Tripartite Reunited

Tripartite Reunited

The translations, migrations and travelings of a concept informing newbiographies of a mathematical object

New National Library, Astana - Kazakhstan BIG -Bjarke Group. Client: Kazakhstan Presidential Office.

Max Bill’s Sculpture, circa 1958 Stainless Steel.

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Mechanical support module for nucleic acidUS Patent 4507089

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TRIPARTITE REUNITED departs from comparisons between different contextual manifestations of a mathematical form: the Moebius strip. The project explores the relations between states of translation, migration and reception generated by the instrumentalization of this form, that ranges from the visual art’s field to spheres of design, corporate identity and architectural language. The functional migrations of this form through cultural discourses, geographical places and historical narratives are merged in situations where aesthetics, economy and politics become all implicated.

Visual methodologies will be employed to analyze, reconstruct, and reinterpret aesthetical, political and conceptual aspects related to the use of this form, aiming to identify the socio-cultural narratives that had been conceptually appropriating it. The impacts of these situations, in both historical and contemporary levels, will be also accounted.

The proceedings of this investigation will emerge from the relations between a set of experiments comprising reenactment of artistic actions, video, sculptural (re)creation, graphic works, writings and texts from archive material – to inform the production of a final exhibition and a publication (atlas/reader).

Abstract

Studies of pressure over a Moebius strip surface in diverse situations. Places where the strip is most bent have the highest energy density; conversely, places that are

flat and unstressed by a fold have the least energy density.

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This proposal departs from my ongoing research about diverse manifestations of a mathematical object, the Moebius Strip. Originally presented as a mathematical object/equation by August Möbius in 1858, the form has been employed since then into many levels of industrial production.

But, my project aims to look at a different use of this form: when it is assumed as an image that (re)present a complex system of meanings; that behaves in abstract ways, manifesting itself in different, as intriguing and obsessive, narratives.

My attention to this form was first caught when I acknowledge its presence in the Max Bill’s ‘Tripartite Unity’ sculpture (1948/49), that remained in Brazil. Further observations led me to follow its traces into an exploration that stems from Bill’s mathematical works (with its impact in design and art in South America, as a symbol of progress), the 60’s Brazilian Neo-Concrete art movement with Lygia Clark (that used the strip in participatory and radical actions / art experiments), going through the brands of Adobe Acrobat software and the German Commerzbank’s new logo, to finally arrive at the Möbius House (1993/96) built by Ben Van Berkel’s Un-Studio.

Comprising of a diverse range of cases – where each one acts both materially and conceptually within discourses, these different versions are examples and subjects of complex histories: they represent the raw material through which cultural events could be expressed, and the place where the virtual abstractness of sociopolitical discourses could be actualized.

Introduction

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fig.1 fig.2

An invention by Prakash M. Achrekar, in 1977, was to be a new improved system track in the shape of a mobius band. The theory was to subject riders to multiplanar rotation and transitions as the coaster moved along the track. The carriage would have been mounted to the track, allowing it to rotate through transitions in a multiplanar manner as it moved along the rails.

images on the left:

Mobius combination of reversion and return path in a paper transport system . United States Patent 6607320

Flexible sheet reversion using an omni-directional transport system. United States Patent 6554276

fig. 1

fig. 2

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Tripartite Unit, Max Bill. 1948/49 Museum of Contemporary Art - USP, São Paulo.

Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, July 1960.

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Caminhando (trilling), action. Lygia Clark,1963. Archive of Lygia Clark Project, Rio de Janeiro.

Samples of Archival Research

(in progress)

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Commerzbank new logo, based on the Moebius Strip form. Frankfurt am Main.10

Kontinüitat, Max Bill 1986 Deutsch Bank Headquarters, Frankfurt am Main. 11

Moebius House, 1993UN-Studio, Amsterdam.

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Lines and colors, concrete by themselves. Forms freed of symbolical association with reality, used for new autonom

ous discourses.

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deas that had been manifested initially just as concepts

Un Studio’s ������������, 1996 A house that would be acknowledged as a reference for

the renovation of the architectural language.

Max Bill’s �����������������Chromium�Stainless Steel, 1948/49 (prize at 1951 São Paulo Biennial) Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

Lygia Clark’s ���������’art as experience’ - paper cutting, 1963

�������������������a mathematical object, a non orientable

space, an equation surface with only one side and one boundary

Max Bill’s �����������, Granit-Monolith, 1986 Deutsch Bank, Frankfurt Headquarters

Adobe’s ������������������circa 1993

Adobe’s ��������������, 2005a new informational protocol for reading

and exchanging spatial data

����������� new brand & logo 2010 (fusion with former Dresdner Bank)

Mapping Manifestations, initial diagram to map some of the Moebius Strip’s migrational movements.

