The premise of my presentation will be that visual artists can expand the possibilities of their work by considering visual images as mathematical terms.

I've long composed visual artworks in which I treat verbal texts and visual images as mathematical terms I can subject to such operations as multiplication and division, or even differentiation. The idea is to attack one's art from so uncommon angle that one almost has to make it new. Hence, one geometry-based excercise I will discuss is to simply take a math formula and insert verbal texts in it and ask how the result will be affected visually. For instance, if we put the word, "poetry," into the formula for the circumference of a circle to get 2A(poetry), what would the circumference we draw look like? One guess: a many-hued pastel one--but with breaks in it to indicate the openness of poetry. How about making the radius "fascism?" When I did that, I got not the circumference of a circle, but a thick black outline of a square!

Working similarly with the area of other geometric figures will produce complete images rather than outlines. They can even include representational images--think of what kind of picture a square each of whose sides are "the sound of footsteps" in length. More complicated extensions of these techniques include my personal favorite, long division.

A second technique I plan to talk about is the mathematical analysis of canonical paintings, using long division. What would you get, for instance, if you tried to divide the word, "dance," or a drawing of a dancer, into a Jackson Pollock painting? To get back to geometry, what would be the result of diving the same divisor into the magic square of Josef Albers that's in the Beyond Geometry show?

Idea: to mix words, visual images and math to make visual artworks. Method: treat verbal and visual images as mathematical terms, then ask such questions as "if we put the word, 'poetry,' into the formula for the circumference of a circle to get 2 times pi times 'poetry,' what would the circumference we drew look like?" One guess: a many-hued pastel one--but with breaks in it to indicate the openness of poetry. How about making the radius "fascism?" When I did that, I got not the circumference of a circle, but a thick black outline of a square!

Working similarly with the area of other geometric figures will produce complete images rather than outlines. They can even include representational images--think of what kind of picture a square each of whose sides are "the sound of footsteps" in length would look like.