Saturday, April 21, 2007

Black cube by Gregor Schneider

German sculptor Gregor Schneider was fascinated by artwork "Black square", which was created by famous russian artist Kasismir Malevich, and he decided to create an analogue of it as sculpture.

Firstly, he tried to represent 15-metres high black cube in 2005 and was erected in Venice at International Art Exhibition - La Biennalle de Venezia. It was named "Cube Venice 2005". But his application was rejected by Venice authority for politic reasons because they were afraid to offend muslims who could consider it as recostruction of the holiest place of Islam - Kaaba, which is at the center of the Great Mosque in Mecca.

In 2006 Gregor Schneider with his cube was invited to exhibition in Berlin Museum of Modern Art. He renaimed it to "Cube Berlin 2006". But his participation in the exhibition was rejected again at the last moment by the general director of Berlin public museums.

Nadeem Elyas, the president of the central Muslim coulcil in Germany, advocated the cube, and finally, 14-metres high sculpture of black cube have found its place before Museum of Modern Art in Hamburg.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Rapid prototyping sculptures

George Hart is active using rapid prototyping (RP) technology for modeling sculptures.

Rapid Prototyping
or Solid Freeform Fabrication refers to a range of new technologies which construct physical three-dimensional objects by assembling thin layers of material under computer control. Objects can be made which are extremely accurate, complex, and beautiful, and which no other technology can produce.

The image left shows he and his model of Sierpinski triangle.

He also interested in four-dimensional geometry. From a 4D object, one can calculate 3D "shadows" which are often beautiful but very complex objects.

The image below shows a 4D structure made of 120 regular dodecahedra. This "shadow" of it has the form of one large dodecahedron filled in with 119 smaller dodecahedra. In 4D all the dodecahedra are regular, but in this 3D shadow, angles are necessarily distorted, so only the innermost and outermost dodecahedra appear regular.

Even more beautiful and intricate is the truncated 120-cell, a 4D object made of 120 truncated dodecahedra and 600 tetrahedra.

Below is two variants of a woven assemblage of Salamanders, in homage to M.C. Escher. The left image is a rapid prototype and right image is a laser-cut wooden sculpture.

Monday, April 2, 2007

Structures by Rinus Roelofs

Holland artist and mathematician Rinus Roelofs constructs charming mathematical structures. He constructs his structures in computer but some of them became sculptures in various Holland towns.
The sculpture above was erected in Borne (Holland) in 2005. It consists of 26 tetrahedrons or 104 triangles. Triangles are just slid together. Construction is stable and need no further fixing.

Bet he created a lot more computer models of three-dimensional structures. One of them (below) shows Hamiltonean path of polyhedron. Hamiltonean path is a sequence of edges that visits all vertexes of a polyhedron exactly once.
Besides three-dimensional structure Rinus Roelofs created a set of two-dimensional tessellation structures for Escher Centennial Congress in Rome in 1998. They represents regular structures that constitute infinite impossible figures. He insists not to call them tessellations but joins.