Jack Criddle is a British-born videographer, editor, and media professional. He holds a BFA in Film from the City College of New York, and is a graduate of the Putney School. He has worked on numerous feature films and documentaries, and created web video content for CBS’s Inside Edition, eHow.com, MASS MoCA, and various artisans and business. His photography work has been published in Smithsonian online, Take magazine, and more. He lives and works in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.
For the short film "Meteorites," Criddle sought to explore the intersection of geometry, abstraction, color, and dance, the physical and the metaphysical, the organic and the electronic, in combining the three-dimensional Penrose tiling sculptures of Debora Coombs and Duane Bailey, and the music of Todd Reynolds.
Films
This video shows three mathematically precise sculptures built by artist-geometer Debora Coombs and computer scientist Duane Bailey. The sculptures show a small patch of an infinite surface made from a single shape, a rhombus repeated hundreds of times, tilted at different angles. The sculptures have exactly the same structure. Each has a unique color palette that emphasizes a feature of the underlying mathematics. If this geometry were projected onto a two-dimensional surface it would form a Penrose tiling.
A tiny pink and green seed may be seen toward the end of the video. If you were to begin building a sculpture with this cluster of six rhombs you could predict the location of all dark rhombs to infinity. The locations of lighter colored rhombs cannot be predicted. Furthermore, repositioning just one of these lighter colored rhombs will cause others to flip at distant unknowable locations.
In Nature, this quasi-crystalline pattern has only been found in meteorites.