Bridges 2026 Exhibition of Mathematical Art, Craft, and Design
Phillip C. Reiner
Artists
Phillip C. Reiner
Independent Researcher
protoCtrl - Advanced Geometries
Berlin, Germany
Statement
At protoCtrl, I study how geometry behaves -- what happens when you iterate a simple rule, how surfaces form from discrete parts, where the same proportions keep showing up across different materials. This research grounds the collaborations with artists I work with. We build physical models from mathematical relationships, dimensional enough to walk around. What holds my attention is the moment someone sees a structure and gets it without needing the math.
Artworks
Hypergraph #16 comes from a search through thousands of rewriting rules applied to small sets of connected nodes. The work builds on Stephen Wolfram's 2020 proposal that space could emerge from repeated graph substitutions on hypergraphs. Most rules produce chains or trees. A few grow into closed forms whose local neighborhoods scale like surfaces. #16 was one of those. I scored candidates for curvature and topological consistency, meshed the results, and 3D-printed them. What I keep coming back to is how small the rule is — three node pairs replaced by three triples — compared to the object you end up holding.