Materials: Painted bamboo and wire

In their 1932 book Anschauliche Geometrie, David Hilbert and Stephan Cohn-Vossen described how a four-dimensional polytope called the icositetrachoron, when projected from its center into our three-dimensional space, yields an elegant figure called the Reye configuration that shows up in many areas of mathematics. The configuration consists of twelve points, sixteen lines, and twelve planes, and each of its points is an intersection of four lines and six planes. Each of its lines goes through three points and is an intersection of three planes, and each of its planes goes through six points and four lines.

Working from a miniature model, I build a Reye configuration from four-meter-long bamboo poles. The regularity of the configuration allowed a four-coloring of the poles, where none of the colors touch each other, but each of them appears at every point and in every plane. The resulting sculpture was exhibited at West Bund Art Center in Shanghai.






Space Hug also served as an invitation for the exhibition audience to participate in a hands-on activity, where they were asked to make their own configurations by joining small bamboo sticks with rubber bands. These miniature configurations (some of them built according to given sets of instructions, others following artistic freedom) were then placed on the floor next to the large-scale sculpture to make an interactive installation that kept growing during the course of the exhibition.

Read more at:
https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/aalto-math-arts-in-shanghai-future-lab-exhibition


Photo: Kirsi Peltonen