Last month, guest artist George Hart visited the South Campus to work with students in the art, digital media and math departments.

His hands-on building activities encouraged students to collaborate on complex physical structures, using materials ranging from paper to computer animation modeling software.

These workshops cross disciplinary lines, allowing students to create art objects while touching on aspects of math beyond the textbook, such as 3-D geometry, topology, graph theory, problem solving and more. The culminating event was the five-by-five foot sculpture designed by Dr. Hart and fabricated with his direction by FSCJ students. The artist designed the sculpture specifically for the College, and even used our logo as a reference. 

He named the sculpture "Ostinato," which means a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm.  The sculpture is made up of approximately 60 identical pieces held together with cable ties.  The students were asked to figure out how the pieces fit together, and then construct the object themselves – with a few hints from Dr. Hart.

Dr. Hart is an organizer of the annual Bridges Conference on mathematics and art and the editor for sculpture for the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts. His research explores innovative ways to use computer technology in the design and fabrication of his artwork, which has been exhibited widely around the world.

"Ostinato" is now part of the College's permanent art collection and will remain on display in the Nathan H. Wilson Center for the Arts through April.