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A primary aim is to scrutinize the diverse forms in their many functions and meanings – as an abstract image, corporate symbol, commercial icon, artwork, industrial functional solution and conceptual environment – to explore the relations between their abstract qualities and physical manifestations.

Interest me to investigate critically the rhetorical apparatuses of these image-objects while they traverse diverse socio-cultural and geopolitical terrains. In this sense, the examination of the unclear intersections of diverse socio-cultural events that had been appropriating this form, in local and temporal dislocations, configures a broader objective. Also, I intend to explore the different methods of production, materials and final (public) manifestation of the strips. This will allow to relate diverse approaches regarding materiality, discourse, form and image. Here, the concept of ‘design’ is key, to be explored as a set of cultural and industrial production methods, and as a specific public and economical language.

In this respect, I aim looking for new forms of connectivity, circulation and reception not just between forms, but through them, in an attempt to explore how new technologies, the rise of globalization and the transformations of production methods connect realms apparently distinct, manifested in visual as material entities.

From these perspectives some questions rise: which are the representations, facts and fictions related to these abstract objects as a mediated symbol? Which are the vectors that allows a mathematical object, through decisive transformative moments of appropriation and manipulation, generate new materializations of itself with new meanings and different qualities? How these process are undertaken and for what purposes? And last, who has the right over, or ‘own’, each new form-image and the experiences related to it?

Through the exploration of these interstitial moments in disarticulations of the traditional historical narrations about art, technology and design, I look for the dialogues between a recent modern past with fields of contemporary visual production.

Aims and Objectives

Mathematica exhibition, view of picture wall.

Mathematica was an exhibition and a work of art in its own right,

commissioned in 1961 by IBM for the new Science Wing at the

California Museum of Science and Industry. I take Mathematica

as an example and reference of research-based shows, in a periodo where the fields of

science, art and design had a strong dialogue. The Exhibition’s

designer was Charles Eames.

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Preliminary rendering:study for a rotative sculpture (as a scaled urban sign).

Methodologies

After having produced some initial visual experiments originated from primary sources, specifically archival and material research (already in process in Brazil and also in Frankfurt), I want to focus now on a procedural stage where analytical and productive processes will lead to the concrete and final outcomes.

In order to go further towards formulating practical works that can test the project’s hypotheses (as a possible way for socio-cultural exploration and engagement), interest me to test different functions of visual practice superimposed to the roles of critic, artist and designer, addressing the potentialities, boundaries and limitations of an actual field of visual production. Also this path would be informed by the use of criticism (in art, design and architectural fields) as a process of aesthetic inquiry into the politics of representation.

Focusing on the strip’s versions as evidences and objects that can be questioned, I plan to produce a series of works and experiments reflecting upon the Moebius strip’s manifestations as conceptual carriers of socio-cultural and semiological relations. Diagrammatic productions, replicas, appropriations and fusions will inform the emergence of a new body of works, that will compose a final iconographic index of an unfolded visual research.

In the process, different procedures would be interconnected: from hand made models and graphics to video, computer renderings, scanning and 3D rapid prototyping, assumed as a process of linguistic explorations on the boundaries of art, design, and industrial production. The new material and aesthetic expressions resulting from this process will reflect a wide system of abstract representations, evocating situations that form our actual globalized environments where programs, ideologies and ideas are merged.

These movements prompted me to reflect on the methodological specificities of art, design and critical research. How can a cultural producer, interested in different fields, contribute to an exploration like this? What type of tools, skills, collaborations and methods could be employed critically?

To this extent, I will approach also theoretical fields to support these practical questions. Aby Warburg’s notion of iconographic inquiry as a method to build identifications and classifications to map visual knowledge, as also his concept of ‘nachleben’ or afterlife of the image – related here to the continuity and metamorphosis – will be approached to explore and map the diverse biographies of these objects. Also is important to face the axiom of

materiality and immateriality in these manifestations, so both Bruno Latour’s ‘DingPolitiks’ and of ‘Forensic Aesthetics’ are notions that inform a productive binary.

These concepts will be articulated to help the observations of how the diverse manifestations operate in different levels – the objectual, the spatial, the linguistic and the virtual– exploring what this mathematical image-object does when traveling between spaces and disciplines, and how it unfolds and behave through space and time when loaded with new concepts and contexts.

View of Moebius Strip at Mathematica exhibition.

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. ABENNET, J., 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.

. Adobe Acrobat historical archives, California, USA (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.html)

. Archive of The Art Museum of São Paulo (MASP), São Paulo.

