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Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science

Jan 29 Sat
Jan-June 2022 @ Tang Museum, NY

Crochet Reef – Exhibition


exhibition announcement card

Tang Museum, Satellite Reef announcement card.

The Saratoga Springs Satellite Reef at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, is a centerpiece of the Tang’s 2022 exhibition, Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science. The IFF is delighted to be part of this ground-breaking engagement between craft and science.

Exhibition webpage and photo gallery:
Tang Museum project webpage:
Crochet Coral Reef website:

About the exhibition – Curators’ Statement:

“For centuries, fiber art practice has influenced practical, theoretical, and pedagogical areas of the sciences as diverse as modern computing and digital technologies, mathematical theories, neuroscience, psychology, biology, environmental science, and more. Through contemporary art by a diverse group of intergenerational artists working in weaving, quilting, needlework, crochet, knitting, dyeing, and other fiber-based practices Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science demonstrates how fiber practice has influenced mathematics, science, and technology. The exhibition foregrounds each work as at once fine art, process-driven craft, and scientific tool, complicating existing frameworks across fields.

Radical Fiber also features a new artwork created by amateur and professional makers around the globe: the Saratoga Springs Satellite Reef, part of the worldwide Crochet Coral Reef project by Christine and Margaret Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring. The Saratoga Springs Satellite Reef draws on the long historical connections, especially in the United States, between fiber practice and community building and will connect hobby crafters, art professionals, novice crocheters, and students from Skidmore, broader Saratoga, and global communities.”

…

Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science is curated by Associate Curator Rebecca McNamara in consultation with Skidmore faculty Mark Huibregtse, Rachel Roe-Dale, and Becky Trousil from Mathematics & Statistics; Sara Lagalwar from Neuroscience; Elaine Larsen from Biology; Aarathi Prasad from Computer Science; and Sang-Wook Lee from Art. The exhibition is supported by Friends of The Tang.

Exhibition Dates: Jan 29 – June 12, 2022
Location: Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY

Call to participate in the Saratoga Springs Satellite Reef – see here.

Cultural Ecology & the Crochet Coral Reef

Mar 15 Mon
5-7pm GMT @ University College London

Seminar


crochet coral reef

UCL – seminar announcement

The Crochet Coral Reef is discussed in a seminar at University College London “The Disappointing Apocalypse” led by Professor Andrew Patrizio University of Edinburgh). The event is part of the UCL seminar series “Cultural Ecology: Galvanizing Climate Action Across the Arts.”

Series description:

The Cultural Ecology seminar programme will unite activist-academics working across the arts to interrogate the following question: ‘How might cultural researchers galvanise more urgent and effective responses to the climate crisis to remedy the severe inadequacy of the actions currently being set into motion by governments and corporations?’

The Disappointing Apocalypse – seminar description:

‘Apocalypse’ has been depicted by numerous artists globally (from medieval manuscript illuminators to the Romantics), first as a visualisation of Christian doctrinal warning and then more generally as a cultural trope for a variety of apocalyptic forms (nuclear war, migration, racial tension, famine). Climate collapse, global warming, pollution, toxicity and plastic proliferation, genetic mutation and viral spread are recently ecologically-framed manifestations on a similar register. These formations are worked on by artists, particularly those employing systemic, critical, relational and conceptual approaches. The disaster is now materially unfolding and seems disappointingly unconcerned with redemption and human futures, whilst being at the same time entirely caused by industrialised humans (expressed through resource depletion, rising waters and mass extinction). It is now difficult to imagine in the visual arts the notion of apocalypse without registering the material presence of climate crisis.

Among the art practices discussed will be Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, The Lagoon Cycle (1974-1986), Ursula Biemann, Black Sea Files (2005), Trevor Paglen, The Last Pictures (2012), Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, El Fin del Mundo (The End of the World) (2012) and Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim, Crochet Coral Reef (2005-ongoing).”
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“Nature” and “See All This”

The Crochet Coral Reef is featured in Nature – the world’s premier science magazine – in an essay about how art can help scientists think more creatively. Download PDF Margaret and Christine Wertheim are also included in a special international issue of the Dutch art journal See All This celebrating women artists, curated by Catherine de Zegher. Other artists include Judy Chicago, Frieda Kahlo, Agnes Denes, Eva Hesse, Leonora Carrington, Georgia O’Keefe, and Ruth Azawa.

