For Professor Kyle Ormsby, Math Plus Art Equals Innovation
Ormsby has embarked on an interdisciplinary visual odyssey with two visionary artists.
You’ve probably heard of Professor Kyle Ormsby [mathematics], the man who solved math—according to an article published in an April Fools edition of The Quest. “My spouse got it framed for my birthday,” Ormsby says. “Reports of me having solved mathematics are vastly overstated.”
Ormsby may not have solved math, but he has challenged preconceived notions about what being a mathematician entails. In collaboration with artist Meech Boakye and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art Artistic Director Kristan Kennedy, he is crafting the participatory installation Go Figures, which will be centered around a hanging mobile that blurs the boundary between math and art.
“I’ve played with math visualization in teaching,” Ormsby says. “But I’m really excited to make this a physical, embodied practice.” “Embodied” is putting it mildly: the mobile is a fabric-based soft sculpture inspired by the associahedron, a geometric model of associativity.
Originally, the mobile was conceived with the Simons Foundation’s Open Interval, which supports scientists and artists as they undertake seven months of exploration. “Reed professor intends to do art,” Ormsby joked at the time. Yet intention gave way to imagination as he, Boakye, and Kennedy brainstormed ideas and navigated the differences between their disciplines—a process Boakye describes as “play.”
“We’re thinking about playing as a way of communicating—because it allows us to get a little bit out of our heads and feel a little bit less concerned with understanding the whole thing,” Boakye says. “We can play together…even if we don’t fully become experts on each other’s disciplines.”
All that play paid off when Ormsby, Boakye, and Kennedy submitted their proposal to the Triangle Program—part of the Simon’s Foundation’s Infinite Sums Initiative—which selected them as one of five interdisciplinary trios to bring their project to life. They are now constructing the mobile, which will be showcased at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art next year, completing a creative journey that Ormsby fondly likens to traveling through “a pitch-black labyrinth.”
“Meech and I have our own mental maps about what this labyrinth is like—and we’ve been casting about and finding a path that we can follow together,” Ormby says. That, in a nutshell, is how you solve math and art.
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