Flying Colours, Fascinating Forms: Addition
Addition is a book/scuplture made for the 2011 Flying Colours, Fascinating Forms exhibition at Norwich Assembly House.
Addition started off as an attempt to build on my earlier book Arithmetic Progressions and to create a book of mathematical functions. The theme of the exhibition was 'Flying Colours, Fascinating Forms' and I felt that a bit of primary-coloured mathematical illustration would fit this well. The idea was to build a flag book with the spine doing double duty both as a spine and as y=0, with flags plotting out various 2D functions along the x-axis.
The result was quite a challenge to build, and also quite a challenge to photograph. Here's the whole book under slightly subdued lighting:
And here's a shot taken outside in bright sunlight, showing one of the ends and the beautiful bright colours:
The other end of the book had a little narration on its contents:
"basic repeating functions such as SIN and COS can be added together to create new forms, from the simplicity of SIN+COS to the complexity of music, but can never quite reach the perfection of a SAWTOOTH or SQUARE wave"
The book is supported by a pair of spring-loaded stands, meant for displaying menu cards in restaurants. Originally I had wanted the book to be closable, and planned to build in a drawstring to help keep the spine straight and to aid opening/closing (you can see this in the first of the photos above). However it became clear that the weight of the pages caused two problems; first, the drawstring couldn't be made taught enough to keep the x-axis straight, it kept sagging; second, taughtening the drawstring would pull the covers inwards and make the book unstable. Reluctantly I added stiff wires along the x-axis, which solved both problems but sadly turned Addition into a sculpture rather than a closable book.
Overall I am not nearly as pleased with this as I am with Arithmetic Progressions. I was aiming towards something in the same spirit, but Arithmetic Progressions pulls off 'beautiful explosion of shapes' much better than Addition does. In part this seems to be down to the fixed nature of the sculpture; Arithmetic Progressions can be opened and closed and this format is much more forgiving as the reader does some of the work of alignment. Though I was quite careful with the spine folding, the flags amplify inevitable small imperfections in spacing so that the end result looks a bit scruffy. Also this was a very difficult book to build (lesson learned: think harder before trying to defy gravity). I would still like to make a compendium of mathematical functions but this is not the way to go about it.
On the plus side, this exhibition was the first for which I wrote and submitted a proposal, artist's CV, etc., and I was massively pleased to be accepted. And though I can now think of many ways in which this 'book' could be improved, I don't think I let myself down at the exhibition, and I am in retrospect pleased that I managed to build it at all!
Total construction time: felt like forever...
comments at Dreamwidth
Addition started off as an attempt to build on my earlier book Arithmetic Progressions and to create a book of mathematical functions. The theme of the exhibition was 'Flying Colours, Fascinating Forms' and I felt that a bit of primary-coloured mathematical illustration would fit this well. The idea was to build a flag book with the spine doing double duty both as a spine and as y=0, with flags plotting out various 2D functions along the x-axis.
The result was quite a challenge to build, and also quite a challenge to photograph. Here's the whole book under slightly subdued lighting:
And here's a shot taken outside in bright sunlight, showing one of the ends and the beautiful bright colours:
The other end of the book had a little narration on its contents:
"basic repeating functions such as SIN and COS can be added together to create new forms, from the simplicity of SIN+COS to the complexity of music, but can never quite reach the perfection of a SAWTOOTH or SQUARE wave"
The book is supported by a pair of spring-loaded stands, meant for displaying menu cards in restaurants. Originally I had wanted the book to be closable, and planned to build in a drawstring to help keep the spine straight and to aid opening/closing (you can see this in the first of the photos above). However it became clear that the weight of the pages caused two problems; first, the drawstring couldn't be made taught enough to keep the x-axis straight, it kept sagging; second, taughtening the drawstring would pull the covers inwards and make the book unstable. Reluctantly I added stiff wires along the x-axis, which solved both problems but sadly turned Addition into a sculpture rather than a closable book.
Overall I am not nearly as pleased with this as I am with Arithmetic Progressions. I was aiming towards something in the same spirit, but Arithmetic Progressions pulls off 'beautiful explosion of shapes' much better than Addition does. In part this seems to be down to the fixed nature of the sculpture; Arithmetic Progressions can be opened and closed and this format is much more forgiving as the reader does some of the work of alignment. Though I was quite careful with the spine folding, the flags amplify inevitable small imperfections in spacing so that the end result looks a bit scruffy. Also this was a very difficult book to build (lesson learned: think harder before trying to defy gravity). I would still like to make a compendium of mathematical functions but this is not the way to go about it.
On the plus side, this exhibition was the first for which I wrote and submitted a proposal, artist's CV, etc., and I was massively pleased to be accepted. And though I can now think of many ways in which this 'book' could be improved, I don't think I let myself down at the exhibition, and I am in retrospect pleased that I managed to build it at all!
Total construction time: felt like forever...
comments at Dreamwidth