'Art & Mathematics 2000' Exhibition at BCC12:00AM / Wednesday, February 14, 2001
The "Arts & Mathematics 2000" exhibition that was recently at the Cooper Union in New York City is on display now through March 30 at Berkshire Community College.
The exhibition, which is free and open to the public, is designed to dispel the misconception that art and mathematics have very little in common. Various pieces are on display at several locations throughout the campus, including the Koussevitzky Arts Center lobby, Koussevitzky Art Gallery, General Bartlett Room in the Susan B. Anthony Center, and the second floor of Hawthorne Hall.
Some of the artist/mathematicians, or is it mathematician/artists, whose works are on display in this unusual exhibit include the following:
Bob Brill is a computer programmer who uses E language to design visual images by means of numerical algorithms. His computer-generated print, "Beyond Lissajous," employs sine functions in six different ways.
Mike Field is a professor of mathematics at the University of Houston where he teaches an interdisciplinary course to art and design students using computer software he developed as a result of his work in the areas of dynamics, chaos and symmetry. His computer-generated print, "Hell Fire II," employs a new method, which he also helped to develop, for the design and coloring of two-color quilt patterns.
Bathsheba Grossman is a digital sculptor who uses bronze, silver and glass to create abstract geometries in space. Her display, "Blue Star," used a computer-controlled waterjet to cut the pieces that were then assembled into a three-dimensional work.
Susan Happersett has plotted various numerical properties that allow her to study the aesthetic characteristics of functions, sequences and series in a purely visual language. Her ink drawing, "Tall Sunflower," is based on the correlation between plant growth patterns and the Fibonacci Sequence which is derived by adding each new number in the series to the previous number (i.e., 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...).
James Norman has a degree in architecture from the University of Virginia. His ink drawing, "Diamond Tessellation," is a direct result of his lifelong hobby of marine biology and depicts the microscopic world of sea life called radiolarian.
Charles Perry's bronze sculpture, "Double Knot," is a variation of his sculpture that is in front of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
Tony Robbin, the author of "fourfield: Computers, Art & the 4th Dimension,"holds the patent on the application of Quasicrystal geometry, a derivative of four-dimensional geometry, to architecture. His acrylic painting, "2000-1," depicts the remarkable visual properties of Quasicrystal geometry.
Carlo Sequin is on the computer science faculty at the University of California at Berkley where he developed the Berkley UniGrafix rendering system. His computer-generated print is titled "Skeleton of a Klein Bottle."Mathematically, a Klein Bottle is a vessel that can hold a liquid, yet it has no rim and consists of a single-sided surface with no inner or outer sides.
John Sullivan holds degrees from Harvard and Cambridge, as well as a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton. His painting, "Maximum Sphere Eversion," is an outgrowth of his research into curves and surfaces whose shape is determined by optimization principles or minimization of energy. A common example of these forces, depicted in Sullivan's painting, is a soap bubble.
Other participants in the exhibition include Manuel Baez, Harriet Brisson, Benigna Chilla, Brent Collins, Nat Friedman, Charles Ginnever, George W. Hart, Jean Le Mee, Robert Longhurst, Clement Meadmore, Eleni Mylonas, Douglas D. Peden, George Rickey, John Sharp, Arthur Silverman, Clifford Singer, Kenneth Snelson, and Koos Verhoeff.
In addition to the indoor pieces, the exhibition includes a fairly large steel sculpture by Antoni Milkowski on the lawn outside BCC's Jonathan Edwards Library. Also, the library has assembled a display of books complementing the exhibit.
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