(note: unfinished draft)

We admirers and creators of Mathematical Art gather from around the world, some of us just starting our day and others watching the sun set, having conversations face-to-face through new technologies. For over a year we have gathered, inspired by a call for action, to celebrate the term “Mathematical Art” as it emerges in the liminal spaces between established disciplines. We have slow discussions about art, about philosophy, about our humanity, and underlying it all is mathematics, not as a pedantic formal enterprise, but as the patterns of patterns that we observe in all things. We aim to create work that will demonstrate that mathematics not only permits a tangible freedom of expression, but can also serve as a deep source of inspiration. We write a manifesto to clarify our new awareness which frames our work within the contemporary context of Art.

We are artists.

Mathematics is our fascination.

Shaping new territories within and between both disciplines,

We make Mathematical Art.

Mathematical understanding inspires us to invent, to fold, to move, to sing. A beautiful world of mathematics lies just below the surface, or sometimes deeply hidden, out of sight. It is multilayered: giving meaning and beauty, holding discovery and intuition, and stirring our curiosity.

We claim the liberty to use all artistic media and mathematical ideas to create an organic dialogue between these two fields. Mathematics is not only a source of ideas but also a medium through which our artistic thought and making take form.

Going beyond demonstrations or illustrations for a textbook, we can let go of fidelity and rigid strictness around mathematical concepts and give space to artistic inspiration. Play opens up sudden surprises through intuitive transformation and movement.

We seek freedoms and also constraints that push us in new directions, leading to new forms for both the materials and the mathematics. We make subtle adjustments so that consequences may be explored and better understood.

Within this process, tensions often arise and lead to moments of decision and new avenues for discovery.

Simplicity is a process of distillation inherent in mathematics, where the most elegant, elemental forms are realized and celebrated. We create works whose aesthetic aspires toward an irreducible simplicity, or craft something that becomes increasingly complex.

We honor time: time for the unveiling of pattern, for deep thinking, and for transformation through performance, algorithms, and manipulation. Often, the translation from the temporal dimension to the spatial one — through static recordings of movement — offers new imaginings and insights.

We gain pleasure and satisfaction from kinesthetically fulfilling a necessary shape, according to a mathematical inevitability. It is akin to placing the last piece of a puzzle, the resolution in music from tension to harmony, the completion of a complex cycle returning to its beginning.

Mathematical Art has long been rooted in collective ritual, with communities coming together to algorithmically fold, glue, weave and crochet parts to make a whole, building fractals out of microcosms, recognizing the power of our shared efforts over that of any individual. We continue that tradition and move it toward new places.

Mathematics is ubiquitous in every discipline, in every culture and in everyday objects, making us blind to its presence. And so we seek to transform and subvert using mathematics in novel ways to create epiphanies through humour, incongruity, fun, and connection.

Mathematical art goes far beyond an austere framework built purely on logic and reason. Instead, it is a search for meaning and for principles of reality, speaking to our humanity. The original inspirations are still there — we may still yearn for the transcendent, for beauty, for the secret underlying structures of the universe — but we remain open to the new, the unexpected, the things we have not yet thought or moved into being.

Zélie Delespierre
Fumiko Futamura
Paul Gailiunas
Matías Gárate
Gabriele Gelatti
Susan Gerofsky
Marta Kopyt
Doug McKenna
Kerry Mitchell
Dave Reimann
Adam Rowe
Karl Schaffer
Emil Simeonov
Bruce Torrence
Emanuela Ughi
Jonas von Grumbkow
Jiangmei Wu
Eka Zharinova

We invite your thoughts.