Students at a workshop at the Hayward gallery in London with their newly-hatched hyperbolic boa. From an original pattern by Keith Henderson.

On Tuesday April 15, IFF Director Margaret Wertheim will lead a workshop at Brown University on making hyperbolic space.

“Giant Coral Forest” sculptures, crocheted out of discarded plastic bags and other plastic detritus.

On Monday April 14, IFF Director Margaret Wertheim will present a lecture at Brown University. Titled “Reefs, Rubbish and Reason”, the lecture will explore the unique intersection of art, science, environmentalism and community art practice embodied in the IFF’s Crochet Coral Reef project.

The lecture is part of a week-long series of events that Margaret is doing at Brown as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Theater Arts and Performance Studies.

Talk Outline:

At a time when climate-change denial is at a peak, humanity urgently needs positive messages for social change. In 2005, as an aesthetic response to global warming, twin sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim sat down to crochet a coral reef in their Los Angeles living room. Today their Crochet Coral Reef project is perhaps the largest art + science endeavor on the planet, with almost 8000 active participants worldwide and more than 3 million exhibition visitors. In this talk, artist, writer and curator Margaret Wertheim will discuss the Crochet Coral Reef project and its unlikely conjunction of art, science, environmentalism and geometry. Tracing a line from sea slugs to general relativity and ocean acidification, Wertheim will raise the possibility that this nexus of art and science may encourage a shift in consciousness about humanity’s role in the ecological future of our planet.

See here for article in the current issue of The Brooklyn Rail about the Crochet Coral Reef project.

The IFF is pleased to announce an unusual evening of poetry and performance. This weekend, IFF co-director Christine Wertheim will perform works from her new book mUtter bAbel by Counterpath Press. Hooting, hOwling, and infantile bAbblings are assured. A specially created costume adorned with crocheted organisms will be worn. Also on the program is writer performer Patrick Ballard, who will activate sock puppets, musical instruments and more. The event takes place at Automata Arts – Los Angeles’s most innovative micro-theater.

Date + Time: Saturday April 5 + Sunday April 6. Both nights at 8pm.
Place: Automata Arts – Chung King Road, Chinatown

$18 General Admission
$15 Members/Students/Seniors
Seating is Limited; Advance Reservations Suggested.

To purchase tickets for the performance, click Here.

The IFF is pleased to announce an unusual evening of poetry and performance. This weekend, IFF co-director Christine Wertheim will perform works from her new book mUtter bAbel by Counterpath Press. Hooting, hOwling, and infantile bAbblings are assured. A specially created costume adorned with crocheted organisms will be worn. Also on the program is writer performer Patrick Ballard, who will activate sock puppets, musical instruments and more. The event takes place at Automata Arts – Los Angeles’s most innovative micro-theater. 

Date + Time: Saturday April 5 + Sunday April 6. Both nights at 8pm.
Place: Automata Arts – Chung King Road, Chinatown

$18 General Admission
$15 Members/Students/Seniors
Seating is Limited; Advance Reservations Suggested.

To purchase tickets for the performance, click Here.

“Making Space” exhibition at Google, Venice CA. Photos © IFF Archive.

On February 10, 2014, the IFF and friends made a field trip to the Google office in Venice, CA, to visit our exhibition there. Titled “Making Space”, the exhibit showcased works developed at the IFF during our major Making Space mathematics and aesthetics project in 2013. Included in the Google show were large-scale sculptures of business card origami, tiny beaded Platonic solids, geometric bamboo stick things, and other enigmatic spatial structures. The pieces looked terrific in the Google space and we thank program manager Max Maxwell for spearheading Google Venice’s innovative arts program. Works featured in the exhibition were by Jake Dotson, Jesse Dotson, Christina Simons, David Orozco, Kathryn Harris, Corrine Cascioppo and Margaret Wertheim. The business card origami sculptures on display built-on and extended original research by engineer Dr. Jeannine Mosely, a pioneer in the field of mathematical paper folding or origami sekkei. Seen below are photos of the elegant installation.

Vistors to the IFF’s Making Space exhibition at Google, Venice CA. At left is David Orozco’s lattice-like tower, and at far right is a cubic lattice by Jake Dotson.

