Big City Forum #3 - April 23, 2009

The Institute for Figuring

Ball-Nogues Studio

A conversation around poetic approaches to materiality.

Big City Forum 3:
Thursday, April 23rd from 5 – 7 pm (check-in and refreshments 4:30 pm).
The Craft & Folk Art Museum, 5814 Wilshire Boulevard (at Curson), Los Angeles, CA 90036, 323.937.4230 www.cafam.org

Featuring:

Margaret Wertheim of The Institute for Figuring: The Institute For Figuring is an organization dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts. The Institute’s interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring. http://www.theiff.org/

Benjamin Ball of Ball-Nogues Studio: Ball-Nogues Studio is an integrated design and fabrication practice that creates experimental built environments to enhance and celebrate the potential for social interaction through sensation, spectacle and physical engagement while striving to infuse the matter of the built environment with a downstream purpose. To achieve these results, we work with unusual materials, develop new digital tools, and apply architectural techniques in unorthodox ways. We share an enthusiasm for the fabrication process as it relates to the built object both physically and poetically by letting the properties, limitations, and economic scenarios associated with a material guide a structure’s ultimate form while developing methods to extend the intertwined boundaries of a material’s aesthetics, physical potential and lifecycle. http://www.ball-nogues.com/index.html