Vincent Van Dongen
I obtained a PhD in computer sciences from Belgium in 1991. My thesis
was on systolic and periodic arrays. I moved to Montreal to become a
researcher between 1991 and 1997. In parallel, I've always been active
in visual art, taking art classes at night while doing my PhD. Around
2020, I became interested in modular art and in particular aperiodic
tiling and the so-called Ein-Stein problem. My studies in that field
include the search for new tilings and their physical implementation
into sculptures.
This design is inspired from the well-known aperiodic
square-triangle tiling. It makes use of tile lifting, an operation
that consists in placing the 2D tiles into a higher dimensional
space. Here, each square tile of the original tiling is being
lifted. First, we divide each square into 4 isosceles right
triangles. Then we lift each triangle into an equilateral
triangle. As a result, squares become pyramids and all pieces of
this sculpture are identical equilateral triangles. Note that
aperiodicity of this lifted tiling is not enforced by the shape of
its monotile, the equilateral triangle, but is created by properly
assembling the triangles together.