ARTWORKS AT THE INTERSECTION OF ART AND MATHEMATICS

Bruce Cannon’s Ten Things I Can Count On
Arijana Kajfes’ Genus Noll
Stewart Dickson’s Three-Dimensional Zoetrope

 

Bruce Cannon, Arijana Kajfes, and Stewart Dickson, are three contemporary artists whose work exists at the intersection of art and mathematics. Their work is on view at the Exploratorium from October 6, 2001-May 5, 2002, in tandem with Mathematica: The World of Numbers... and Beyond, a Sputnik era classic exhibition by acclaimed designers Charles and Ray Eames— the only Eames exhibition still extant.

The art works are as follows:

Ten Things I Can Count On/Bruce Cannon
Small computer controlled machines, looking like a cross between a short wave radio and a car battery with a glowing digital display, count up or down, marking the passage of time and quantifying answers to such questions as Breaths I Have Taken, Duration of My Career in Seconds, Seconds Since the Invention of the Microprocessor, Love’s Time/Memory/Absence and Acres of Open Space Left in the Continental US, among others. The machines are carefully calculating — using such customized features as randomized models of a day and changes in count rate representing, relative to Breaths In a Day, for example, changes in respiration, based on sleeping, jogging, sex, walking and reading. At the root of these banal, faintly humorous and slightly wrenching machines, is the seeming futility of the human compulsion to quantify. Artist Bruce Cannon is based in Oakland, California.

Genus Noll (Hold Infinity in Your Hands for a Moment)/Arijana Kajfes
Picture a computer animation of a bagel slowly spinning in light and shadow, gradually transforming into other shapes. The bagel is in fact a geometric construction called a torus. The surface of this three-dimensional form with a black hole in the middle, deforms and stretches in space. In Genus Noll, this sensuous screen image transforms into an endless loop of equally hypnotizing studies of a sphere — a ball of clay spins and transforms on a potter’s wheel; a batch of dough becomes a pizza shell as it spins in the air. At the end of the animation the sphere recedes further and further, vanishing into the surrounding black space. Upon reentering the beginning of the loop, the surrounding black space becomes the black hole of a new sphere (the bagel). According to Kajfes, "I tried to find a way of exiting a black hole without actually Ôfalling through’ it, so that somehow, space would wrap around itself and recreate itself ad infinitum." These shapes render themselves topologically mesmerizing for the mathematician and intriguing to anyone fascinated by black hole theories. Arijana Kajfes is a Swedish artist born in Croatia.

Three Dimensional Zoetrope/ Stewart Dickson
As you look through slits in the spinning zoetrope, real objects appear to morph and change before your eyes. The 19th century moving image technology of the zoetrope combines with the most up to date technique in computer-aided 3D design to animate a newly explored area of mathematics that until recently, also had the mathematicians confounded. Artist Dickson’s work is based on the transformations in the field of topology. Think of it as 4D movie — 3 dimensions in space and one in time. Dickson begins by using 3D images created on a computer and then "prints" them as a series of slightly varying real 3D objects inserted into the zoetrope. Inside the zoetrope, important shapes, the equivalent of important equations, rapidly change from one to the next, as in a movie. The transformations, when seen as an actual 3D object in motion, reveal symmetries hereto invisible to mathematicians. For visitors to the Exploratorium, the effect is wondrous and suggestive of the ways that art has played a role in the advancement of mathematics. Artist Stewart Dickson is based in Southern California.