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This is happening in New York this month at NYU and at the World
Financial Center.
http://www.theiff.org/reef/index.html
Thanks to Rebecca Reitz, the Hall of Science's Science Librarian for
this lead.
Eric Siegel
Want to Save a Coral Reef? Bring Along Your Crochet Hook
By PATRICIA COHEN
The exotically shaped creatures that began to sprout silently all
over the cozy lecture hall were soon spilling onto empty chairs and
into women’s laps and shopping bags. When fully grown, these
curiously animate forms will find a home as part of a mammoth version
of the Great Barrier Reef. But at the moment they were emerging at a
remarkable pace from the rapidly flicking crochet hooks wielded by
members of the audience.
This environmental version of the AIDS quilt is meant to draw
attention to how rising temperatures and pollution are destroying the
reef, the world’s largest natural wonder, said Margaret Wertheim, an
organizer of the project, who was in Manhattan last weekend to
lecture, offer crocheting workshops and gather recruits. The reef is
scheduled to arrive in New York City next month.
As she explained to the 40 people, nearly all women, who had gathered
at New York University on Saturday, “This has grown from something
that was a little object on our coffee table” to an exhibition that,
so far, spreads over 3,000 square feet. And that was before the
addition of that day’s catch.
Ms. Wertheim, a science writer, and her twin sister, Christine, who
teaches at the California Institute for the Arts, came up with the
idea of creating a woolly homage to the reef about two and a half
years ago. The Wertheims, 49, grew up in Queensland in Australia,
where the approximately 135,000-square-mile reef — and the billions
of tiny organisms that it comprises — is located. But the Hyperbolic
Crochet Coral Reef (more on that in a moment), is much more than a
warning about global warming. It marks the intersection of the
Wertheims’ various passions: science, mathematics, art, feminism,
handicrafts and social activism.
For that reason the project has attracted a wide range of
participants, including the Harlem Knitting Circle (which arrived
with 10 members), a student from a Westchester high school’s
environmental science club who had never crocheted before, a
geoscientist and a former mathematics teacher and sheep farmer in
Australia who creates algorithms to calculate the length of yarn
she’ll need before spinning and dying the wool from her own sheep. In
Chicago, where the exhibition appeared a few months ago, about 100
women contributed to the reef.
News of the project has been all over the online knitting and crochet
world, which is how Njoya Angrum, the founder of the Harlem Knitting
Circle, and Barbara H. Van Elsen of the New York City Crochet Guild
discovered it.
“It pushes the boundaries of crochet, using different materials,”
said Ms. Van Elsen, who wore to the gathering a bright orange yellow
and green necklace that she had crocheted. “Exploring texture and
color, it frees you up.”
It’s also “the greatest way to get people really aware of what’s
going on in the world,” she added.
For Ms. Wertheim, a lithe woman with a no-nonsense attitude and
closely cropped black and gray hair, the project embodies the “beauty
and creativity that comes out of scientific thinking,” what she
refers to as “conceptual enchantment.” As it turns out, the
gorgeously crenellated, warped and undulating corals, anemones,
kelps, sponges, nudibranchs, flatworms and slugs that live in the
reef have what are known as hyperbolic geometric structures: shapes
that mathematicians, until recently, thought did not exist outside of
the human imagination.
“For God’s sake, please give it up,” Wolfgang Bolyai told his son,
Jonas, a 19th century mathematician who was working on this sort of
non-Euclidean geometry. “Fear it no less than the sensual passion,
because it too may take up all your time and deprive you of your
health, peace of mind and happiness in life.”
Actually these hyperbolic forms can be glimpsed all around, in the
ruffled edges of kale leaves, the ruching that “Project Runway”
designers favor, rippling ballerina tutus and drugstore scrunchies
that girls use to gather a ponytail.
Yet mathematicians hadn’t focused attention in their direction. It
wasn’t until 1997 that Daina Taimina, a mathematics researcher at
Cornell who had learned to crochet as a child in Latvia, realized
that by continually adding stitches in a precise repeating pattern
she could create three-dimensional models of hyperbolic geometry.
For the first time mathematicians could, as Ms. Wertheim said, “hold
the theorems in their hands.”
The Wertheims read about Ms. Taimina’s work a few years ago and
invited her and her husband, also a mathematician, to speak at their
Institute for Figuring, a nonprofit educational organization that
they founded and run from a Los Angeles post office box. From these
oddly frilled forms the Wertheims got the idea for the Hyperbolic
Crochet Coral Reef. The Institute for the Humanities at New York
University is co-sponsoring the exhibit, which will appear in the
university’s Broadway Windows at East 10th Street and at the World
Financial Center April 5 through May 18.
In the university’s auditorium Ms. Wertheim opened a large bag and
began throwing out long snaking tubes, tightly scrunched blooms, fat
textured spirals, and hairy coiled cactuses created out of yarn,
thread, plastic bags, ties, can flip tops, videotape, ribbon, tinsel
and more in a riotous splash of reds, blues, pinks, oranges, greens,
tans, purples and yellows.
Later the group members traipsed upstairs to a large jewelry studio
where they settled at one of six thick wooden worktables and began
crocheting. The woven organisms developed so quickly it seemed as
though time-lapse photography was at work.
“I was curious at first about how to do the forms, but then I was
more intrigued by the message,” said Tina Bliss, a graphic designer
who lives on Staten Island. Now, with two knitting groups, she has
become “an evangelist” and wants “to bring a coral reef back to
Staten Island.”
Mr. Wertheim emphasizes that the art and the science — the
“conceptual enchantment” — are open to everyone. Aniqua Wilkerson, a
member of the Harlem Knitting Circle, explained she first learned to
knit seven years ago from books and through trial and error. She had
tried to crochet hats, but they kept buckling. “That was a mistake,”
she said as she finished up a tightly woven urchin in lime green,
melon and turquoise. “I realized it was from increasing the stitches
too much.” Which is precisely the method used to create hyperbolic
forms.
“Wow,” Ms. Wilkerson said, “I’d been doing that all along.”
Eric Siegel
esiegel at nyscience dot org
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