Unstructured chaos and geometry
No. 185, 1976
(Geometry)
India ink on paper, 45x61.5 cm.
A whirlwind of blocks and bars whips through space, as if a hurricane had picked them up and strewn them around. Bars spin and twist in the atmosphere, flying and eventually falling to earth. What brings about such tumult? In some cases, merely cutting a well structured polyhedron into elementary pieces and shifting them about can lead to such apparent chaos. Here, breaking up a polyhedron has created a chaotic cluster of parallelepipeds. To reconstruct the original polyhedron, each simple block must remember its neighbor, the one with which it shared a boundary inside the original structure. Very little memory is needed. If each block remembers only its immediate neighbors and yet knows nothing about the structure as a whole, a very complicated system can still come together with surprising ease and regularity.
