via BoingBoing

Bathsheba Grossman is a sculptor who uses cutting-edge technology to render math- and science-inspired shapes in three dimensions. You can buy 3D-printed laser-cut metal ones, or order them in plastic at lower costs from ShapeWays. That sound you hear is my jaw scraping my keyboard.

Borromean Rings

120 Cell

Along these same lines – check out the renderings on the Minimal Surface Archive, and for some background on what it means to project a 4-d dodecahedron into 3 dimensions, this video explains how to think in 10 dimensions.  If you really want to blow your mind, try parsing this article on the Lie Group E8, which has been proposed as a fundamental model of physical existence.

Go here, turn on HD, full screen it and sit back.  Nothing in the video is real.

This little project really gives me a new appreciation for MAD. It’s too easy to misconstrue most of the office’s larger work as more Hadid inspired shape-making. But reading MAD’s description of this small intervention communicates the issues that they are struggling with working in China. There is clearly a tension between doing the flash-and-glam work that China seems to hunger for and yet to engage the history and context of this profoundly ancient place.