The Institute For Figuring

08/09/2018

Giant "Coral Forest" sculptures from our "Crochet Coral Reef" project have been showing at the "Trade Markings: Frontier Imaginaries" exhibition, at Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Here visitors enjoy the wooly excess of these Suessean monsters. Photo courtesy, Van Abbemuseum, by Marcel de Buck. Thanks to curator Vivian Ziherl.

07/02/2018

Three of the Institute For Figuring's giant crochet "Coral Forest" sculptures are in the exhibition "Trade Markings: Frontier Imaginaries" at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands. Exhibition dates: April 7 - July 1, 2018. Curated by Vivian Ziherl, with Charles Esche and Annie Fletcher, the exhibition explores trade flows and their effects on the environment, from the Middle Ages to today. In conjunction with the show, the museum is hosting the creation of the Eindhoven Satellite Reef made by local community members in the Dutch state of Brabant. This is the 40th addition to the IFF's ongoing archipelago of Satellite Reefs worldwide.

01/11/2018

IFF director Margaret Wertheim has an essay out in Aeon magazine. How many dimension are there in our universe? And what does a "dimension" mean? Wertheim writes: "The birth of modern science is usually seen as a transition into a mechanist account of nature, but arguably more important – and certainly more enduring – is the transition it entailed in our conception of space as a geometric construct." From Descartes to Einstein, from relativity to string theory, and beyond, dimensions are crucial to the modern understanding our world.

Relativity says we live in four dimensions. String theory says it’s 10. What are ‘dimensions’ and how do they affect reality?

01/03/2018

The Brooklyn Rail has a special section this month on "Art, Science and the Question of Convergence", guest edited by Taney Roniger. IFF director Margaret Wertheim has an essay about "figuring" as speculative material play practice. Included also are essays by Roniger, Matthew Ritchie, James Elkins, Werner Sun, Suzanne Anker, Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfland, Stephen Nowlin, and others. A deeply fascinating collection of perspectives on a continually ambiguous boundary. The issue includes an interview with Donna Haraway on her vital new book "Staying with the Troubles: Making Kin in the Chthulucene" which discusses our Crochet Coral Reef. https://brooklynrail.org

“To figure: to form or shape, to trace, to reckon or calculate, to represent in a diagram or picture, to ornament or adorn with a design or pattern.” Thus the Oxford English Dictionary defines the act of figuring, a word equally resonant in mathematics, science and art.

12/20/2017

Think VR is the future? Tomorrow night (Wed. Dec. 20, 2017) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, IFF director Margaret Wertheim is giving a talk about virtual reality and its roots in the Middle Ages. We'll go from Giotto and medieval Italy to Angkor Wat and medieval Cambodia through state-of-the-art VR.

10/13/2017

On NPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge IFF director Margaret Wertheim talks about of spacetime and the prospect of a universe. Titled "Is the Universe a Number?" show also includes Israeli mathematician Shlomo Maital on the , and laureate Franck Wilczek on searching for beauty in laws of nature.

For centuries, mathematicians have been looking for the deep design, the mathematical code to explain everything from microorganisms to spacetime. But it’s a dangerous quest.

08/31/2017

Tonight is a special screening of "Symbiotic Earth" a film about radical biologist Lynn Margulis who proposed that evolution is propelled by collaborations between cells and organisms. started a revolution that's reverberating through the biological sciences and beyond. Her work was an inspiration behind the IFF's Crochet Coral Reef project; Reef co-creator will participate in a panel discussion after the fim. At the cinema, .

Australian Preview Screening of John Feldman’s feature-length documentary, “Symbiotic Earth: How Lynn Margulis Rocked the Boat and Started a Scientific Revolution.” An engaging panel discussion will follow the screening. Symbiotic Earth explores the life and ideas of the extraordinary Lynn Margulis,...

07/17/2017

The IFF mourns the passing of Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the Fields Medal in mathematics, who has died of cancer at the age of 40. Much of her work was about the geometry and topology of hyperbolic surfaces and the intersections between disparate areas of mathematics that characterize the shapes of things. Her passing at such a young age, and at the peak of her powers, is a tragedy for mathematics. Mirzakhani was a beacon of light and inspiration to all of us who believe in the intellectual equality of the sexes. Her Iranian origins also stand as a testimony to the formidable history of math & science in the Middle East. In the world of math her legacy will resonate for centuries to come. Here's an elegant account of her ground-breaking work from Quanta magazine.

Maryam Mirzakhani has become the first woman Fields medalist for drawing deep connections between topology, geometry and dynamical systems.

06/07/2017

This weekend the IFF was delighted to be part of KNOWLEDGES at Mount Wilson Observatory, the acclaimed art and astronomy event curated by Christina Ondrus. IFF director Margaret Wertheim delivered a public lecture, "Making Space", about the history of scientific concepts of space, followed by a workshop in which participants built models of hyperbolic space. Mount Wilson is the place where Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe – and hence space itself – is expanding. At KNOWLEDGES, his famed 100 inch telescope became the site of inspired musical performances (including one synchronized to the motion of the telescope dome), and the locus for a cluster of commissioned art installations.

http://theiff.org/current/events/knowledges-mount-wilson/

05/07/2017

The IFF has long admired Stanford designer John Edmark, who's mathematically inflected sculptures we encountered years ago at the Gathering For Gardner. Here's a stunning video of his phyllotactic "Blooms" performing under strobe lights. The pieces are actually static. What appears to be organic growth is a magical trick of the eye created by careful synchronization between the structure of the forms and a strobing light as the figure rotates. Based on the Fibonacci numbers, its a mathematical dance. (via Elizabeth Robison) For further amazement, see John's high-res Bloom films here at his website: http://www.johnedmark.com/ #/phi/

05/04/2017

The IFF's friend, Bradford Hansen-Smith, recently had an exhibition of his remarkable folded-paper-plate sculptures at the Shafer Art Gallery in Kansas. Titled "The Geometry of Beauty", the show centered around groves of exquisite biomorphic forms created from thousands of intricately folded white paper plates that simultaneously call to mind Ernst Haeckel's diatoms and Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten "gifts". Enjoy these luscious images of a unique bio-mathematic world.

05/02/2017

Tomorrow IFF director Margaret Wertheim is giving a talk at Monash University on the history of virtual reality from Dante to today. She argues that the roots of VR lie in the Middle Ages with Roger Bacon's pre-perspective notion of "geometric figuring." Here's the flier: