Intersections
A Public Art Exhibition
Rebecca Lin
Rebecca is a PhD student at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Media Lab, where she is advised by Erik Demaine and Zach Lieberman. She integrates mathematics and computation with art, design, and fabrication to develop new tools, abstractions, and processes that expand creative possibilities. Most recently, she has worked on computational approaches to sustainable fashion at Adobe Research and on shape-changing structures at the University of Tokyo. Prior to her doctoral studies, Rebecca earned her BSc in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia, where she studied theoretical computer science and computer graphics under the mentorship of William Evans, Craig Kaplan, and Alla Sheffer.
Artwork
Spiraling
Print
16’ ’x 20’’
$600
This piece explores the interplay of curiosity, compulsion, and overwhelm. It conveys the mind-numbing sensation at the cusp of countless “rabbit holes,” each a vortex of possibility. Which one to choose? It hardly matters. Linger on any, and become lost once again in a spiraling, looping imagination.
The swirling forms were crafted using an encoding-decoding scheme for Islamic art-inspired “constellation patterns,” developed in collaboration with Craig S. Kaplan. This framework encodes these patterns as graphs and decodes them by leveraging circle packings as scaffolding. It enables designers to specify motifs and their relationships—expressed as vertices and edges—without the arduous task of resolving the geometric inconsistencies required for seamless, visually pleasing compositions. By abstracting these complexities, the framework supports the creation of more intricate and chaotic forms—like this one—that would otherwise be difficult to realize using traditional design methods.