Fabien Vienne
Artists
Statement
I create 3D forms to convey the notion that geometry is no mere tool of composition, it's an epistemology – a way to understand the world and to express its underlying laws. Each work seeks to employ the principle of economy to find the essential in a problem and to then "substantiate" it in a least-action solution which brings that essence to light and to life. While using modern materials to explore classical questions, I often wonder how much further along we might be today if the great minds of the past had also had these materials for their earlier explorations.
Artworks
Fuzzy Precision (2D)
2 discs of diameter 80cm (one disc is interactive)
plastic tubes and connectors (Tubespace), colored soda straws
2010
Fuzzy Precision-2D shows the fractal structure embedded in the irrational √3 edgelengths created by overlaying, common-centering, and rotating identical triangular grids -- an interactive trip from pure periodicity to a sea of irrational near-misses to a highly-ordered √3-scaled hierarchy of nonperiodic tilings. To align the base grids, rotate the top grid to 0°. Rotate slightly away from 0° to see moiré interference patterns. Rotate to 30° to create near-misses of 3+ lines crossing at lengths of integer- and √3-multiples. You'll see scattered dodecagonal flower-shaped "rosettes" with near-miss centers that vary in their precision. If highest-precision centers are interlinked, a nonperiodic tiling results. Link the next-highest precisions, and you get an exactly similar nonperiodic tiling, deflated in the proportion √(2+√3):1. Two such tilings are shown in yellow and green on the second disc. A 3D variant with 5-fold symmetry will be constructed with Zometool at Bridges2011.