Nature | Vol 590 | 11 February 2021 | p351-353

 

See All This | No. 20 | Winter 2020/2021

Christine and Margaret Wertheim in See All This | No 20 | Winter 2020/2021

 

BiotensegriTea Party – Math, Art and Biology

Nov 06 Fri
10am PDT @ Zoom

Panel discussion


 

Spiderwebs are naturally occurring tensegrities. Photos by Margaret Wertheim, from Venezuela.

BiotensegriTea Party Series – #33 Math, Art and Biology.

Tensegrity structures were made famous by the sculptor Kenneth Snelson and the architect R. Buckminster Fuller, who used them in his geodesic domes and elsewhere. They have also been studied extensively by engineers and mathematicians, who have articulated formal properties of these unique strutted forms, which balance out forces of tension and compression. But long before humans cognized this elegant engineering technique, nature had been making use of tensegrities in a variety of living systems and animal-generated architectures. Spider webs are tensegrities, and cells are held together by filigreed nets of tensegrity built from stranded proteins.

The organization Biotensegrity.com is devoted to exploring realizations of tensegrities in nature. On November 6, 2020, IFF director Margaret Wertheim will participate in a panel discussion on these forms and on nature’s proclivity for inventing clever mathematical solutions to complex real-world problems. The event is part of the group’s BiotensegriTea Party Series.

Date+Time: November 6, 2020, 10am – Zoom.

Panel participants: Margaret Wertheim and Daina Taimina, moderated by Chris Clancy.

Background Reading: See Margaret”s interview with mathematician Robert Connelly on the mathematics of tensegrity structures, from Cabinet magazine.

Biotensegrity.com

 

Mathematical diagrams of tensegrity structures, courtesy of Robert Connolly, Cornell University.

What Does It Mean to Know Mathematics?

Oct 19 Mon
1pm @ UC, Santa Barbara

Seminar


Media Arts and Technology lab at UCSB.

IFF director Margaret Wertheim will present a talk at the Media Arts and Technology Seminar Series at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The title of the talk is Crafting Mathematics: Or Does a Seaslug Understand Hyperbolic Geometry?

Date and Time: Monday October 19, 2020 – 1pm, on Zoom. Sign up for the event here at MAT/UCSB.

Talk Abstract: What does it mean to know mathematics? In the frilled forms of corals and other crenelated marine organisms we witness structures that mathematicians long thought to be impossible. Defying the rules of Euclidean geometry, such “hyperbolic” surfaces are now known to exist in a wide variety of living and physical systems. For the past 15 years, science writer and artist Margaret Wertheim has been working on a project to make sculptural representations of coral reefs using the craft of crochet, thus marrying mathematics with art, science, and handiwork. Her Crochet Coral Reef project – which has been widely exhibited around the world, including at the Venice Biennale and the Smithsonian – is at once a novel enterprise in radical craft practice and a global experiment in applied geometry that makes a case for embodied mathematical knowing.

Art in the time of COVID

“Coral Forest” by Margaret and Christine Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring, at Lehigh University Art Galleries. Photo by Stephanie Veto for LUAG.

At once intimate and collective, the Crochet Coral Reef offers a unique model of art-making in the time of COVID. While the world shelters at home, three new Satellite Reefs are blooming into being. Under the auspices of the Helsinki Art Museum, thousands of Finnish crafters are crocheting corals for a display at the 2021 Helsinki Biennial. Toronto crocheters have been called into action by the Ontario Science Center, where an Ontario Satellite Reef will be shown alongside a major exhibition of the IFF’s own crochet reefs. And at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign the Urbana-Champaign Satellite Reef will feature a “day-glow” black-light sub-reef. By collectively mirroring the quiet productivity of the living reefs we emulate, we crochet “reefers” are building works of art that call attention to the crisis of global warming while also offering an alternative vision for what art-making can be – communal, humble, joyous, hand-made, and attuned to the webs of life.

 

Urbana-Champaign Satellite Reef

Sep 17 Thu
5:30pm CDT @ University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Lecture and Launch


Margaret Wertheim in the” Fohr Satellite Reef”- at the Museum Kunste der Westkuste, Fohr Germany, 2012.

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign is making a community based Satellite Reef.

On Thursday September 17, 2020, Margaret Wertheim will launch the latest addition to the ever-evolving archipelago of Satellite Reefs with an artists’ talk about this global community-art-happening in the context of the overall Crochet Coral Reef project.

Following up, on Tuesday September 22, Wertheim will lead a workshop about crochet-coral making and the mathematics of hyperbolic geometry underlying Crochet Reef forms. From the crenelated surfaces of living coral organisms to the structure of the cosmos, nature abounds in non-Euclidean formations. Weaving a thread via domestic female craft from sea slugs to spacetime, Wertheim will explore resonances of geometry in nature and ask “What does it mean to know mathematics?”

