TELOFLUX continues my explorations of geometric forms challenging myself to merge the visual arts and architecture envisioning geometric structures that blur their boundaries.
The title TELOFLUX derives from the Greek word Telos meaning complete, final, perfect and Flux referring to something that is not done, moving, flowing, changing, evolving. I like contradictions.
Animation of TELOFLUX
Music: from the original soundtrack to the film METROPOLIS: I. Auftakt: Metropolis Thema, composed by Gottfried Huppertz, perfomed by Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin conducted by Frank Strobel
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I’ve always been interested in Typography especially its use in graphic design. I make a holiday card each year and this past year I made a card with the word PEACE and for the card, I designed the letters A, C, E and P and it bothered me that the rest of the letters in the alphabet hadn’t been fleshed out. So, here’s the completed alphabet and numbers.
The morphology of the design is modular with a parallelogram base module stacked 5 rows high and 3 columns wide for all the letters except for M, N and W which are 5 columns wide. Modules are subtracted from this grid to form the letters as illustrated above.
I’m not sure what to call this exploration of form. Is it architecture? Is it sculpture? Perhaps it straddles both realms.
One day looking at the Great Pyramids at Giza, seeing the thousands of blocks stacked up forming the shape of the pyramid, I had a AHA moment. These massive platonic solids, smoothed out with a cladding of limestone covered the blocks. I would take a cue from these blocks and begin experimenting with using blocks to create 3d structures in my own way to make my art.
I’m going deep into the weeds here (the nerd in me can’t help it) but please indulge me as it helps give insight into what you are looking at. I’ve always found the form of the Stellated Octahedron beautiful. A Stellated Octahedron is two Tetrahedrons, one facing up and one facing down intersecting each other. A Tetrahedron for those uninitiated is a 3 sided pyramid with 4 triangular faces, 6 straight edges and 4 vertices (corners). When putting two of these together it goes from 4 vertices (tetra) to 8 vertices (octa). The Stellated Octahedron was first described in writing in the book De Divina Proprotione’, 1508, by the Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli with illustrations by Leonardo Da Vinci. In 1609 Johannes Kepler would give it the name it’s known as today, “Stella Octangula”, Latin for eight pointed star and hence the name it has known today in English translation “Stellated Octahedron”.
In my version, I’ve structured the form with skeletal boxes, outlining only the outer perimeter of the two intersecting tetrahedrons, leaving an absence at its center. The delicateness of the structure is to invoke the ethereal and the ephemeral, a feeling that the structure occupies space and time but is dissolving.
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