I’m very impressed by Tony Robbin. He has a few papers in the journals, but they do not do justice to his art, not because of the colors, but because of the scale he chose and the ability to move around. It is all about form after all.
So you will want to visit his site.
Under normal circumstances, the Society attracts intelligent notions, but its meetings are also considered art-math gatherings of a common type. In these, you have people (some of them actual mathematicians) that use algorithmic methods, produce something pleasant or interesting and call it art. You also have artists who use “math” in their work as a gimmick. I think Robbin escapes this.
More than a century ago, cubism and its siblings mattered. The artist could paint something that lived in two worlds, one world is our ordinary world of objects as recognized but abstracted through the eye of the artist (which we borrow); the other is a world beneath (or above) with an order that can be inferred by what the artist discerns. But the logic of that world — the supposed real world — eludes us. Such a painting is mysterious, spooky, possibly spiritual or even dangerous.
Most of these used religious icons and symbols. Some used geometry and perspective.
I think Robbin is in this tradition. In part with Scott Carter, he has explored hyperspace as thoroughly as one can without being a mathematical mystic. And he uses that knowledge to paint those two superimposed worlds I noted. It may be that a viewer must have some training to appreciate what he does. Maybe, as with Van Gogh, the work and the writing about the work must be digested together. Otherwise, I can see how it would seem mechanical, pleasantly sterile.
For myself, I find his stuff worthy art.
The Relationship to Kutachi
One of our most commonly envisioned metaphors is the notion of regular or semiregular divisions of space. Most of the ISIS-S work we cite focuses on polyhedral or minimal surface tessellations, and ordered transforms among them. Our best examples are Lalvani and Burt. but that hardly helps our left hand side problem; they are instead good for simplifying massive numbers of right hand side (meaning logical) facts.
What we need is a way to soften this, to imply added unknowns, mystery — an order only partly glimpsed but intuitively navigable. I am supposing we can get some Ideas from Robbin for this.
Links
A Quasicrystal for Denmark’s Coast. Tony Robbin. [Culture and Science v3] 1992.
Quasicrystal Dome. Tony Robbin. [Culture and Science v5 pp 345] 1994. (small version)