Craig S. Kaplan and Henry Segerman
Craig Kaplan is an associate professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He is interested in the application of mathematics and computer science to the solution of problems in art and design. He has always had a passion for mathematical art, but more broadly studies graphic design, illustration, and film.
Henry Segerman is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Oklahoma State University. His mathematical research is in 3-dimensional geometry and topology, and concepts from those areas often appear in his work. Other artistic interests involve procedural generation, self reference, ambigrams and puzzles.
This is a self-referential bunny — a sculpture of a bunny, the surface of which is tiled by 72 copies of the word “Bunny”. This piece is part of a larger series of “autologlyphs”, following on from HS’s “Sphere Autologlyph” from the 2010 Bridges art exhibition. An autologlyph is a word written or represented in a way which is described by the word itself. This style of autologlyph combines Escher-style tessellation with typographical ideas related to ambigrams.
The bunny was created using a technique published by CSK for transferring a symmetric design to a suitably parameterized mesh surface. We modified the technique to require a quarter as many copies of the fundamental domain as compared with the original version. This allowed us to send a smaller (and more affordable) model to the 3D printer. The design of the word “Bunny” was produced using Adobe Illustrator, then thickened in 2D, triangulated, mapped to the 3D surface, and extruded into a thin shell for manufacture.