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Totem_2
3" x 4" x 10" tall, white ABS
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Artist Statement: Since high school I have been fascinated by geometry. I enjoyed constructing
the more complicated Platonic solids with ruler and compasses, as well as
reading about the 4th dimension. I went on to study physics at the University
of Basel, and in 1970 started working at Bell Telephone Laboratories on the
design of Charge-Coupled Imaging Devices. There, in Murray Hill, I was
introduced to the field of Computer Graphics in courses given by Ken Knowlton
and Lilian Schwartz.
In 1977, I joined the faculty of the Computer Science Division at the University
of California, Berkeley. Inspired by a talk by artist Frank Smullin, I started
to develop the Berkeley UniGrafix rendering system, so that I could depict
objects such as the "Skeleton of a Klein Bottle" or the "Granny-Knot Lattice."
Since then, the focus of my work has been on computer-aided design (CAD).
First I developed programs to support circuit designers, later architects and
mechanical engineers, and recently even artists.
In 1995 I started a close collaboration with Brent Collins, who had been
sculpting abstract geometric art for two decades. With my students, I developed
a procedural "Sculpture Generator" program, to help Collins prototype potential
future work in virtual form. Later programs generalized the original concepts,
and eventually expanded the design space through new paradigms. In this work
I see myself as a composer in the realm of pure geometry.
"Totem_2" is the latest creation from a recent modification of the "Sculpture Generator I"
which allows me to create these elongated forms. It has been cretaed on a
Fused Deposition Modeling machine.
The design of the goemetry of "Cohesion" dates back about three years, but
was only cast in bronze in 2002 by Steve Reinmuth.
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