Surfaces and the definition of a space

We said that ZYG#1 would be "an installation that allows an immersive experience in a contained space". In several of the examples that have been posted the space is defined by continuous surfaces but many others are not. How much space is, then, needed to define a space? The feeling of being inside a space can be attained even in spaces that are shaped by surfaces that contain holes or empty spaces. Besides many of the examples that are already posted in this blog I particularly like the Beijin olympic stadium, also known as The Nest. We used a "similar technique" in Zoo Lógico, a few years ago: with big elastic bands three actor/dances would shape the space and create forms that would evolve and transform throughout the opening.

The amount of lines that seem to cross the space in the case of the Nest seems to be quite huge but the definition of surfaces can be attained in simpler ways. When looking at patterns that emerge from lines that intersect I came across with the notion of Voronoi diagrams. In simple terms "diagrams created by taking pairs of points that are close together and drawing a line that is equidistant between them and perpendicular to the line connecting them. That is, all points on the lines in the diagram are equidistant to the nearest two (or more) source points.". Many applications can be found for Voronoi diagrams, from visual arts to astrophysics or biology, for example to model the structure of cell tissues or higher arrangements of shapes that we find in nature. It is easy to create Voronoi diagrams either by hand or using computer applications. The next two images were generated by a Processing patch (using different amounts of starting points and an algorithm that distributes the points in space randomly).

Several of the examples already posted in this blog seem to have Voroinoi diagrams (even if not stated so by the authors). Here there are some more:

Yesterday, when I was trying to understand what we were doing in Zoo Lógico with our elastic bands technique, several years ago (the idea came after reading an article in Scientific American about mathematical games for children), I found other interesting ideas about defining spaces by using elastic bands: