Carlo Sequin

Statement

My professional work in computer graphics and geometric design has also provided a bridge to the world of art. In 1994 I started to collaborate with Brent Collins, a wood sculptor, who has been creating abstract geometrical art since the early 1980s. Our teamwork has resulted in a program called “Sculpture Generator 1” which allows me to explore many more complex ideas inspired by Collins’ work, and to design and execute such geometries with higher precision. More recently I have become interested in mathematical and topological concepts such as the regular homotopies that permit immersions of a torus or a Klein bottle to be smoothly transformed into other shapes in the same class. I then try to turn the mathematical models that illustrate these concepts into aesthetically pleasing sculptural maquettes.

Artworks

A torus can be turned inside out with a regular homotopy. This is a symmetrical half-way point of such a torus eversion. It shows the same amount of both surface sides. How to actually carry out the transformation from this point into an either all-red or all-green torus in the energetically least costly way is still an open problem.

A gridded model of a Klein bottle (Euler characteristic 0, genus 2) with the minimal possible total surface bending energy. This energy is calculated as the surface integral over mean curvature squared.