. Archive of The Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo (MAM), São Paulo.

. Archive of The Museum of Contemporary Art USP (MAC-USP), São Paulo.

. BENJAMIN, W., 2000. The task of the translator. In: Venuti L. ed., The translation studies reader, London: Routledge.

. Biennial of São Paulo Foundation: Wanda Svevo Archive, São Paulo.

. BILL, M., 2010. Form, function, beauty = Gestalt. London: AA Publications.

. DEBORD, G., 2000. Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red.

. DeLANDA, M., 1997. A Thousand Years of Non Linear History. New York: Zone Books.

. DELEUZE, G.; GUATARRI, F., 1987. A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi. Mienapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

. DEMOS, T. J., 2008. Travelling of Images. (on the art of Hito Steyerl), Artforum Magazine - article.

. FOCILLON, H., 1996. The Life of Forms in Art. New York: Zone Books.

. FOUCALT, M., 1984. Space, Knowledge and power, In: The Foucault reader, Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books.

. HILL, C. A., 2004. Defining Visual Rhetorics, Routledge.

. JAHN, G. V., 1997. The Exploration of Physical Space in Architecture: New Design Elements Derived from the Moebius Strip - in Proceedings of The Second International Conference: Mathematics and Design 98, The University of Basque Country, pp. 207-214.

. KRESS, G.; LEEWEN, T. V., 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge.

. LATOUR, B., 1993. We Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press.

. __________, 2005. From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik – or How to Make Things Public (Introduction to the catalogue of Making Things Public). MIT Press.

. LESSING, L. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. The Penguin Press.

Bibliography, Archives andOther Resources

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. Lygia Clark Foundation Archive, Rio de Janeiro (http://www.lygiaclark.org.br)

. LYOTARD, J. F., 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Univ. of Minnesota Press.

. Max Bill Foundation Archive, Switzerland (http://www.bill-stiftung.ch)

. Meta Design (production of Commerzbank’s new logo): http://www.metadesign.com/clients/commerzbank

. MEZZADRA, S., RAHOLA F., 2006. The postcolonial condition: a few notes on the quality of historical time in the global present, in: Postcolonial Text, Vol. 2, No. 1 http://journals.sfu.ca/pocol/index.php/pct/article/view/393/819

. Mitchell, W.J.T., 1987. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. University Of Chicago Press.

. ____________, 2006. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. University Of Chicago Press.

. MICHAUD, PHILIPPE-ALAIN, 2004. Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. Mit Press.

. MIGNOLO, W., 2000. Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledge, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

. MIGNOLO, W., 2001. The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference. Multitudes, in: http://multitudes.samizdat.net/The-geopolitics-of-knowledge-and

. PERRY, C., 1993. In The Edge of Science: The Role of the Artist’s Intution in Science” in The Visual Mind: Art and Mathematics, MIT Press.

. RANCIERE, J. 2009. The Future of the Image. Verso.

. REISER, J., 2006. Atlas of Novel Tectonics. New York: Princenton Architecure Press.

. ROSE, G. 2006. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. Sage Publications.

. SCHMIDT, G., 1948. Max Bill’s Kontinuität, in: Werk, No. 3

. SILVA, RENATO RODRIGUES, 2010. Interdisciplinarity & Participation in Contemporary Brazilian Art. Fillip Magazine (abstract at http://fillip.ca/content/interdisciplinarity-and-participation-in-brazilian-art)

. SPIES, W., 1986. Kontinuität Granit-Monolith - Max Bill. Deutsche Bank. Frankfurt am Main.

. TAMEN, M., 2001. Friends of Interpretable Objects. Harvard Univiversity Press.

. PETRESIN, V.; LAURENT, P. R.,2002. The Double Möbius Strip Studies, Nexus Network Journal, Vol. 4, no.4, http://www.nexusjournal.com/PetRob.html.

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Method and apparatus for folding a web patent: 6565501 - Trennepohl, Michael D. (Cincinnati, OH), May/2003.

Preliminary renderingstudy for a knect sculpture where parts of the sculpture would integrate the mechanic device responsible for the rotation movement.

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The possibility of visiting a surface, by traveling it entirely in one direction and coming back to the starting point is fascinating. In this “eternal cycle” it is possible to reflect on what ground one stands, as one can literally be above or below the strip and still be in the same space. The example of the Mobius strip is also something curious, as it is a space that has neither proper inside nor outside, its limits are not determined. Even if there are complex mathematical explanations behind the development of such topological elements, one can focus on the outstanding visual parameters that define them. In other words, there’s no need to be a mathematician to study these forms, the principle and its implications can be studied at same time as form and as a concept.