Tag 'art'

I wanted a light and airy hyperbolic plane that would float in the breeze. I decided to try making one out of plastic bags. I cut them into heptagons, ironed them together, and voila! The ironing was not easy, but it worked. I took some pictures of the process and plan on putting together a webpage soon.

To simulate the ghost drawing in a photo, I dressed all in black, wrapped the hyperbolic plane around my waist, and belted it into place. All I need now are proper lighting, camera, and a wind tunnel!

After my first two hyperbolic figure studies, I wanted to imagine more complex forms, forms that loop and fold in a sort of hyperbolic origami. In doing this, I accidentally re-discovered surfaces like Schwarz's P surface, which as it turns out can be made by rolling up a hyperbolic plane. While both those things are already known, I'm still going to give major points to mathematical art because they just as easily might not have been. Hopefully after a few more series of sketches I'll be entering new mathematical territory.

Click to play (1 min 32 sec)

When writing this music, I tried to capture the repetitive rotational feel in the process of both glassblowing and this particular instance of paper folding, as well as sneaking in elements of symmetry and mathematics. I see this video as a collaboration and communication between art, glass, music, math, paper, and people.

I think the colour makes it much easier to see what's going on, though seeing is really no substitute for playing with it in your own hands, so I recommend you make your own.

One neat thing about this is that by drawing freehand I have no limitations except for my own ability to visualize hyperbolicness; it tests my visualization skills and allows for forms that might not be found by other methods. I hope to take the concept further once I develop my drawing skills and hyperbolic intuition a bit more.

The first photo shows the three platonic solids that have triangular faces, and the second photo is of a hyperbolic tiling that has seven triangles around every vertex. I plan eventually to put a webpage together with more details and instructions. Mostly I'm glad that I had a stockpile of empty bottles lying around!

I put up a new webpage on hyperbolic beading so that you can make your own. So far the page only contains diagrams for the above model, but I hope in the future to try some other tilings and patterns.

I consider this a rough test for future mathematical beadwork, hopefully with nicer beads, colour patterns, and artistry. I was inspired to pursue mathematical beadwork by some of the very beautiful models I saw at BRIDGES this year, notably the works by Laura Shea and Bih-Yaw Jin. There are also some connections between computational balloon twisting and computational beadwork (if you wanted to minimize the length of the path the string takes).

Yes, one of the many fun people I hung out with was Mike Naylor, the mastermind behind Naked Geometry. A group of us got together and tried doing some human geometry. Here is a cube we made with ourselves, and a lovely tessellation that Mike created out of me.

Mostly I am posting to provide a high-resolution version of the comic, as Blizzard requires submissions to be small jpgs.

You can see my comic on the official site. If you are not in the US, change the region setting in the upper-right corner, and select June.