Kanata Warisaya, Asao Tokolo, Tomohiro Tachi
I started this work from the art-science collaboration class "individual and group," taught by Tomohiro Tachi and Asao Tokolo, held at the University of Tokyo in 2019. The participants created artworks inspired by the connection between math, art, science, and design, including Tokyo 2020 Olympic Paralympic emblems "Harmonized Chequered Emblems" and the geometry of tessellation underlying the patterns.
I originally applied the emblems to static 3D sculpture; however, it turns out that the structures can transform. I started collaborating with Tachi regarding the kinematic design based on the transformable nature of the patterns to explore this family of kirigami mechanisms.
This artwork presents the mechanism inspired by Tokyo 2020 Olympic Paralympic emblems and their variations. In this work, we inverted the figure and the ground of the emblems, i.e., we regard the white ground of the emblems as rigid bodies connected at corners and the rectangular indigo figure as the transformable gaps. Due to the geometric properties of the underlying rhombic tiling and their dual rectangles, the structure becomes a one-DOF mechanism which can contract the rectangular gaps into zero-area slits. We fabricated the artwork by kirigami method, i.e., laser-cutting the material along the slit pattern in the contracted state. This work also generalizes the auxetic mechanisms designed by Ron Resch in the 1960s.