The National Museum of Mathematics presents: COMPOUNDING VISIONS The art of Trevor and Ryan Oakes The National Museum of Mathematics presents: COMPOUNDING VISIONS The art of Trevor and Ryan Oakes Curated with texts by Lawrence Weschler Conjured into being at the instigation of Mark Mitton 11 East 26 Street New York City May 10 - July 21, 2014 COVER2 Beauty, creativity, exploration… The ability to enhance perceptions and change perspectives… The simple elegance—or the delicious complexity—of pattern, texture, and color…Beauty, creativity, exploration... Art,The orability math? to enhance perceptions and change perspectives… The simple elegance—or the delicious complexity—of pattern, texture, and color… There’s an artistry to mathematics that captivates those who peer closely…and mathematicalArt, or math? interpretations of art that can illuminate and elucidate. WelcomeThere’s an to artistry Composite to mathematics, the gallery that at MoMath,captivates where those artwho and peer math closely… intersect to provideand mathematical a unique perspective: interpretations a chance of art that to perceive can illuminate the world and elucidate.from a different angle, and to come away with a new, often surprising, understanding. Welcome to Composite, the gallery at MoMath, where art and math intersect to provide Thea unique National perspective: Museum aof chance Mathematics to perceive is delighted the world to from open a Compositedifferent angle, with and the to come workaway of with Trevor a new, and often Ryan surprising, Oakes. Theseunderstanding. young artists explore perspective and technique in a way that bridges two worlds, expressing both the mathematical natureThe National of art and Museum the artful of Mathematics nature of mathematics. is delighted toWe open hope Composite you will join with us the in work of enjoying,Trevor and engaging, Ryan Oakes. and Thesediscovering. young artists explore perspective and technique in a way that bridges two worlds, expressing both the mathematical nature of art and the artful nature of mathematics. We hope you will join us in enjoying, engaging, and discovering. CindyCindy Lawrence, Co-Executive Co-Executive Director Director NationalNational Museum of Mathematics NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MATHEMATICS NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MATHEMATICS BOARD OF TRUSTEES ART COMMITTEE The National Museum of Mathematics wishes to thank the following individuals forGlen their Whitney, help andPresident, inspiration Treasurer in making CompositeDavid DeWeesea reality: John Overdeck, Vice President Judith H. Gibbons DavidLaetitia DeWeese Garriott de Cayeaux, Secretary MarkRob W. Mitton Jones Judith H. Gibbons RyanCindy LawrenceOakes HalleyDuane AdamsK. Harrisburg TrevorTimothy Oakes Nissen ChuckAnousheh Hoberman Ansari FrancescoRachel Perera Scattone Weingeist JosephPeter Carr J. Kohn RachelGlen Whitney Weingeist RobStephen W. JonesDella Pietra Lawrence Weschler Robert J. Frey SPECIAL THANKS TO: Matthew Goldstein Carole G. Hankin Suzanne Cruse Robert W. Jones Halley K. Harrisburg Brian Keating Chuck Hoberman Sandy Leong Joseph J. Kohn Saul Rosenthal Mark Mitton David Turock Ryan Oakes Jade Vinson Trevor Oakes Brad Wilson Francesco Scattone Stephen Wolfram Lawrence Weschler 1 2 were telling me that the guys I really had to up against each other, because they are all meet were these other twins, the Oakes boys. engaged in what he likes to call “the dialog of Now, the Wertheims had in those days only immanence.” And from our first meetings it just recently launched the hyperbolic crocheted was clear to me that these kids were deeply coral reef (that marvelous interpenetration of engaged in that kind of liminal inquiry. non-Euclidean mathematics, environmentalist So, to make a long story short, I wrote concern, feminist handicrafts, aesthetic marvel about them and their adventures relatively and political activism—granted, a whole other early on in a piece for the Virginia Quarterly story, but one well worth Googling), and they Review—the very piece that follows – one that were telling me that if I thought that that I hope will give you a general background on was something (which I fervently did), then where the boys are coming from, and a hint of I’d really love what Trevor and Ryan were up where they were headed back then, in 2009. to, with pipe cleaners of all things! Which, And I was hardly surprised, a few years after indeed, within a few hours proved decidedly that, to learn that the National Museum of the case. Mathematics had decided to devote the first For the Oakes boys, too, were clearly forging show in their new art gallery space to the two their own way into the terrain between the of them. Despite the fact that the Twins had aesthetic and the investigatory—which is to no particular mathematical training, it was say the same terrain all artists used to inhabit obvious that they had deeply mathematical before the relatively recent and entirely