First stop: The Bridges Conference

My first stop on my pre-trip to Panama is the Bridges Math and Art conference, which is just barely over as I write this now. This is a five-day conference that drew 437 people from 31 different countries to share their approaches, discoveries, and delight in pulling together mathematical art. In addition to lectures, there were poetry readings, music nights, a play (in which I got to play both a spy disguised as a Catholic priest, and also a man in drag!), and excursions to the nearby Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, University of Virginia campus, and Monticello.

What does this have to do with my journey to Panama? Well, for one thing . . . . . . I gave the opening plenary talk for this conference, which in a nice coincidence/symmetry also kicks off the mathematics project that I'll be working on in Panama – writing a book about the perspective of optical illusions. This is the first time I've given this talk, and the fact that it was very well-received makes me really optimistic about the writing that I'll get to be doing.  

Being the first speaker gave me the double advantage that (a) I got the talk over with early and could relax for the rest of the conference, and (b) during the rest of the conference lots and lots of people came up to suggest cool ideas I got to look into. It's been very fruitful.

I guess it's worth saying that the kind of illusions that interest me are ones in which the viewer of the illusion actually matters. Where you stand (or where the art makes you seem to stand) can make a big difference sometimes!  Here are two glimpses of specific examples. 

Several views of an Anton Bakker sculpture,
from the Bridges Art exhibit.

Anton Bakker makes some really cool sculptures – in fact, he designed a sculpture of four interlocking triangles that became the basis for next year's bridges logo. For him, some guiding philosophies of his sculpture involve symmetry and multiple perspectives.  He particularly wants sculptures that two people could look at and see very different things.  The sculpture above sometimes looks like it's a triangle, sometimes looks like it's an X, and often looks like it's disjointed, but it's actually one continuous loop.

Sometime you can use shadows as a kind of "additional eye" to get a sense of the shape of something. Vincent Van Dongen was experimenting with folding paper for lampshades; at one point, he took the photo below, whose image surprised him so much it started him on a whole new line of art exploration.  This interesting three-dimensional shape, from where the camera was, looks kind of like an upside down heart, but its shadow looks like a right-side-up heart.

From Vincent Van Dongen's online journal, January 2020.

It's really curious isn't it? I love how the juxtaposition makes us want to figure out what's really going on. 

I said one reason that this Bridges conference is connected to my upcoming trip to Panama was because of my plenary talk; the second reason is that one of the attendees of the conference is my Panamanian host! Jeanette Shakali is the Executive Director and founder of FUNDAPROMAT, the Foundation for the Promotion of Mathematics. She's a dynamo of energy, and I am so, so, so looking forward to getting to spend time with her! So it was lovely that we got to ride the bus to Monticello together, after she'd already seen my talk, and we could further plan cool activities for me to do in Panama.

 

The first planning is already underway! I sometimes do a workshop where I tell participants they are going to draw art, literally: we draw perspective images of the three-dimensional letters, ART. Well now I have the Panamanian version of that activity underway!  

Dibujando ARTE en tres dimensiones.

I leave Richmond today heading for my second pre-Panama stop. More later.