At a time when climate change denial is rampant, humanity urgently needs positive encouragement for social change. As an aesthetic response to global warming, twin sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim sat down in 2006 to crochet a coral reef in their Los Angeles living room. Today their Crochet Coral Reef project is perhaps the largest art and science endeavor, with 7,000 active participants and more than three million exhibition visitors worldwide. This lecture discusses the unlikely conjunction of art, science, environmentalism, and geometry; traces a line from sea slugs to general relativity and ocean acidification; and raises the possibility that the nexus of art and science may have the power to shift our consciousness about humanity's role in the ecological future of our planet.

Image: "The Branched Anemone Garden" by the Institute For Figuring. © IFF Archive, 2011.

Simultaneous Arabic translation will be provided

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