Artists
Rebecca Lin
PhD Student
MIT: CSAIL & Media Lab
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Statement
As a researcher and mixed-media artist, I develop mathematical abstractions and computational tools that facilitate new ways of making. I blend my digital design process with the creation of tangible artifacts, sometimes in collaboration with machines. This practice often reveals compelling artistic inquiries and technical challenges, and I find magic where they meet.
Artworks
This piece explores the interplay of curiosity, compulsion, and overwhelm on the cusp of countless “rabbit holes,” each a vortex of possibility. Its swirling forms were created with an encoding–decoding scheme for Islamic art–inspired “constellation patterns,” developed in collaboration with Craig S. Kaplan. The framework encodes patterns as graphs and decodes them via circle packings, enabling pattern makers to define motifs and their relationships—expressed as vertices and edges—without the arduous task of resolving geometric inconsistencies. This abstraction makes the intricate, chaotic forms in this work possible.