Gallery Exhibition
Opening Reception · Dec 10 · 5:30–7PM
Our choice of representation shapes what we can create.
This exhibition explores a translation between constellation patterns of Islamic art and mathematical graphs. By moving between these representations, we gain access to new visual vocabularies: ways to revisit classical patterns and uncover forms that might otherwise remain hidden.
Central to this work is an encoding–decoding method developed by Rebecca Lin and Craig S. Kaplan. The method encodes constellations as graphs, with stars as vertices and their connections as edges, then decodes them back into interlocking stars through circle packing and classical construction techniques.
The designs are crafted computationally in custom-built software and refined through careful manual intervention. They are then grounded in physical making across light, wood, textiles, and sculpture, often through a dialogue between handcraft and machine processes. Together, these works trace the interplay between mathematical abstraction, computation, and craft, and the expanded space that emerges when constellations move between these worlds.
Islamic geometric patterns are a rich ornamental tradition, with interlocking stars woven through precise geometric rules. Four- and six-fold constellations rest naturally on square or hexagonal grids, but stars with five, seven, nine, eleven, or other numbers of points introduce a more complex puzzle. Artists have met this challenge with inventive geometries and artful distortions, yet nonstandard constellations remain painstaking, uncertain, and underexplored.
Intrigued by constellations that mix or depart from classical symmetries, Rebecca Lin and Craig S. Kaplan proposed an encoding–decoding scheme for generating star-based designs. A planar graph encodes the pattern: vertices represent stars, and edges specify how they meet. From this graph, a circle packing, guaranteed by the circle packing theorem, provides a geometric scaffold on which classical construction techniques are adapted to produce interlocking motifs.
This translation between combinatorial and geometric representation opens new visual possibilities. By shaping the connections between vertices, one controls each star’s points and relationships. The works that follow treat this scheme not only as a design method, but as a way of moving between mathematics, ornament, computation, and material form.
Lin and Kaplan developed a computational design tool that renders the graphical and geometric objects of their encoding–decoding scheme as both visual and programmable structures. The tool supports a new mode of reasoning about the method and the design space it creates, bridging mathematical abstraction and craft.
Three constellation forms, traced in white, appear alongside animations of their circle-based scaffolds in yellow and corresponding contact graphs in blue. Each vertex represents a circle, and each edge marks a tangency.
The constellations are traced through Euler tours, each covering every segment once. Different heuristics, such as taking the smallest turn or longest next edge, produce distinct paths through the same pattern. These tracings suggest a broader idea: representing constellations as graphs opens them to the language and tools of graph theory, while exploring them through code reveals new ways to see and understand them.
A collection of structured graphs that, through our mathematical–computational framework, give rise to classical-looking patterns we have not encountered in existing examples.
This piece nods to Georg Nees’s Schotter (1968), an early computer-generated artwork in which a grid of squares gradually unravels through controlled, parametrized randomness. In this reinterpretation, each square is replaced by a rosette: a petaled star drawn from Islamic constellation patterns and treated as a fundamental unit throughout the exhibition.
Order and chaos emerge from a graph shaped by controlled randomness. Varied stars weave into structure, at once integrated and unraveling.
Also:
2025 JMM Mathematical Art Exhibition
(Honorable Mention)
Against structure, a stretch: what is, what could be.
These pieces translate digital patterns into physical form. Through handcraft, mathematics and computation become embodied, intimate, and lived-in, draped on the body.
Shadowed and fragmented,
yet widening,
a field of rosettes blooms,
a quiet nod to kintsugi.
This piece begins with a circle packing on a freeform surface, with the motif constructed atop that scaffold. Rather than beginning with a graph, it enters the process through circle packing directly, exploring the forms that emerge when the approach extends into 3D.
Curiosity, compulsion, and overwhelm converge around rabbit holes. Which one to choose? It hardly matters. Linger and become lost again in a spiraling imagination.
Also: "Intersections", Group Exhibition, Seattle Universal Math Museum (SUMM) & MercerIsland Visual Arts League (MIVAL), Mercer Island, WA.
Press: KING 5 News
A photographic study of pattern as apparition, where geometry appears softened, displaced, and dreamlike.
A collection of sketches documenting Lin and Kaplan’s development of the encoding–decoding scheme.
A series of material tests exploring how laser parameters shape the surface, depth, and fragility of printmaking paper.
I’m deeply grateful to the many individuals and communities across campus and beyond who made this exhibition possible. Thank you to MIT MAD, whose generosity, freedom, and support enabled this season of work, and to the MIT Office of the Arts for the opportunity, thoughtful curation, and lovely write-up. I’m also grateful to the communications teams at MIT Arts, the Media Lab, CSAIL, MAD, and SA+P for helping share the work, and to the teams at the CBA and CSAIL machine shops for their thoughtful advice.
I owe special thanks to my advisors, Erik D. Demaine and Zach Lieberman, for their guidance; to Craig S. Kaplan, one of my earliest mentors and advocates; and to my collaborators, Ben Weiss and Yufeng Zhao, who were a joy to work with.
A heartfelt thank you to Sarah Hirzel, the gallery’s curator, and Katherine Higgins from MAD for being steadfastly in my corner throughout this process. Finally, thank you to my family and friends for their constant love and support. I’m especially grateful to my sister, Esther Lin: my biggest supporter, an incredible event planner and photographer, and a powerful researcher.