minds, which is to say sensibilities besotted artificial rise of the divide between the arts with the splendors of pattern and order. and sciences. The sort of terrain that Leonardo Still, little did I know what an adventure it and Michelangelo and Brunelleschi would would prove, when, through the ministrations have called their own (imagining no other). For of Cindy Lawrence, Glen Whitney and Tim these kids—and they were very young: bright Nissen of the Museum, and especially thanks to and vivid and unabashedly open—were at the the interventions and introductions provided same time age-old wise. As became clear in by their pal, that other sublime inquirer after talking to them, they had been involved since immanence, the magician (!) Mark Mitton, the toddlerhood in a progressively ever-more- Twins actually began engaging with real-life consuming dialog on the nature of perception mathematicians, folks like Joe Kohn and John (two boys talking hour after hour, month after Conway and Manjul Bhargava of Princeton, month, year after year, about what it is like, and Chaim Goodman-Straus of the University precisely, to see with two eyes), so they’d of Arkansas, and George Zweig (originally out already been at it for a long time. And though of Los Alamos and MIT). their path had been entirely “artistic”—they’d The results of those conversations are LAWRENCE WESCHLER only just graduated from Cooper Union— everywhere evident in the show that it was clear that the sorts of issues they resulted and the catalog that follows, and our INTRODUCTION were exploring ramified in all kinds of other appreciation to all of those mentioned above directions as well. is boundless. Likewise to Gerri Davis who The artist Robert Irwin, whose thinking and designed the catalog—no mean feat, as you The Twins and I met by way of the other manqué science writer and the other a poet/ career I’d explored years earlier in my own will come to understand. twins. This was back in 2007, and they were literary theorist, the two of them founders of first book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of So, turn the page and meet Ryan and Trevor only twenty-five at the time. We were all the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles, an the Thing One Sees, likes to say that it’s not Oakes by way of that original VQR piece, after attending the opening at the Metropolitan entire enterprise given over to celebrating all that surprising that explorers at the edges which you too will get a chance to see what it Museum of an installation by the artist Tara the aesthetic splendors of scientific thinking, of their respective disciplines (physicists, can be like when disciplines collide and conjoin Donovan, and the other twins—Margaret which is to say all the beauty that is in truth philosophers, artists, mathematicians, archi- and ramify away…what it is like, in short, to and Christine Wertheim, the one a physicist- and vice versa—anyway, the Wertheim Twins tects, biochemists, and the like) keep bumping positively revel in figuring stuff out. 3 4 MATHEMATICAL IMPLICATIONS So, as we say, the Oakes Twins were not themselves mathematicians, nor had they ever had any particular mathematical training. But their work kept tending into distinctly mathematical terrain, and this show proposes to explore some of those incursions. Thus, for example: ALGORITHMIC WATERCOLOR PAINTINGS Throughout their practice, the Twins keep almost parallel to the surface. The next line reverting to algorithmic procedures, which is up, they held the stick ever so slightly more to say they set themselves a procedural rule vertically, again rolling it in a straight line from which they then follow all the way through. one side of the paper to the other. And again, Thus, for example, in the series of paintings and again, each time holding the brush-stick at represented by the two examples to your right, a slightly higher angle and therefore traversing they started out by inventing a brush (a scrap from one edge of the paper to the other ever of felt twisted and folded and lashed around more slowly, till, at the top of the sheet of rice the tip of a stick, below) that they saturated paper, the brush was being twirled upon its in blue paint. They then took a long vertical tip at a 90-degree angle, perpendicular to the piece of rice paper, and starting at the bottom, paper, making tiny strokes and tumbling along rolled the blue brush horizontally along the at an almost imperceptible pace. The result, paper, initially with the brush-stick itself held curiously, read as a receding field of waves. A PIPE CLEANER SCULPTURE: HYPERBOLIC STRUCTURE AND NEGATIVE CURVATURE By the end of sophomore year at few iterations, the structure began to fold in Cooper Union, Ryan and Trevor had on itself, to ruffle, in hyperbolic fashion. It become increasingly drawn to center-out quickly became obvious, though, why this Algorithmic watercolor painting, detail elaborations: the way, for example, a low was happening.