We study the interplay between shells, spirals and their biological and latent social symbolism in the form of a large-scale rigid oribotic spiral sculpture and oribotic instruments. Our title reframes a quote from the seminal work On Growth and Form, in which Thompson posits that the mathematics of growth defines the shape of the shell and that the shell shapes the snail. We extend this question to society, do people shape society or does society shape people?
Does the shell curve the snail or does the snail curve the shell?
Our work is a prototype study of the interplay between shells, spirals and their latent biological and social symbolism in the form of a large-scale rigid oribotic spiral sculpture and oribotic instruments. The title reframes a quote from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s seminal work On Growth and Form, which delves into how natural forms, including shells, adhere to mathematical principles. Thompson posits that the mathematics of growth defines the shape of the shell and thus the shell curves the snail.
We extend this question to society, do people shape society or does society shape people? The sculpture, elegantly constrained by the mathematics of origami, expands and contracts acoustic space, reflecting a tension between rigidity and flexibility in systems of thought and social mechanisms. The work is a collaboration with members of an international multidisciplinary network of scholars in the field of Structural Origami and the Origami Robotics research team at the Futurelab.
Credits
This work was first conceived during the Structural Origami Meeting in 2023 in Innsbruck while viewing an origami model by Kanata Warisaya. Development of the rigid origami geometry was made in collaboration with Luca Zimmerman, inspired by previous work on rigid foldable horns by Tomohiro Tachi and work on degree-four rigid origami vertices by Thomas Hull. The sculpture design and mechanics were designed in collaboration with the Structural Origami group and the Origami Robotics team at the Ars Electronica Futurelab.
This research was funded in whole or in part by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [10.55776/AR590] PEEK Grant AR590 ORI*botics On the Art and Science of Origami and Robotics