POLYHEADRA is an analogue interactive installation, an inflatable sculpture and a collaborative compilation at the same time. It is composed of 100 black tubes placed in a big white cube gallery space. Magnetic rings attached to the tubes and as well to the walls, floor and ceiling allow to dock the tubes to the space or to connect them to each other.

This work is all about proportion and relation. We can find it everywhere, e.g. in human perception, processing, thinking and acting towards the collaboration. Our mind love the golden ratio and the right proportion between chaos and order. In art, painting is all about color relations and proportion of shapes, in dance the body proportions and the relationchip with dance partner and scenography is crutial, in music the harmony and ensemble made the play.

POLYHEADRA refers to the Renaissance idea in which size, scale and proportion are the key to a perfect creation. So here the participants become the „measure of all things“ again. There are many devices used for this purpose like the oldest natural measures: the cubit (50 cm) and foot (30 cm) used since ancient times. In POLYHEADRA, the cubit refers to the pipes and the foot to the space itself. More precisely, the diameter of the tubes equals 1 cubit, likewise their length increases by 1 cubit each time. In the same way 2 cubit is the distance between the magnets on the tubes and 3 cubit on the walls. Meanwhile, the room itself is 40×40 feet in size and 16 feet in height. As the audience assembles the tubes of different lengths, ongoing collaborative compilations emerge that go hand in hand with associations and imagination.

The title of this artwork is a wordplay combining the word „Polyhedra“, a three-dimensional shape in geometry and the word „head“. The premiere of POLYHEADRA took place in Milan in December 2022, where 524 years earlier (1498) that Leonardo da Vinci completed his Polyhedra illustrations for Luca Pacioli’s book for „Divine Proportion“. Pacioli applies his theory to many fields, including the visual arts or architecture and deals with mathematical proportions like golden ratio. The clarity of the theses together with Leonardo’s excellent diagrams made the book both scientific and popular literature, where contemporary geometric concepts and images were widely popularized.

Slightly later, in 1597 Johannes Kepler in the book „Mysterium Cosmographicum“ developed his geometrical, elementary structures of the universe based on the proportions and relations of the „Five Platonic Solids“ representing the 5 elements. Later on, in the 1950s and 1960s Maurits Cornelis Escher created his impossible compilations as an invitation to imagine the possibility of impossibility. POLYHEADRA as well invites the participants to develop geometrical, elementary structures and to explore a collective creative compilations of the possible and the impossible as an art experiment. And so, as an oversized construction kit POLYHEADRA strongly remind in its outcomes of many basic structures in nature, e.g. bacteria like Mycobacterium, coral reefs, fossil fungi like Prototaxites or Phaeodarea, the amoeboid cercozoan organisms.

Whatever, all the imaginations and ideas that come out of the many minds of the participants constantly reshaping the composition of this collaborative compilations could be even seen as a demonstration of the self-configuration of neurons in a brain, through which all the ideas emerge.