Lecture Date: 09/17/2020 5:30pm CDT

Workshop Date: 09/22/2020 2:30pm CDT

Both events will be held live on Zoom.

The Urbana-Champaign Satellite Reef is hosted by the Department of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Satellite Reef co-ordinators: Guen Montgomery and Jennifer Bergmark.

UIUC – Project Press Release.

To participate in the Urbana-Champaign Satellite Reef and to submit crochet corals, see here.

“Event Horizon” Symposium

Aug 20 Thu
6-7pm PST @ University of Melbourne

Panel discussion


Event Horizon Symposium schedule: August 18-21, 2020

IFF director Margaret Wertheim is delivering a keynote address at the Event Horizon Symposium at the University of Melbourne. The symposium is inspired by the extraordinary Event Horizon Telescope image of a black hole at the heart of galaxy M87. During the 3-day symposium, speakers and panelists will consider the cultural, aesthetic and scientific impacts of this image, and reflect on an “event horizon” as a metaphor for understanding many of the defining, boundary-crossing issues of our times.

Ms Wertheim will deliver a talk, by pre-recorded Zoom, on the topic “The Shape of Space”, which will be available on the symposium website from August 18, 2020.

Wertheim will also participate in a live Zoom panel discussion about the cultural resonances of the Event Horizon image. Date&Time in Melbourne: August 21, 11am-12noon. Date&Time in USA: August 20, 6-7pm PST.

Event Horizon Symposium is co-hosted by the Center of the Visual Arts (CoVA) at the University of Melbourne and by Science Gallery Melbourne. The symposium coincides with the publication of a special issue of Art + Australia, in which artists, scientists, writers and cultural theorists explore the theme of “event horizons” as a way of thinking about issues ranging from immigration to science fiction to a potential end of the world.

Event dates: August 18-21, 2020.

Symposium speakers: Artists: Margaret Wertheim, Stelarc, Karlie Noon, Lynette Smith, Sean Cubitt; Dr. Suzie Fraser (Director: CoVA), Dr. Ryan Jeffries (Director: Science Gallery Melbourne), Dr. Ted Colless (Editor: Art + Australia), and others.

Symposium website.

Black hole at the heart of galaxy M87

 

Metabolic Studio – Interdependence Salon

May 14 Thu
1pm PST @ Zoom

Discussion


Metabolic Studio’s neon logo.

On May 14, IFF directors Christine and Margaret Wertheim are the invited speakers at the Metabolic Studio’s Interdependance Salon.

The Wertheim’s will be talking about the Crochet Coral Reef; art in the age of climate change and oceanic plastic trash; and mathematics in nature. The discussion will be hosted by beloved LA art critic, artist, radio-host and blogger Doug Harvey.

This is the 4th event in the Metabolic Studio’s series of Interdependance Salons, initiated to discuss things that matter and threads that connect us in this strange new time we are living through. To join us, sign up here at EventBrite.

Time: Thursday May 14th, 2020. 1pm PST.

Place: Zoom


About the Interdependence Salons – From Metabolic Studio:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”  Buckminster Fuller

A declaration of interdependence must be followed by a practice of interdependence. Achieving this interdependence takes both seeing and doing, both vision and action. A new collective vision is needed, centered and prioritized around the common good and community.

As we live through these uncertain times, we at Metabolic Studio hope as a community to collectively support one another and share our knowledge and voices. Please join us every Thursday at 1pm PST for a series of Interdependence Salons virtually on Zoom as we take inspiration this season from Buckminster Fuller’s 1976 Bicentennial Declaration of Interdependence. Metabolic Studio will be hosting special invited guests discussing their work in this new reality we are facing.

Ontario Science Centre

Oct 30 Sat
July 24-Oct 30, 2021 @ Toronto, Canada

Crochet Reef – Exhibition


Large atrium lobby of the Ontario Science Museum

Lobby of the Ontario Science Center, a Toronto landmark building.

During summer 2021, The Crochet Coral Reef was on exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre, Canada’s oldest and most prestigious museum dedicated to science and nature. In conjunction with the exhibition, Crochet Reef creators Christine Wertheim and Margaret Wertheim worked with the people of Canada to create an Ontario Satellite Reef.

Exhibition dates: July 24 – October 30, 2021
Location: Ontario Science Center

Exhibition webpage:
Crochet Coral Reef website:

Ontario Satellite Reef – project webpage.

This exhibition was originally scheduled for 2020, and was delayed until 2021 due to COVID-19.