Math for artists: challenge 3—designing and fabricating a polyhedron (Icosahedron)

This week's assignment was twice as challenging as usual. First, I am typically intimidated anytime I have to fabricate something physical even though I enjoy it eventually. Besides, fabricating things at ITP is somewhat inevitable.

Second, it is obviously a math exercise that would hopefully lead me further to understanding different relationships of objects in space. But I could tell that I would be confused at some point even before I started.

Going to The Metropolitan Museum’s “Making Marvels” exhibition was a great deal of inspiration.

https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2019/making-marvels

After a brief research, I found out that making platonic solids is a popular activity. Since we were asked to think about more sturdy materials than, say, paper, I chose wood. Well, I chose popsicle sticks. 60 popsicle sticks, to be more precise.

I am not sure if it is a New York phenomena or American wonder but I think I would never found a set of popsicle sticks that fast in Russia.

I was also thinking about design and the purposes of this assignment except for getting to understand the polyhedron's structure and bought these anonymous men and women to fill my sculpture with the meaning (hopefully). I was also thinking of building the solid itself out of them but decided to start simple.

Some of the tutorials that I was watching before the start are definitely worth mentioning.

Don’ laugh but yes, cotton swabs. This one was a little bit cheaty but worth watching before the start in case you’ve never heard of a polyhedron.

This one I watched a bunch of times.

There are also two more, step-by-step tutorials with photos:

Popsicle Stick Icosahedron

Popsicle Stick Geometric Sculpture

I am genuinely grateful to all of the mentioned above tutorials but they all have the same problem. I will illustrate it with the pictures of my process below.

So, I need 20 triangles, fine.

Then I need to take five of them, tape 6 sides, grab the middle, and two more sides will “meet”. That was easy and felt like a miracle. After that, I had to make one more lid.

And then things got confusing. Step-by-step tutorials literally told me—well next steps are easy but hard to explain. Lady in the video was just assembling triangles that fast that I couldn’t get why on Earth she arranges different groups of 4 and 5 triangles and how the hell she is combining them, and what is the most important in this process.

Eventually, I realized that my next steps are:

1. Making 2 groups of three and assembling them with the lid.
2. Making one group of 4 and assembling it with all the rest.
3. Adding another lid.
4. CHECKING THAT ALL OF THE VERTEXES ARE THE VERTEXES OF THE STRUCTURE OF 5 TRIANGLES (now trying to explain that I get why the tutorial’s authors couldn’t do it)

At this point, I got a little desperate and stopped trying to do things in a neat manner, justifying myself by the fact that my main goal is to understand how the structure works. When I managed to create a new solid by having a vertex of 6 triangles, I got even more worried and decided to go further without thinking too much but rather intuitively. THAT WORKED.

A little messy, I admit. But first of all. I ran out of tape (and was happy enough to build the right form). And second, it’s art!

I like to think that it’s either the sculpture dedicated to ITP people (wires and question marks as the symbols of the desire to learn more about this world and tech)…or about how complicated life and relationship can be. It’s open to interpretation.

I really enjoyed the process, and now after the stress of uncertainty left me, I might repeat this experience again to build something more meaningful. And yes, there is something magical and mystifying about these forms.