east of the Great Barrier Reef. For inspirational images, and to contribute to this endeavor, see here on the dedicated Crochet Coral Reef website.

Cover of the German magazine that launches the Baden-Baden Satellite Reef.

Coral Forest – Helsinki, installed in an underground ammunition bunker built by the Russian army on Vallisaari Island, Finland.

The Crochet Coral Reef is in the Helsinki Biennial – opening June 12, 2021.

Helsinki Biennial 2021: The Same Sea, gathers together 40 artists and artist collectives whose work reflects on the interconnectedness of humans, the environment, and all living things. For the exhibition, Christine and Margaret Wertheim worked with the people of Helsinki to fabricate the Helsinki Satellite Reef – to which nearly 3000 Finns contributed. The Wertheim’s have also overseen construction of 4 new  Coral Forest sculptures assembled from an epic array of plastic crochet pieces by made by Helsinki Reefers. At once ludicrous and serious, these totemic works draw our attention to the tsunami of plastic trash pouring into the world’s oceans. This Helsinki Coral Forest is constructed entirely from recycled plastic, including 200+ kilos of offcuts from the industrial production of toilet paper packaging; the works are co-curated by Margaret and Christine along with a quartet of talented local ladies: Lotta Kjellberg, Elina Ahlstedt, Noora El Harouny and Tuija Maija Piironen. For more information about the biennial installation see here.

Team Finland: Elani, Lotta, Noora, and Tuija Maija, curators of the Helsinki Satellite Reef.