/ Cory Doctorow / 4:25 pm Tue Jun 14, 2011

Möbius Ship


Tim Hawkinson's Möbius Ship sculptures are nautical, single-surfaced and have fractional dimensionality. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Echoing the working methods of ship-in-a-bottle hobbyists, Hawkinson created a painstakingly detailed model ship that twists in upon itself, presenting the viewer with a thought-provoking visual conundrum. The title is a witty play on Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick, which famously relates the tale of a ship captain's all-consuming obsession with an elusive white whale. The ambitious and imaginative structure of Hawkinson's sculpture offers an uncanny visual metaphor for Melville's epic tale, which is often considered the ultimate American novel.
Möbius Ship (via Kottke)

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  1. Ah, but can he put a Möbius Ship inside a Klein Bottle? (Of course, it is in every Klein Bottle in the universe, just as it is outside every Klein Bottle in the universe.)

    The IMA is a great museum. I hope this is still on display there when I visit my sister at Christmas.

    1. You can fit two of them!

      A mathematician named Klein
      Thought the Möbius band was divine.
      Said he: “If you glue
      The edges of two,
      You’ll get a weird bottle like mine.”

  4. @OriGuy – so clever

    Having fractional dimensionality (non-integer Hausdorff dimension) isn’t so uncommon. That’d be true for any object except smooth and simple ones I think.

    Don’t see the connection to Moby Dick, but I like it as an art object.

      1. Sound it out. “Moby-us Ship” (I didn’t pick up on it until Teller pointed it out)

        That and also because Captain Ahab’s quixotic quest to him nowhere but deeper into his ceaseless obsession, so it was like circling the multiply connected surface of a Möbius strip.

        “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.”

  6. The piece is part of the permanent collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

    Even neater in person.

  7. Thank you for not saying that this was also 3-D printed, or my mind would have exploded.

  8. Technically Moebius strips are three dimensional. Pedantry aside, this is really really cool.

    2. Moebious *ships* are certainly 3-D, but a true moebius strip is an embedding of a 2D object (no thickness) in a 3D space. Similarly, a knot is an embedding of a 1D loop in 3D space, but this does not make the knot itself 3D

  10. Ok, I haven’t been to IMA since my car broke down on the way to a Boiled in Lead concert many years ago. Time to go there again.

    Very neat.

    But… do you suppose that Cliff Stoll would make a tiny Klein Bottle Wine Bottle to go on it somewhere?

    http://www.kleinbottle.com/wine_bottle_klein_bottle.html

    And, if you don’t know who Cliff Stoll is, you should:

    http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html

    (The scary thing is, I think he might have calmed down a little in the last 20 years… Other than that and the grey hair, little visible (or audible) change.)

    1. I love Boiled In Lead! Saw them in Milwaukee years ago…

      this sculpture is beautiful.

      1. There are a few BiL fans among the happy mutants. But I will let the others out themselves, if they wish to.

        I used to videotape and sometimes photograph their shows, when I could make it, and for a long time I had ‘LEADHED’ as my license plate.

        Enjoy!

  11. Wait a second…

    If it’s a Mobius strip, then there’s only one “outside”. Is the “outside” the top of the ship with masts or is it the bottom hull?

    Surely the artist had to make a decision to make some part of the strip a “top” and other parts a “bottom”, which sorta breaks the whole idea of a Mobius strip, doesn’t it?

    I really don’t mean to be a party pooper, I don’t.

  12. Three jolly sailors from Blaydon-on-Tyne
    Went to sea in a bottle by Klein.
    And since the sea was entirely inside the hull,
    They found the scenery exceedingly dull.

  14. One minor correction — Cory’s text says “Möbius Ship sculptures,” but as far as I can tell, there’s only one of them.

    Anyway, Tim Hawkinson is all kinds of awesome. He had a big retrospective with dozens of objects he’d made a few years back at LACMA, and he’s not just a guy who made one very clever Möbius Ship — he’s a guy who’s made a whole bunch of really clever, thought-provoking, skilfully made items that will get you thinking about the world around you in a different way. Last year I saw a small exhibition of some new pieces he’d made in Culver City. He’s still got the touch.

  15. As one who has been fascinated by ships of 17th, 18th and 19th centuries since kid-hood, lemme just say that this Möbius Ship freaks me out. And not entirely in a good way.

    As art… EXCELLENT. But personally, a bit nightmare-ish.

    brrrr.

  16. I don’t see how a moebius strip has fractional dimensionality: it’s just a 2D surface in a 3D space: having 1 or 2 faces does not change the dimensionality.

      1. No, Cory is just wrong on the dimensionality. The Mobius strip is a 2-dimensional manifold.

        1. No, Cory is just wrong on the dimensionality. The Mobius strip is a 2-dimensional manifold.

          *self-similar facepalm*

          Ah, you’re right. These aren’t fractals. In my weak-ass defense, my maths topped out at partial differential equations. I shouldn’t have tried to be so helpful on topology topics. Thanks for catching my blunder.

  17. I get it now… looking at that model gives me Mal de Mer. I’ve sailed across the Pacific and around the Med., never felt as queasy as when looking at this scary thing. :)

  18. Somewhere, probably many somewheres, a SF writer is setting a tale on a Mobius Ship like this out in space.

  19. gentlemen we have an umlaut problem. the pun falls down if you pronouce Möbius right… but no matter.

    there’s a certain kind of art that gets made, which has this feeling about it… artists successful enough to have workshops full of fabricators (often other artists) who make their stuff for them, seem to me more likely to make art based on a pun. they scribble down the idea and then let others grapple with the details… i’ve plenty of friends who have been in just such a position. anyway, the concept that Ahab’s obsession can be articulated by a mathematical oddity that happens to be a model of a ship seems forced to me – as puns often do. all that stuff feels retrospectively applied by some curator to make the pun more intellectually acceptable, and therefore the work more serious.

    it’s nice to look at though.

    1. I appreciate your analysis, but I think this is just meant to be fun. Yeah it’s a bad pun, but it’s awesome!

  24. Wow, shows ya what you can do with some string, napkins and a lot of toothpicks. Now for his next trick, he’ll try making that inside a bottle!

  26. Notice the lower-right of the photograph where the hull side (“bottom”) “becomes” the deck side (“top”) of the ship. Brilliant way to make a one-sided object look like a real-life two-sided object.

  27. I saw this in person and was upset that the artist didn’t remove the bar-codes from the dowel rods used for masts — seemed like a small detail that messed up the whole effect.

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