During the course of the IFF’s Making Space project in 2013, visitors to our gallery were introduced to the techniques of business card origami pioneered by Dr. Jeannine Mosely in order to build material models of fractals. Using 60,000 specially designed, brilliantly colored cards, participants were invited to experiment and develop new structures of their own. It quickly became evident that some participants had a special knack for these techniques and a new taxonomy of business card “species” began to evolve. David Orozco developed an innovative method for constructing lattice-like towers; Jake Dotson started exploring folding techniques based on pyramidal rather than cubic geometries; Jesse Dotson (his younger brother) worked out how to make spherical forms resembling armillary spheres. Inspired by a structure on a geometry website Christina Simons developed a lovely module based on a truncation of the cube that can be fitted together in a crystalline space-filling lattice.

Dr. Mosely’s original techniques had been designed to create three-dimensional fractals, but the IFF’s Margaret Wertheim, encouraged people to also think about two-dimensional forms. Margaret and Christina completed a grid of the nine two-dimensional layers of a Level Two Mosely Snowflake fractal, highlighting the graphic internal anatomy of this self-similar structure. Other participants started to explore in 2D and Tracy Tynan surprised us with a rendition of a Peono space-filling curve. Jesse Dotson constructed  a hexagonal tiling network that made excellent use of our “swirly” patterned cards, while Corrine Cascioppo made a model of the famous “infinity” knot, a mathematical form that has resonance in Tibetan Bhuddism.

Christina Simons places another atomic module into her molecular origami structure. Each atomic unit here is a truncated cube so the balls fill space in a crystalline lattice.

Included in the Google exhibition also were two vitrines of small beaded mathematical structures made by San Diego artist Kathryn Harris. As part of the Making Space project in 2013 Kathryn conducted a workshop at the IFF showing us how to make Platonic solids from bugle beads and wire. For the Google show she constructed a complete set of the 5 perfectly regular Platonic solids and a set of the 13 semi-regular Archimedean solids. These tiny forms are a delightful invocation of geometric objects that have engaged philosophers and mathematicians attention for thousands of years. The Platonic solids – though named after Plato (who associated them with the five basic elements) – were known to neolithic peoples; the oldest objects that show us these forms are a series of stone balls whose surfaces are inscribed with the network structure of each solid. Found in Scotland, they date back more than 4000 years. Kathryn’s work carries forward this ancient lineage of math and material design.

Kathryn Harris’s eades representations of the 5 Platonic solids (left) and the 13 Archimedean solids (right).

Making Space exhibition at Google. At left are two Level Two Mosely Snowflake Sponge fractals, folded by Christina Simons and Margaret Wertheim, from an original design by Dr. Jeannine Mosely. At right are some of the nine topographic layers which make up these three-dimensional structures. By revealing each layer, one gets a visceral, graphic sense of the fugue-like repetition of crosses and rings that make up these forms. Thes basic architectural motifs are repeated at every level of the fractal’s anatomy.

At right, Jake Dotson’s cubic lattice and, hanging above, his origami module embedded in a cubic lattice of bamboo sticks. This structure is a prelude to the many paper-and-stick things that Jake would develop during his Science + Art Residency at the Institute For Figuring in Fall 2013.

Nine topographic layers of the Level Two Mosely Snowflake Fractal.

Jesse Dotson with his hexagonal tiling structures and his “armillary sphere”. At left is David Orozco’s tower and three linked Level One Menger Sponge fractals by Margaret Wertheim.

Close-up of two Level Two Mosely Snowflake fractals at the Google exhibition, showcasing the elegant business cards that were designed for the IFF’s Making Space project by Cindi Kusuda and Margaret Wertheim. Fractals folded by Christina Simons and Margaret Wertheim, from an original design by Dr. Jeannine Mosely.

The 13 Archimedian solids, realized in wire and bugle beads, by Kathryn Harris.

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On Monday, December 9, IFF Director Margaret Wertheim will give a talk at the Newcastle Museum in Australia in conjunction with the Model and Metaphor conference being held at the University of Newcastle. The conference is convened to consider the role that the arts can and might play in advancing both scientific literacy and, potentially, scientific research. Margaret’s talk on the Monday night, precedes the conference and is open to the public. [See above link for details.]

Entitled Concepts of Space: How Artists Paved the Way for Physicists at the Dawn of the Scientific Revolution, Margaret’s talk will consider the history of perspectival representation and how this form of artistic expression set up the conditions for the acceptance of a Euclidean concept of space in the early seventeenth century. Here, Wertheim will argue, artists from Giotto to Raphael paved the way for the new physics championed by Descartes, Galileo and Newton.

On Tuesday, December 10, artists, scientists and other critical thinkers will gather at Newcastle University for a one-day symposium to reflect on contemporary and future relations between the arts and sciences. Conference speakers include Dr. Jill Scott, Dr. Nola Farman, and Stellarc.