Carlo Séquin

"Hilbert Cube"

Stainless steel and bronze alloy, 5 inch cube, 2005


"Hilbert Cube" is a space filling recursive curve in 3 dimensions in analogy to the famous Hilbert curve in the plane.
Special care has been taken to never place more than three coplanar line segments in sequence.
At the largest recursion step the geometry has been slightly altered so as to obtain a closed loop.

"Genus-2 Costa Surface in a Cube"

Bronze cast with 2-color patina. 5 inch cube, 2005


In "Genus-2 Costa Surface in a Cube" twelve quarter-arc curve segments on the faces of a cube
form the three boundaries that suspend a minimal surface closely resembling the core section
of a genus-2 Costa surface.

Carlo H. Séquin is a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D degree in experimental physics from the University of Basel, Switzerland in 1969. From 1970 till 1976 he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J., on the design and investigation of Charge-Coupled Devices for imaging and signal processing applications. In 1977 he joined the faculty in the EECS Department at Berkeley, teaching courses in integrated circuits, computer-aided design, and computer graphics. He is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, and has been elected to the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences.

Séquin's work in computer graphics and in geometric design have also provided a bridge to the world of art. In collaboration with a few sculptors of abstract geometric art, in particular with Brent Collins, Séquin has found a new interest and yet another domain where the use of computer-aided tools can be explored and where new frontiers can be opened through the use of such tools.

"Since high school I have been fascinated by geometry. I enjoyed constructing the more complicated Platonic solids with ruler and compasses, as well as reading about the 4th dimension.  While at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, I was introduced to the field of Computer Graphics in courses given by Ken Knowlton and Lilian Schwartz. In 1982, inspired by a talk by artist Frank Smullin, I started to develop the Berkeley UniGrafix rendering system, so that I could depict objects such as the "Skeleton of a Klein Bottle" or the "Granny-Knot Lattice." Since then, the focus of my work has been on computer-aided design (CAD). First I developed programs to support circuit designers, later architects and mechanical engineers. In 1995, I started a close collaboration with Brent Collins, who had been sculpting abstract geometric art for two decades. With my students, I developed a procedural "Sculpture Generator" program, to help Collins prototype potential future work in virtual form. Later programs generalized the original concepts, and eventually expanded the design space through new paradigms. In this work I see myself as a composer in the realm of pure geometry. The artistic achievement lies in finding a procedural formulation that can reflect the inherent symmetries and constructive elegance that seems to lie beneath the physical laws of our universe."

Other artwork by Carlo Séquin may be seen at: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sequin/SCULPTS/sequin