Ian Jehle

Canada

Statement Profile GlogauAIR Project CV Summary

Statement

Ian Jehle’s areas of focus are mathematics, game theory and participatory art making. While his primary experience is as an artist and teacher, his educational and professional background also includes engineering and mathematics. As such, he is deeply interested in the ways in which mathematical principals appear as part of our everyday experience of the world, not only through architecture and industrial design but also in the way people experience and use mathematics, often intuitively, in their decision making.

Profile

GlogauAIR Project

PROJECT 1: INFINITE GO (working title) A participatory art installation based on the mathematical properties of the ancient Chinese board game, GO.

Project would include research into the mathematical fields of Group Theory and Optimization, development of the visual elements, including playing pieces and various grid structures, and a written set of rules that would govern the playing of the game. The goal is to create a participatory art installation which will be built by the game players based on a set of rules. At the start of the game, the game board is undefined, not limited by the geometry of the location. As the game progresses, the players would expand into the existing architecture around them. The ever expanding game board will reorient and redefine the physical space into a continually expanding mathematical game space.

PROJECT 2: A set of site-specific, participatory sculptures which invite an audience to create a series of fractal (geometrically repetitive) towers.

Inspired by Japan’s Toyko Skytree and Kobe Port Tower, as well as various open lattice towers located across Europe (including Berlin’s Funkturm Berlin) and centered around the mathematical fields of Combinatorics and Fractal Geometry, this project will involve the design and fabrication of a set of building toys. Following a simple set of rules, teams of volunteers will then use these toys to create a series of towers. Each tower will be built using a limited set of shapes which would repeat and grow with smaller shapes combine to create larger versions of the original shape. As the tower grows the audience will determine their tower’s functional goal and it’s relationship to other towers being built nearby. Towers may be built systematically, with regular, repeating geometry or they may grow organically. Teams may compete against one another to form the tallest or the most elaborate structures or they may allow their structures to combine into a mutually supporting super-structure.

CV Summary

EDUCATION

2000

MFA, Visual Arts, Columbia University

1997

Post-Baccalaureate, Painting, Brandeis University

1995

BA, Fine Art, American University

1991

BA, Philosophy, American University

ONE, TWO & THREE PERSON EXHIBITIONS

2018